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pete hegseth
The Real Outrage In Yemen Is US War Crimes
As Democrats decry the Trump Administration’s national security lapse, the United States is engaged in an actual killing campaign.
Mar 31, 2025
Beginning in March of 2017 and for the following eight years, at 11:00 a.m. on every Saturday morning, a group of New Yorkers has assembled in Manhattan’s Union Square for “the Yemen vigil.” Their largest banner proclaims: “Yemen is Starving.” Other signs say: “Put a human face on war in Yemen,” and “Let Yemen Live.”
Participants in the vigil decry the suffering in Yemen where one of every two children under the age of five is malnourished, “a statistic that is almost unparalleled across the world.” UNICEF reports that 540,000 Yemeni girls and boys are severely and acutely malnourished, an agonizing, life-threatening condition which weakens immune systems, stunts growth, and can be fatal.
The World Food Program says that a child in Yemen dies once every ten minutes, from preventable causes, including extreme hunger. According to Oxfam, more than 17 million people, almost half of Yemen’s population, face food insecurity, while aerial attacks have decimated much of the critical infrastructure on which its economy depends.
Since March 15, the United States has launched strikes on more than forty locations across Yemen in an ongoing attack against members of the Houthi movement, which has carried out more than 100 attacks on shipping vessels linked to Israel and its allies since October 2023. The Houthis say they are acting in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza and have recently resumed the campaign following the failed ceasefire between Israel and Hamas.
Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable cause...
The new round of U.S. airstrikes has damaged critical ports and roads which UNICEF describes as “lifelines for food and medicine,” and killed at least twenty-five civilians, including four children, in the first week alone. Of the thirty-eight recorded strikes, twenty-one hit non-military, civilian targets, including a medical storage facility, a medical center, a school, a wedding hall, residential areas, a cotton gin facility, a health office, Bedouin tents, and Al Eiman University. The Houthis claim that at least fifty-seven people have died in total.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other high-level Trump Administration officials had discussed real-time planning around these strikes in a group chat on Signal, a commercial messaging app. During the past week, Congressional Democrats including U.S. Senator Schumer and U.S. Representative Hakeem Jeffries expressed outrage over the Trump Administration’s recklessness, with Jeffries saying that what has happened “shocks the conscience.”
President Trump commented that there was “no harm done” in the administration’s use of Signal chats, “because the attack was unbelievably successful.” But the Democrats appear more shocked and outraged by the disclosure of highly secret war plans over Signal than by the actual nature of the attacks, which have killed innocent people, including children.
In fact, U.S. elected officials have seldom commented on the agony Yemen’s children endure as they face starvation and disease. Nor has there been discussion of the inherent illegality of the United States’s bombing campaign against an impoverished country in defense of Israel amid its genocide of Palestinians.
As commentator Mohamad Bazzi writes in The Guardian, “Anyone interested in real accountability for U.S. policy-making should see this as a far bigger scandal than the one currently unfolding in Washington over the leaked Signal chat.”
On Saturday, March 29, participants in the Yemen vigil will distribute flyers with the headline “Yemen in the Crosshairs” that warn of an alarming buildup of U.S. Air Force B2 Spirit stealth bombers landing at the U.S. base on Diego Garcia, a tiny island in the Indian Ocean.
According to the publication Army Recognition, two aircraft have already landed at Diego Garcia, and two others are currently en route, in a move that may indicate further strikes against Yemen. The B2 Spirit bombers are “uniquely capable of carrying the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), a 30,000-pound bomb designed to destroy hardened and deeply buried targets ... This unusual movement of stealth bombers may indicate preparations for potential strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen or serve as a deterrent message to Iran.”
The Yemen vigil flyer points out that multiple Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs can use their GPS precision guidance system to “layer in” multiple warheads on a precise location, with each “digging” more deeply than the one before it to achieve deeper penetration. “This is considered particularly critical to achieving U.S. and broader Western Bloc objectives of neutralizing the Ansarullah Coalition’s military strength,” reports Military Watch Magazine, “as key Yemeni military and industrial targets are fortified deeply underground.”
Despite the efforts of peace activists across the country, a child in Yemen dies every ten minutes from preventable causes—and the Democratic Representatives in the Senate and the House from New York don’t seem to care.
A version of this article first appeared at The Progressive.
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A Reminder Amid Group Chat Outrage: US Strikes on Yemen Are Unconstitutional
"President Trump has not only launched us into a new military escapade in the Middle East, he's done so in breach of our Constitution," said one advocate.
Mar 27, 2025
The leaked messages among top Trump administration officials about U.S. strikes in Yemen earlier this month, which were held via a private sector messaging app in breach of national security protocol and inadvertently included a journalist, sparked considerable discussion among political commentators and social media users—but as the initial shock regarding the Signal conversation faded, advocates and policy experts said lawmakers' attention should turn to the illegality of the attacks on Yemen.
The advocacy groups Just Foreign Policy, DAWN, and Action Corps released a joint statement Thursday calling on Congress to take action to stop U.S. military action in Yemen by upholding "its sole authority to declare war under Article I of the Constitution and the 1973 War Powers Resolution (WPR)."
The chat messages sent between officials including Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and National Security Adviser Michael Waltz stunned the public and Washington insiders this week because they had accidentally also been sent to Atlantic journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, but the three groups pointed out that they also included an admission from Vance that the strikes were not defensive—contrary to claims by President Donald Trump:
I think we are making a mistake… 3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn't understand this or why it's necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message…
Vance's comments bolster the three groups' position that "the strikes also violate Chapters I and VII of the United Nations Charter, which prohibit states from launching a war unless in self-defense or authorized by the U.N. Security Council."
Even before the chats were leaked, said the groups, it was clear that Trump had not sought congressional authorization for military strikes in Yemen, which have killed at least 53 people since the U.S. launched attacks on March 15.
The War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was introduced after former President Richard Nixon's secretive bombings of Cambodia, requires congressional authorization for "the introduction of the United States armed forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances," while Article I of the Constitution grants Congress the authority to declare war.
"Congress should demand an end to this reckless, unauthorized war that will both harm U.S. interests and continue to terrorize the Yemeni people who have already suffered years of U.S.-backed violence."
"President Trump has not only launched us into a new military escapade in the Middle East, he's done so in breach of our Constitution," said Isaac Evans-Frantz, director of Action Corps. "Congress should demand an end to this reckless, unauthorized war that will both harm U.S. interests and continue to terrorize the Yemeni people who have already suffered years of U.S.-backed violence."
The groups' comments echoed those of Michigan State University professor and Quincy Institute fellow Shireen Al-Adeimi, who is Yemeni-American.
"With all the noise about the Signal leak, is anyone in Congress or the media concerned that actually bombing Yemeni people and Yemen's infrastructure is unconstitutional?" she asked on Tuesday. "Anyone?"
The Trump administration claimed that the strikes in Yemen were made because the Houthis' blockade on Israeli ships—established in retaliation for Israel's breaking of a cease-fire in Gaza—was an attack on U.S. economic interests and economic security, but the three groups noted that "there is no evidence that Houthi forces attacked any U.S. ships or personnel from the beginning of the Gaza cease-fire in January 2025 through March 15."
The Houthis struck cargo ships they deemed to be tied to Israel starting in November 2023, in response to Israel's relentless assault on Gaza. They stopped the attacks for the duration of the cease-fire, which lasted nearly two months starting in mid-January.
"The cessation of Houthi attacks during the short-lived Gaza truce underscores their primary focus to defend Palestinians from genocide—a reality obscured by Trump's rhetoric to justify unauthorized military action and deepen U.S. aggression in a widening conflict," said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of DAWN. "The best way to protect global maritime navigation through the Red Sea is to ensure the Israeli government ends its genocidal violence in Gaza."
Along with Vance's apparent admission that the strikes were not in self-defense, the Signal discussion included what observers called a "confession" to alleged war crimes by Waltz, who said the residential building of the girlfriend of a Houthi leader had "collapsed" after a U.S. strike. As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, Waltz and Vance celebrated the strike.
Etan Mabourakh, a fellow at Action Corps, called on Congress to introduce a Yemen War Powers Resolution. The House and Senate both passed such a resolution in 2019 to bar the U.S. from participating in the Saudi war in Yemen.
"Congress should take the necessary step to stop these illegal, ineffective, and unauthorized airstrikes in Yemen," said Mabourakh. "Rather than debating the Trump administration's violation of security protocols in their Signal chats, they should do their job and challenge another unlawful new war in the region that is making everyone less safe."
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Along With National Security Breach, Leaked Signal Chat Contains 'Confession' of Alleged War Crime
National Security Adviser Michael Waltz and Vice President JD Vance celebrated as a residential building "collapsed" following a U.S. strike.
Mar 26, 2025
Along with raising alarm about a massive national security breach—and questions about the competence of top officials in the Trump administration who "inadvertently" added a journalist to a Signal group chat about plans to bomb targets in Yemen—the incident that Atlantic reporter Jeffrey Goldberg publicized this week included an apparent "confession" of at least one alleged war crime.
As
Common Dreamsreported Wednesday, Goldberg released the entirety of the group chat that was held via the commercial messaging app Signal, following denials by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt that any classified information was transmitted in the discussion.
In addition to making clear the detailed plans for attacks on Houthi targets in Yemen using F-18s and drones, the conversation included a brief message from National Security Adviser Michael Waltz in which he appeared to casually describe a strike on a civilian target in Sanaa.
Waltz first praised Hegseth, Central Command leader Gen. Michael Kurilla, and the intelligence community for an "amazing job," saying a "building collapsed" after U.S. intelligence identified a Houthi leader who was targeted for a strike.
He then clarified his message for Vice President JD Vance: "Their first target—their top missile guy—we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend's building and it's now collapsed," wrote Waltz.
The vice president replied, "Excellent."
The messages Goldberg disclosed to the public were sent over several days after he received a connection request from "Michael Waltz" via the Signal app. The conversation took place around the Trump administration's March 15 bombing of Yemen, which was carried out after the Houthis renewed a blockade on Israeli ships.
At least 31 civilians were killed in the bombing campaign, and the Houthi media office reported at the time that the U.S. had struck a "residential neighborhood" in Sanaa.
On Wednesday, journalist and author Kim Zetter said Waltz's message suggested top administration officials knew U.S. forces had "targeted [a] residential building," despite President Donald Trump's claims to the contrary.
Dylan Williams, vice president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy, said the messages contain "prima facie evidence of at least one war crime applauded by the people who conspired to commit it."
Matt Duss, executive vice president of the organization, recalled the warning of Foundation for Middle East Peace president Lara Friedman in September 2024 regarding the Biden administration's support for Israel's "rules of war" in Gaza—where "every human being" has been defined "as a legitimate military target—a terrorist, a terrorist supporter or sympathizer, or a 'human shield'... allowing the annihilation of huge numbers of civilians and destruction of entire cities."
"The costs of these new rules of war will be paid with the blood of civilians worldwide for generations to come, and the U.S. responsibility for enabling, defending, and normalizing these new rules—and their horrific, dehumanizing consequences—will not be forgotten,"
said Friedman at the time.
Duss
said Wednesday that "rules of engagement that permit destroying an entire civilian apartment building to kill one alleged terrorist is part of [former President] Joe Biden's legacy."
"It's still a war crime though," he added, "and Waltz's text is a confession."
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