A fateful day in September of 2016.
Jeffrey Stern talking:
so this was a district with a few villages. People had come together to build a well for themselves. This was a little bit into the blockade. It was a little bit into the food shortage. And frankly, they needed more water, and they needed their crops to grow more. It’s a very dry area. It’s a volcanic area in northern Yemen. And so people had pooled their resources to try to dig a well. And that’s pretty expensive. These are mostly subsistence farmers, so it was not easy to come up with this kind of capital, but they pulled their resources, and they built a well.
And on the day that the—actually, on the day that the well—that the drill struck water, the planes came. And first it was early in the morning, and a bomb fell and killed about six people and injured more. And then, about five or six hours later, once people had gathered to look for loved ones, to help, to just see what was going on, the planes came back, and they stayed for several hours chasing people down and dropping bombs on them.
there was a man who owned a small—he was a small business owner, really. He owned a drill rig. And he was known as a pretty charitable man who would often forgive debts because often people couldn’t afford to pay for a well. And you could dig and not find anything, and it still costs tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars. He was killed. There was a judge, a young judge, who had been working in traffic court, actually, who was essentially burned alive.
There were also a lot of people who survived. And one of the things that we were able to do, the magazine was able to make space for, is to describe what it’s like to try to get treatment for these incredibly traumatic injuries in an incredibly poor country that also is suffering from a blockade. So, fairly basic medical supplies are just unavailable. So, you know, even the people that survived had incredibly tough roads to recovery. And frankly, some of them will never recover. Even those who will remain alive now can’t farm. They can’t use their bodies. It’s hard to get—it’s hard to get prosthetics. It’s hard to get treatment. So, the effect of these bombs, that are designed to create massive—to create casualties in as wide an area as possible, on people who are really unable to get fairly basic medical care, it’s really devastating.
that’s one of the reasons why we chose to focus on this strike. Now, of course, taking one water well offline doesn’t create a cholera epidemic, but the aggregate effect of hitting so much critical infrastructure, including water wells, including water treatment facilities.
The other thing that I think is really critical, that is a little bit overlooked and that I actually hadn’t even thought of until someone mentioned this when I was there, was that if you pool your resources and do something for your community, like dig a well or build a water treatment facility, and this is what happens, you kind of learn your lesson. I mean, you learn that to build a water well for yourself, to build a water sanitation treatment for your community, to build a factory, you’re inviting the planes to come. You’re inviting this kind of, you know, incredible devastation on yourself. And people were terrified and traumatized and, frankly, basically stopped doing this kind of thing, stopped building wells.
So, in the aggregate, what happened is the number of people in acute need of water spiked right around that time. About three weeks after this well was hit, the first cases of cholera were reported. And, of course, within a year, there were a million suspected cases, and it was one of the worst cases of—one of the worst outbreaks of cholera in recorded history.
the U.S. military is not doing the bombing. The U.S. military has stopped refueling. For a while they were doing aerial refueling for the Saudi military, for the Saudi-backed coalition, which is important because that allows for something called dynamic targeting, which is when the planes go up and they look for things to hit, essentially. They don’t have to necessarily depend on intelligence and plan strikes in advance. So, when you’re able to loiter, you can look for things to hit. And at the time, the U.S. was providing the refueling, which we have since stopped.
The explanation that the Saudi-backed coalition—they have something called a joint incident—a JIAT, which ostensibly investigates some of these strikes and recommends action. They eventually investigated this, came out with a very brief statement that said, in essence, that the water digger looked like it could be a ballistic missile launcher. The explanation, you know, kind of strange credulity—they just—they don’t look that much alike, a water drill and a ballistic missile launcher. There are also—if you hit a ballistic missile launcher, there would be secondary explosions. There’s fuel. And the planes came back and chased people down for several hours.
this is a place where not a lot happens, and kids were curious. And, you know, people ran out of their houses once the sun came up, and started to gather there.
And also, you know, in this case, double tap doesn’t quite do it justice. Human Rights Watch—Priyanka Motaparthy, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, showed up within several weeks of this attack, and she found 12 craters. The people said there was—it felt like more than 20 bombs had fallen. Of course, we don’t know that. We know that at least 12 fell. So, it’s a double tap, kind of, but really it’s one explosion that drew people out and then at least 12 more.
a sort of interesting and kind of a heart-wrenching aspect of this, even after being in Yemen, is that some of the people I talked to at Raytheon really are building—they take pride in what they do. Now, this is not scientific. I did not poll thousands of workers. I talked to two, who we kept anonymous. But they are building not bombs, but the precision guidance systems that are attached to bombs. So, what they are doing, what they believe they’re doing, is taking something that would create a lot of collateral damage and allowing it to create minimal collateral damage. And theoretically—right?—that’s true. I mean, if used correctly, then, supposedly, I mean, you would use a bomb like this, and you could hit what you want to hit and avoid hitting what you don’t want to hit.
The other thing is, they talked about how much pride they take in helping the American war fighter and keeping the American war fighter safe, and actually in keeping themselves safer. Raytheon is a leader in workplace safety, I guess, somewhat ironically.
In this case, though, in the case of foreign sales, you know, we are providing these weapons sometimes to allies that are using them not as they’re designed to be used and perhaps in exactly the opposite way of how they were designed to use. So the idea of using a very precise weapon to minimize civilian casualties only works if you’re trying to minimize civilian casualties.
And, you know, I won’t go as far as saying that the Saudi-backed coalition are deliberately causing a humanitarian catastrophe. I don’t think that’s something that certainly I can know. But at the very least, they’ve been extraordinarily careless. And using these weapons to hit things like water wells, whether they believe it’s a water well or not, has created the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe.
we do this with a lot of different countries. The Pentagon works as sort of a broker and helps the foreign countries get what they need. And, you know, often those countries are serving our interest, or at least we believe they do. The State Department rigorously investigates, provides oversight, I should say, to these sales. But we are facilitating this. I mean, we are taking weapons from private contractors and putting them in the hands of the Saudi-backed coalition, which is bombing civilians.
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Jeffrey Stern
author and journalist. His latest piece for The New York Times Magazine is headlined “From Arizona to Yemen: The Journey of an American Bomb.”
— source democracynow.org | Dec 17, 2018