Add Yemen's woes and the death of thousands of Yemenis to the....

never-ending sins of the USA.

Paul Street at InformationClearingHouse
The United States and the Crucifixion of Yemen 
 The United States has killed, maimed, displaced and otherwise harmed an astonishing number of people in its 241-year record of murder and mayhem—including more than 20 million killed in 37 nations since 1945.
 Murder, Direct and Proxy

Direct

A grisly distinction exists between those Uncle Sam has directly assaulted and those he has more indirectly attacked. Here are just a few examples from the long record of direct U.S.-military mass murder since 1945:

Hiroshima (146,000 killed with a single bomb—what President Harry Truman called “the greatest thing in history”) and Nagasaki (80,000): The arch-criminal atom bombings were unnecessary and savagely carried out even though the U.S. high command knew Japan was defeated and ready to accept U.S. surrender terms.

Iran Air Flight 655: On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes crossed into Iranian waters and shot down an Iranian civilian plane, blowing 290 people out of the sky. The Vincennes’ commander was granted an award for “exceptionally meritorious conduct.”

The “Highway of Death”: U.S. fighter jets engaged in a frenzied slaughter of tens of thousands of surrendered Iraqi troops in 1991. Lebanese-American journalist Joyce Chediac testified that “U.S. forces continued to drop bombs on the convoys until all humans were killed. So many jets swarmed over the inland road that it created an aerial traffic jam, and combat air controllers feared midair collisions.”

Fallujah: The U.S. Marines waged chemical warfare and used radioactive ordnance in the process of leveling a great Iraqi city in April and November of 2004.

The U.S. drone war program (2001 to present), aptly described by Noam Chomsky as “the most extreme terrorist campaign of modern times”: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports a minimum number of 3,734 U.S. drone strikes with nearly 10,000 killed, including 1,427 civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, “since the Bureau began collecting data.”

Indirect

Dreadful as such incidents of direct imperial butchery are, the United States may well have killed, maimed and displaced more people indirectly, through proxies and clients.

In 1954, a CIA-orchestrated coup removed the democratically elected and leftist Guatemalan government of Jacobo Árbenz. Over the next four decades, U.S,-backed right-wing Guatemalan regimes killed tens of thousands of peasants, workers, students and activists.

In 1960, the CIA killed Congo’s first independent head of state, the leftist anti-colonialist leader Patrice Lumumba. The United States subsequently backed the brutal Congolese dictator Joseph Mobuto, who killed hundreds of thousands of people. The U.S. has been significantly responsible for as many as 3 million deaths in that resource-rich country ever since. It sponsors and protects the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame, whose body count in his own country and Congo runs into the tens of thousands.

In 1965 and 1966, the United States worked with Britain and Australia to help orchestrate the overthrow of the democratically elected leftist government of Indonesia and the subsequent massacre of somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesian peasants, workers, intellectuals and activists. Coup General Suharto received military and economic assistance from the U.S. over three decades of subsequent authoritarian rule.

In December 1975, Suharto got a green light from his sponsors.........