PNN – Following the new revelation about Saudi Arabia’s refusal to pay the debt to the United States regarding the cost of fuel for Saudi fighter jets in Yemen, Republican Senator Rand Paul criticized Washington’s continued arms sales to Riyadh and described it as a “national dishonor”.
According to the report of Pakistan News Network, Intercept wrote: Last week, the research results of this American website showed that Saudi Arabia has repeatedly pressured the US Department of Defense (Pentagon) for supporting the war in Yemen, which has led to the death of hundreds of people and a humanitarian disaster in this country.
According to The Intercept, the Pentagon has refused to respond to this media’s request for months since this revelation about Saudi Arabia’s unpaid debt to the United States.
In a statement sent to the Intercept, US Senator Rand Paul criticized Saudi Arabia, its leadership and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, as well as the Pentagon for refusing to respond to the revelations.
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This American senator said: Yemeni children are growing up with the knowledge of the brutal war of Saudi Arabia, which has led to killing and starvation with the support of the United States. Now the billionaire crown prince of Saudi Arabia is apparently refusing to pay American taxpayers’ money to fuel the country’s warplanes. The crime of Saudi Arabia and the lack of transparency in our government show more and more that America’s servitude to this tyrannical government is a national disgrace.
This American senator is one of the old critics of the sale of American weapons to Saudi Arabia because of the history of human rights violations in this country. In 2019, Rand Paul, joining independent senator Bernie Sanders and a group of legislators from the two main American parties, asked the then president of the United States, Donald Trump, to stop supporting Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war. Paul also tried last year to block the sale of advanced military communications and intelligence technologies to the United States.
Despite Saudi Arabia’s unpaid $15 million debt to the United States, the Biden administration recently lifted a ban on the sale of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia and authorized the initial shipment of surface-to-air munitions to Saudi Arabia. This restriction does not apply to the sale of so-called defense weapons and military services. The sale of these weapons in the last four years was almost 10 billion dollars.
The support of the Biden administration for Saudi Arabia has been in spite of the uncertainties about the country’s role in the terrorist attacks of September 11 in the United States.
In 2021, the Biden administration imposed a ban on the sale of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia due to the war in Yemen, which has directly and indirectly killed at least 377 thousand people, including thousands of civilians.
According to senior US government officials, when the US announced earlier this month that it would lift the ban and allow the transfer of surface-to-air munitions, it also stated that it was considering the possibility of transferring the sale of new weapons to the country on a case-by-case basis.
The Intercept wrote: The US Department of Defense has not responded to this media’s questions about whether Saudi Arabia has paid the excess part of the bill for refueling its planes or not.