Steller column: Don't use Tucson workers to justify Saudi slaughter

Tim Steller Arizona Daily Star Oct 21, 2018 Updated 2 hrs ago

On Aug. 25, 2017, a laser-guided bomb fired from a Saudi military jet destroyed an apartment building in Sanaa, Yemen’s capital city.

It killed 16 civilians, Yemeni officials said, including five out of six siblings from one family. The only sibling who survived was a 5-year-old girl named Buthaina, whose eyes were so bruised and swollen that she had to open her eye with her fingers to see visitors at the hospital. A heart-wrenching photo of that moment awoke some people to the mass tragedy of the Saudi war in Yemen — some people, for some time.

In the rubble of the building, local photographers found a fragment of the bomb with a series of numbers on it: MAU-169L/B EC42; ASSY2252788–1; and NSN 1325–01–524–9697. They sent a photo of the numbers to Amnesty International, and through research, the human-rights group found this year that the device was made by Raytheon Missile Systems in Tucson.

This month, the killing of a Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, has opened America’s eyes, again, to the true nature of a regime we have been supporting for decades. The dissident journalist’s apparent murder also should remind us of the much bigger crime, probable war crimes actually, that Saudi Arabia has been committing in Yemen — not just with U.S. military assistance, but using munitions built by Tucsonans.

https://tucson.com/news/local/steller-column-don-t-use-tucson-workers-to-justify-saudi/article_9c93f3b7-3dcf-56ea-95fc-abe49e9db625.html