Saudi Arabia & 9/11 9-29-2016

29, September 2016            Saudi Arabia & 9/11

President Obama’s efforts to veto a bill allowing victims of the 9/11 attacks to sue Saudi officials is ill-advised. Saudi Arabia is no friend of the United States. Propping up a thoroughly corrupt regime which withholds basic human rights from its citizens, stoning would be adulterers, demeaning women and forcing them to wear head to toe suffocating burkas in the stifling heat, lashing dissidents in public, chopping the hands of would be thieves, - is indefensible. Our decades of alliance to this monstrous regime is based on our addiction to oil and our desire to sell billions of the most sophisticated weapons to enrich our defense contractors.  These weapons have been used to kill thousands of innocent people in neighboring Yemen making us complicit in Saudi’s war crimes.

The Obama administration argues that passage of the bill will open up Pandora’s Box to possible lawsuits. The sad reality is that we have killed millions of innocent men, women and children with impunity with bombs, drones and other lethal weapons of war without offering apologies or reparations (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Iraq, Afghanistan…).

Why shouldn’t we hold our officials to the same standard that we demand from our adversaries?

Perhaps this might be the impetus to apply the brakes on endless wars and surely that would be a positive development. President Obama should shred his weekly “kill list” and allow the victims of 9/11 lawsuits to proceed.