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“YEMEN” mentioning Christopher Murphy was published in the Senate section on pages S189-S190 on Jan. 28.
Of the 100 senators in 117th Congress, 24 percent were women, and 76 percent were men, according to the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
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The publication is reproduced in full below:
YEMEN
Mr. MURPHY. Madam President, this is a screen shot from a video taken during a school field trip on August 9, 2018. These are Yemeni schoolchildren going to school in a northern governorate inside the country, and they are on their way either to or back from a picnic that they were having with their classmates.
As you can see, they are schoolchildren of elementary age--around 8, 9, 10 years old. They don't look any different than what school children here in the United States would look like on their way to a fun-filled school field trip. There is a little boy catching a little nap somehow amidst all of the den of the rest of his classmates so excited.
They are excited because there isn't and there wasn't a lot of fun to be had for schoolchildren in Yemen today or in 2018. A civil war still plagues that country and plagues Yemeni children who are too often facing starvation and disease, but on this day, there was fun to be had.
This is that schoolbus hours later. Forty children died when a U.S.-
made bomb dropped from the sky and hit this schoolbus. Not every child on that bus died, miraculously, but 40 children on the bus and around the bus did. It was a war crime.
The Saudis, in the aftermath of the incident, defended it saying that it was a legal action. They were targeting enemy leaders who were responsible for recruiting and training young children.
They hit a schoolbus in the middle of the day, right next to a crowded marketplace. It wasn't on a lonely road. It was in a crowded area. It is why not only people on the bus died, but children and families surrounding the bus died as well.
This was a military strike done, in part, as part of a coalition campaign of which the United States is a member. It is not just that we sold the bomb that hit this bus. We participated and still do participate in this military campaign in a myriad of ways
For years, we flew planes in the sky that put fuel into the Saudi and Emirati jets that dropped these bombs. We embedded U.S. personnel in the operations center that planned these bombing campaigns, and maybe, most importantly of all, we lent moral authority to the Saudi-led campaign inside Yemen.
But over the course of our time as a coalition partner with Saudi Arabia, the war in Yemen has been a national security apocalypse for the United States. Our bombs and our planes have been used to kill thousands of civilians; 17,000 civilians have died inside Yemen since the beginning of this war.
The war has caused the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe on the ground inside Yemen. Over 100,000 children have died of starvation and disease. Yemen, since 2015, has been the site of the world's worst cholera outbreak anywhere in the world during all of our lifetimes--
likely caused by the targeting of water treatment facilities by the coalition, of which the United States is a member.
And inside this country, Yemenis rightfully blame the United States for this cataclysm. They know that it is our equipment, they know that it is our bombs, and they know that it is that moral authority that the United States gives to this war through our decision to continue to take part in it, human rights crime after human rights crime.
It has radicalized a generation of Yemenis against the United States. It has made us part and parcel of repeated human rights violations, and it has created a chaotic environment on the ground in Yemen that has allowed for AQAP, the wing of al-Qaida with the clearest designs to hit the United States, again, room to govern and room to grow. AQAP and ISIS are able to operate and control territory inside Yemen because of the chaos created by this civil war.
Iran has grown stronger. At the beginning, Iran and the Houthis, who are on the other side of this civil war, had a slightly tenuous connection, but as the war has dragged on, the Houthis have had to become more and more reliant on Iranian assistance and Iranian expertise. Iran has grown stronger and stronger inside Yemen and inside the region as this war persists. In every way, it has been a nightmare, from a security perspective, for the United States.
But with the election and inauguration of President Biden, our participation in this national security cataclysm is coming to an end. I come to the floor today to thank the Biden administration and to thank the incoming Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, for their recognition that it is no longer in our security interest to be a part of this.
The Biden administration has made several very important decisions that they have announced at the outset of their term in office: one, the plan to withdraw from the military coalition; second, a decision to suspend arm sales to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, who are the primary participants in this coalition. UAE has dramatically scaled back their involvement--to their credit. The Saudis continue to fight this war on the ground and in the air.
And lastly--and, perhaps, most immediately importantly--the Trump administration announced that they were reserving an eleventh-hour decision by the Trump administration naming the Houthis a terrorist group.
Now, the Houthis are incredibly bad actors. The Houthis are also guilty of war crimes in and around this conflict. They recruit child soldiers. They deliberately hold up aid and don't allow it to get to the citizens in areas under which they control. The Houthis have a lot to answer for as well. But by naming them a terrorist group, what the Trump administration effectively did was to stop the international aid community from being able to deliver any aid into Yemen because the Houthis control some of the most important ports, and 80 percent of the aid is commercial food. That would have all stopped if you couldn't run aid through ports controlled by an organization named at the eleventh hour by the Trump administration as a terrorist organization.
The Biden administration has made a decision to suspend that designation to make sure that we are not going to end up with millions of people starving inside Yemen because the United States makes the decision to eliminate the ability of humanitarian groups to get food on the ground in Yemen. They are all incredibly important decisions that the administration has made--decisions supported by a majority of this body.
We have voted here in the Senate, on a bipartisan basis, to end the U.S. participation in the war in Yemen. We didn't have a veto-proof majority. So we couldn't overcome the President's veto. But there is a bipartisan coalition that believes the United States shouldn't have anything to do with this, and President Biden is now effectuating that bipartisan consensus in policy.
Lastly, let me say this. Saudi Arabia is an important security partner for the United States. The UAE is an important security partner for the United States. We have an important counterterrorism relationship. The Saudis and the Emirates have been part of this groundbreaking detente with Israel, resulting in several recognition agreements. That is great for U.S. security interests in the region. But it is time for us to reset those relationships to make clear that if our Gulf partners are going to participate in actions inside the region that are terrible for our security interests, then we can't join them in those actions--a reset that includes an expectation that the Saudis and the Emirates address what is a very disturbing downward trend in the ability of individuals inside those countries to have political space with which to contest grievances with the regimes.
It is time for us to make sure that our relationships with our Gulf allies are always consistent with U.S. national security endeavors, and the Biden administration is off to a very good start in resetting those relationships by pulling ourselves out of a war inside Yemen that has killed 17,000 civilians, caused 100,000 kids to die of starvation and disease, and ends up with our bombs doing this to a school bus full of 8-, 9-, and 10-year-olds.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The senior Senator from Iowa.
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