To end secret wars, you have to start with ending secrecy.
A shroud of official secrecy has long enabled the Saudi coalition’s criminal war in Yemen, which has killed thousands of civilians and deliberately starved millions. It has enabled the coalition to avoid compensating the U.S. government for $331 million in refueling costs. The gratis U.S. refueling services enabled the Saudis to carry out bombing campaigns that target fishermen and food distribution facilities.
Now Bellingcat, the crowd investigation site, is seeking to pierce this veil by compiling a robust dataset on 100 coalition airstrikes. With the help of The Policy Institute at King’s College London and the Global Legal Action Network, the group seeks to disrupt the war machine. The
aim will be to create a replicable methodology and a comprehensive public database to meet the highest evidentiary standards for potential use in impact-oriented investigative journalism, academia, and legal endeavours.
In other words, the dataset will serve as the evidentiary basis for exposing a criminal war in the media, studying its legacy in universities, and pursuing legal action against its intellectual authors in court. In other words, bell the cat.
Bellingcat’s most recent scoop was the identification of two Russian GRU agents involved the poisoning of renegade Russian spy Sergey Skripal.
