Pompeo's State Dept Did Not Consider Civilian Casualties When Selling Weapons To Middle East

The State Dept bypassed Congress to sell weapons to Saudi Arabia and others without ensuring they won’t be used against civilians.

The State Department did not fully consider the risk of civilian casualties when it approved more than $8 billion in arms sales to Middle Eastern countries last year...

An unredacted version of the report, obtained by POLITICO, also raised questions about Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s assertions that an emergency situation existed, allowing him to greenlight the sales over congressional objections.

...the Inspector General said the department “did not fully assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian casualties and legal concerns” surrounding the transfer of precision-guided munitions to the three countries.    The Conventional Arms Transfer Policy prohibits the U.S. from approving arms transfers if it knows those weapons will be used against civilians.

Here’s a thought – if our weapons are at risk of being used against innocent people, don’t sell them to these countries.

Lawmakers had asked the inspector general to investigate the transfer of military equipment to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan after Pompeo in May 2019 cited threats from Iran and used emergency authorities to transfer the weapons. The move short-circuited lawmakers, who had blocked some of the transfers for more than a year over concerns that the U.S.-made equipment could be used to kill civilians.

The report has been heavily anticipated in part because Pompeo recently engineered the firing of Steve Linick, the inspector general under whom the investigation began. Linick also was looking into whether Pompeo and his wife, Susan, had improperly used State Department resources for personal reasons, a probe that remains underway.

If a thin pretext of emergency is all the executive needs to exempt itself from legal requirements, then the executive will just provide one and Congress will never have any say in it as designed.

The 22 transfers included the sale of 120mm mortar rounds to Saudi Arabia and Javelin anti-tank guided missiles to the UAE, along with the transfer of laser-guided bombs from the UAE to Jordan.  Of those 22 cases, lawmakers had placed holds on 15, the report said.

.... by the time the inspector general began reviewing what happened in October 2019, “foreign partners had taken full delivery of 4 of the 22 arms transfer cases included in the May 2019 emergency.”  The low number of full deliveries... raises questions about how much of an emergency was in play in the first place.

"The concern all along was that Pompeo concocted the emergency to bypass Congress.  A few key details in the report verify that, and those are the details State tried to bury. It looks like a coverup.”

Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/08/11/state-department-civilians-middle-east-393584