Dead Civilians, Uneasy Alliances, and the Fog of Yemen’s War
▻https://news.vice.com/article/dead-civilians-uneasy-alliances-and-the-fog-of-yemens-war
L’Arabie Saoudite fait une déclaration doublement extraordinaire : Elle affirme ne pas tuer de civils malgré toutes les preuves du contraire et elle avance comme preuve que ses tirs sont supervisés par les Britanniques et les Etasuniens. Mais le plus désesperant est que le journaliste de Vice ne remet pas en cause la dernière assertion (quand les tirs sont supervisés par les Occidentaux les civils sont essentiellement epargnės) malgré l’immensité des preuves du contraire.
The US and UK position, in which they internally report that the coalition is observing the law in airstrikes they oversee while publicly dodging questions on potentially unlawful strikes, is likely due to the fact that two distinct sets of airstrikes are taking place in Yemen, according to comments from American and British officials to VICE News that are corroborated by public briefings given by Asiri, the coalition spokesperson. (Asiri did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)
One kind of airstrike is pre-planned, based on satellite imagery, drones, reconnaissance aircraft, and human intelligence on the ground. The available intelligence is carefully parsed and a decision is made about whether the prospective strike site is an important military target and “unequivocally hostile,” in Asiri’s words. The potential collateral damage is also taken into account.
The other variety is a contingent or “dynamic” strike, which is based on real-time emerging intelligence from the air or the ground. The decision to launch such strikes, often on the basis of much thinner intelligence, is typically made within minutes rather than the hours or days that precede pre-planned strikes. According to multiple Western defense and diplomatic officials, dynamic strikes make up the majority of aerial assaults launched by the coalition.
#propagande mine de rien