Biden Administration Funding and Training Saudi Death Squads Exposes Lie of ‘Defensive’ Arms Sales

Reading reports in NYT, AP, and VOA about a bombshell Human Rights Watch report, one would think the mass killing Saudi border guards funded, armed, and trained themselves.

A scathing report released by Human Rights Watch today says that “Saudi border guards have killed at least hundreds of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers who tried to cross the Yemen-Saudi border between March 2022 and June 2023.” It goes on, “Saudi border guards have used explosive weapons and shot people at close range, including women and children, in a pattern that is widespread and systematic.”

Several Western outlets reported on the Human Rights Watch findings, but conspicuously, all of them either ignored or only mentioned in passing the US role in training and arming what Human Rights Watch calls potential “crimes against humanity”.

The only major outlet to note the US role in this horrific story, The Washington Post, would mention this important—and politically relevant—detail in passing in paragraph five, writing, “U.S. service members and personnel have trained Saudi security forces, including the border guard, as part of a long-standing security assistance mission there.” 

The New York Times, AP, and Voice of America all ignored entirely the US role in providing assistance for the mass killings in question. CNN noted the US role in backing the Saudi bombing of Yemen, but made no mention of the fact that the Saudi security forces detailed in the report were trained, funded, armed, and supplied by the US military. 

Maintaining chauvinist blinders along with their counterparts across the Atlantic, France24 and The Guardian ignored France and Britain's military support for the Saudi regime, respectively, in their reports on the death squads. 

The most politically urgent detail, that the domestic media consumers reading about these war crimes, are themselves funding them with their tax money, is left out of these grisly and haunting reports entirely. Instead, they are simply presented as far-off, unrelated war crimes “over there,” for which the public can do little about.

This is consistent with Western media’s coverage of Saudi war crimes over the past decade, with US’s role in the bombings of school buses and hospitals, and other assorted war crimes either ignored, downplayed, defended, or—more perversely—presented as something the US was trying to Fix From The Inside. 

But more importantly, and relevant to today’s political debates, is this Human Rights Watch reports puts to rest the cynical lie at the heart of the Biden’s Saudi Arabia policy since he came into office: that of the “defensive weapons” and “defensive support” as something separate from Saudi Arabia’s ongoing crimes in Yemen and domestically. As The Column’s Sarah Lazare noted in November 2021, when it was announced the Biden White House would approve “only defensive weapons sales,” the idea of “defensive” arm sales to Saudi Arabia was logically and morally nonsensical on its face. “So-called defensive weapons are part of a military apparatus that is enforcing a brutal blockade, shutting out aid for Yemen and creating a climate of intimidation and fear,” Lazare wrote at the time, “The weapons transfer sends a message to Saudi Arabia, at precisely the moment it is refusing to lift its blockade, that U.S. support is unconditional. It enables Saudi Arabia to prolong its deadly incursions.”

As I laid out a few weeks later at The Column when criticizing partisan hack Chris Murphy’s about face in backing the Biden White House’s “defensive weapons” loophole: 

By Murphy’s logic, he should also support shipping $650 million in “defensive” weapons to Iran, Hamas, Russia, Syria, and China, because, after all, not doing so isn’t supporting these countries’ wars, no? But of course he wouldn’t, because doing so would be an endorsement of those governments and their ongoing military operations. Just as supporting another massive shipment to Saudi Arabia as it continues to destroy and starve Yemen is an endorsement of the government and its ongoing military operations.

Nowhere has this proven more clear than in this report, detailing Saudi Arabia using American weapons, consistent with Biden’s “defensive support” policy, training and funding to carry out death squads targeted Ethiopian migrants at its borders. Indeed, this is exactly the type of “self-defense” we were told Saudi Arabia needed to protect its “sovereignty” and “internal security.” 

In October of 2021, a State Department spokesperson told Arms Control Today that US continued military support for Saudi Arabia was “consistent with the administration’s human rights approach”. The spokesperson said it “helps Saudi Arabia maintain self-defense capabilities…particularly on their border.”  As The Intercept’s Max Granger noted on Twitter earlier today, this has been the Biden line since it reneged on its pledge to make Saudi Arabia “the pariah that they are” when running for office in 2019. According to a Biden State Department “fact sheet” from January 2021, "The United States works with Saudi Arabia to increase cooperation on border security. The U.S. has $126.6 billion in active government-to-government sales cases with Saudi Arabia." 

So what does Saudi “self-defense” at their “border “look like? It looks like the summary execution of unwanted people. An act of cruelty and paranoia fit for a regime that’s shown little interest in human rights and basic due process. As I’ve detailed in these pages, this is what happens when US war criminal enemies are treated as Existentially Evil in needing of regime change, but war criminal allies are treated as simply mistaken, errant, having Lost Their Way, and in need of a sort of geopolitical mentorship by way of Mk 19 grenade launchers. 

There is, of course, no humane, liberal, or pro-human-rights way to sell $650 million weapons to Saudi Arabia. They will use the power these arms entail, even those nominally “defensive” or for “border security,” to target any population they see as a threat to their autocratic grip on power and their cushy, fossil fuel-funded high standard of living. If a few hundred obscure poor black Africans have to die to maintain this bubble, then this is what they’ll do. At the very least, the American government, and its Democratic president, shouldn’t be supplying the money, training, and weapons for them to do so.