Oswald in the doorway: the blog of the Oswald Innocence Campaign, by Ralph Cinque

Recently, someone asked me how I could make a movie which denounces the U.S. Government and Military and expect Americans not to be offended. There is a very simple answer to that: Everything the film says is true. If the film told falsehoods; if it claimed things and attributed terrible things to the U.S. Government and Military that were not true, then Americans would have grounds to claim. But, when a film tells the undisputed truth, and this one does, then there is no basis to complain. You have nothing to complain about. You can't complain about someone telling the truth. 

It starts with the Sheikhs plotting their revenge, and what is cited is the Navy Seal raid in Yemen in 2017. It was shortly after Trump took office; his first Special Op. They lost one man in that mission, and Trump displayed her at his State of the Union address. And she did look like the most tortured and agonized woman on Earth. Ivanka sat with her and tried to comfort her. And as Trump talked about the success of the mission and the heroism of the Seals, including the one who died, he made no mention of the 8 women and 7 children they killed. And that is cited by the Yemeni sheikh. But, the figure of 8 women and 7 children were the lowest numbers I found. I found higher ones, but I went with the lower ones because the lower ones are bad enough. 

This is from Wikipedia, which cites the source for the 8 women and 7 children killed. It was the Yemeni government, and they actually said that AT LEAST that many were killed. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raid_on_Yakla  

Here's another report on it from The Intercept which I really respect. 

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/09/women-and-children-in-yemeni-village-recall-horror-of-trumps-highly-successful-seal-raid/

The biggest number cited in the film is the 500,000 deaths of children "from America's wars and the Embargo of Iraq."

Actually, the UN said in 1996 that the Embargo of Iraq had caused the death of 575,000 children, and that was before any of the post-9/11 wars.  Of course, the number was challenged, and a prominent Columbia University researcher, Richard Garfield was was hired to refute it.  He did come up with a lower number, but it's still horrific. 

Garfield arrived at an estimate of approximately 350,000 dead children through 2000. Most of these deaths are associated with sanctions, according to Garfield, but some are also attributable to destruction caused by the Gulf War air campaign, which dropped 90,000 tons of bombs in forty-three days, a far more intensive attack than the current strikes against Afghanistan. The bombing devastated Iraq's civilian infrastructure, destroying eighteen of twenty electricity-generating plants and disabling vital water-pumping and sanitation systems. Untreated sewage flowed into rivers used for drinking water, resulting in a rapid spread of infectious disease. Comprehensive trade sanctions compounded the effects of the war, making it difficult to rebuild, and adding new horrors of hunger and malnutrition.

Now, I don't know that he's right about the lower number, but let's assume that he is. That would mean 350,000 children were killed by U.S. actions, and that was before the war on Afghanistan which has killed many children, and before the Iraq War of 2003 which killed even more. And, it was before America's undeclared wars in Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere. 

So, in the film, when Abdul Latif Hassan says that "Ameica's wars and the Embargo of Iraq have caused the deaths of 500,000 children" it is surely a very conservative number because the Embargo of Iraq was in the 1990s and it definitely killed hundreds of thousands of kids by all counts, and this is 2019, and a hell of a lot of American warring has gone on since then which has killed an awful lot of kids. We would have been on safe ground if we had gone much higher than 500,000, but I'm glad we didn't because 500,000 is bad enough. It delivers the full emotional, gut-wrenching impact.