Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 38 - Yemeni Civil War Part 2: His Excellency General Steve

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

On this episode Joe and Travis talk about how a retired US Army Lieutenant Colonel who once ran a breast enhancement pyramid pill scheme out of his garage became an Officer for the UAE and commit massive war crimes against the Yemeni people. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Buy some merch: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store follow the show on twitter: @lions_by Follow Joe: @jkass99 follow Travis: @haycraft_travis

Praters dot the landscape in Yemen, lasting reminders of the many civilian deaths in a brutal war. Perhaps no death is more tragic than Mohammed Al Khal. After a volley of airstrikes hit a highway in western Yemen on August 15th, Al Khal picked up a wounded man in his taxi, an ice cream vendor, and drove him to the hospital. But coalition warplanes followed his car, believing he was carrying a wounded soldier. Just as he arrived, Warplanes struck the hospital. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. With me again today is Travis.

We are on part two of the Yemeni Civil War, and if anybody has still not drank themselves into oblivion of depression from the last episode this one will be a little bit better how you doing today Travis I'm doing pretty good finally those paid attention during the last episode I'm pretty much fully moved into the new apartment so everything's ready for a full career of podcasting instead of going out and enjoying the mountains and the nature and all the kind of things that northern new rock has to offer instead on on the internet i'm posting i'm tweeting yeah that's that's what

i'm doing up here in the pacific northwest except we actually got snow today and i don't want to fucking touch it like i grew up in mich Michigan and I'm repulsed by snow. I hate that shit. Well, I'm from South Louisiana so I've got the opposite problem. I just wish I could see it. I've only seen it like twice in my whole life. It's cool for

a month and then you're like, oh, I have six more months of this. Oh, God. Yeah, I don't know if I could do that, uh if it would snow here in airbill that'd be pretty cool i think doesn't it snow in airbill i thought it did before um i think it does on occasion but uh the real i mean if you drive like an hour out of the city up into the mountains you'll get some pretty cold temperature and some snow and there's a ski resort like uh maybe two and a half hours drive

out of arabiel interesting but um but yeah arabiel like it's pretty mild winters uh but because it's it's kind of the just south of where all the mountains are but uh once you're in the mountains it's pretty it's pretty legitimate and cold and uh wintry and snowy and rainy and stuff like that sounds like washington right now um yeah i could use some of that during the summer though yeah yeah summers there must be fucking terrible um yeah i'm not excited about it uh so on this episode uh so on the last one we talked about about the background and the history of the conflict. And this time we're going to talk about the people in charge of some of the most heinous crimes of the war. And they are, by and large, foreigners, which kind of shocked me.

And while we are absolutely not absolving the UAE or the Saudiudi government um for their share in of the blame of this war uh but the point i am trying to make through this series is without these foreign functionaries um this war probably would not be possible um and also one point i want to make um when you say foreign you specifically mean foreign to the Arabian Peninsula because really most pretty much all of the actors involved here except the Houthis are foreign to Yemen yes

and like everyone's interfering in Yemen but like even more so on like another level of like heinousness, heinosity I don't know what the I like heinosity I don't think that's a word, but I like it. But yeah, you bring

up a very good point. Obviously, the Saudis and the Emiratis are foreign to Yemen, but we're talking about specifically non-Arab people who are acting as either mercenaries to an extent or actual official

members of mostly the emirati government um which is really weird um and one of the people we will talk about today is an american who now goes by the name general steve um or how he was yeah uh or how he was known when he was an officer within the united states army lieutenant colonel steven tomajan which uh travis helpfully pointed out is uh he's one of my people and he's armenian so that's nice um yeah i know we're we're The Azerbaijanis are right all along. Yeah, I know. We're just trash people. So Steve was born in 1965 in New Hampshire, which is shocking because I think we both pegged him as being from the South. And he was a military academy nerd, like many officers were, from high school through college. And a fact that will become a little bit ironic later, He actually attended both a Christian high school and a college. Um,

and then he, I forgot to look it up. It's some, uh, evangelical college in New Hampshire. Um, it's, it's has that loving American mixture of both a military academy and being a religious zealot

oh weird and it's also like like when you say evangelical you mean like protestant evangelical i believe so yeah um it's armenians we're not and that's the weird part is like armenian orthodox church like i grew up um like my mom grew up a catholic because she's not Armenian, but my dad is the Armenian side of the family, and he was very, very strict Armenian Orthodox, and so is everybody else, and that's what everybody had to be, which is interesting that he was not. Okay. was commissioned into the u.s army in 1986 became a helicopter pilot uh not just any helicopter pilot however uh after serving in the first gulf war he joined the 160th special operations aviation regiment also known as the night stalkers if that name sounds familiar they're made famous by the black hawk down movie uh along with being the guys who transported the seals to kill osama bin laden and um yeah yeah and Laden and crashing the secret squirrel helicopter in the yard there.

And they've also carried out countless covert operations across the world. So he was not just a helicopter pilot. He was like one of the best helicopter pilots in the U.S. Army. helicopter pilots in the u.s army uh and you know a lot of those operations uh that would never really officially quote unquote happen he took part in uh because by 1997 he earned several awards that have no citation behind them uh so for anybody who is not aware what that means uh in the u.s military if you get an award, regardless of how minor they are, they come with a citation. That is unless you do some shit that people just don't want to talk about. Like, for instance, I have what's known as an Army Achievement Medal.

It's like the lowest medal you can get. And I got it for setting up the stage for an Orange County Chopper USL show. It had a citation. So, like, there's literally citations for everything yeah you're welcome for my service um it was this is where the story goes from being uh kind of the rote biography of any special ops guy to uh kind of ridiculous because um in 1997 he also incorporated a small company in maryville tennessee called breast wishes and it was a it was a mail order enhancement pyramid pill scheme and he made he sold pills through the mail uh with the sole intent of tricking people

into thinking they made their boobs bigger. And these pills absolutely did nothing, but that didn't stop them from making nearly $200,000 in the first year. Jesus Christ. Dude, we need to get into this business. I know. Podcasting is not the way to go. I either have to take pictures of my feet with guns or sell tit pills.

I don't know. lions led by donkey's breast enhancement yeah uh business yeah that sounds like incredibly unappealing uh and the weird and the weirdest part is like he only had two employees and it operated out of his garage um and his employees had nothing but nice things to say about him. I'm assuming because they made a ton of money from lying to people. Yeah. But by 1999, he closed up shop as, you know, pyramid schemes are a fleeting thing. And he kind of just escaped with most of the money. He would never.

And it's weird that he was allowed to do that while being an officer in the army. I'm not exactly sure of the regulations behind that. But I know as an enlisted person if like i could not have another job yeah i think it is a little looser for officers or at least maybe not legally but like in terms of getting away with it yeah um i've heard officers can you know do that a lot um with these kind of like side businesses that they can run mostly remotely. Yeah, and there's, so friend of the show, she's been on a few times, Flynn is a senior NCO in the Army

and she has several people, several NCOs that work with her like involved in like multi-level marketing pyramid scheme type shits. So it's not like unheard of and like even me when i was a young private or something my platoon sergeant was involved in a pyramid scheme and he tried to like wrangle other people into it and that is unethical but uh apparently you get away with it if you're a colonel uh well you have to get away with everything yeah yeah and he continues to get away with everything yeah and he continues to get away with everything um uh so it's kind of funny because buzzfeed did a biography on him uh and when when buzzfeed contacted uh him about this he said quote i'm not sure why this is relevant

because it's funny obviously um yeah and i would argue it is kind of relevant uh it speaks to his level of ethics uh that shows that he's willing to lie his ass off for money and take advantage of people um it's a skill that would suit him well later in life yeah in uh 2003 he he deployed in support of the american invasion of iraq and was awarded the Bronze Star for his service with Joint Task Force 20. Now, Joint Task Force 20 was not something I was familiar with and I had to look up, but it was, according to my research and the research of several other journalists, responsible for black operations in covertly based out of Saudi Arabia. The details of the operation he carried out are still not entirely known,

The details of the operation he carried out are still not entirely known, but everybody has kind of figured out that it had something to do with looking for the weapons of mass destruction that we heard so much about. So he failed, so I'm not sure he got a medal. Yeah, clearly. That's just not very good. Yeah. He also worked heavily with SEAL Team 6, Rangers, Delta Force, and other elements of the joint special operations command uh he also later deployed to afghanistan um and by 2007 steve officially retired from the u.s army with the with the rank of lieutenant colonel um unlike most officers who slide into some cushy positions somewhere he moved to the united arab emirates um

now we talked about it a little bit in the last episode but the uae is kind of a weird country uh it's a strange federation of seven different monarchies with the ruler of dubai being the overall ruler of the nation um and this is kind of like my yada yada yada explanation so travis if i get this completely wrong, please correct me. I'll jump in. Don't worry. Their justice system is also kind of based on Sharia law, which would probably be a pretty big shock to say in Christian American from a religious school in the Northeast. I don't know if it really would.

Honestly, like Sharia is better because you don't have to pay interest on loans. This is like the third show in a row that somehow comes back to Ursary, and I'm not sure how. I don't know. Well, I feel like, you know, someone who's big into evangelicalism, like, is down with 99% of Sharia law. Or, like, Islamic fundamentalism. Or at least there's parts that they don't like, um, or they pretend to not like,

right. Like hating gay people, um, and removing bodily autonomy from women. So they're probably down with most of it. Yeah. That's like, if they just called their God,

God, instead of a law, like evangelicals and like Islamic militants would be fucking best friends. Yeah. Well, it's like, it's just racism like it's not an ideological dispute it's literally just racism no not evangelicals being racist no yeah right um and you know to the west if you just pay attention to uh like mainstream media

and news sources. The UAE puts on a pretty decent front of being a reformed and free state. It is full of expats and people with a lot of money. But according to Human Rights Watch, that could not be further from the truth. This includes, among other things, a crackdown on journalists, dissidents and prosecuting multiple women for adultery for daring to just be raped. It's pretty fucked up. And it's not just local people either. They're perfectly willing to prosecute

or detain American or other quote-unquote Western people for doing anything even remotely out of line in the Emirates. So it's a pretty dangerous place to go if you are even remotely female or politically questionable. So what you're saying is we should absolutely never go to the UAE.

Yeah. And I think there was a news story not that long ago, and I could be wrong, but there was two, I think they were Australians, or maybe it was a British person and an Australian person who met up while on vacation or working in the UAE. And like any mature adults, they decide to fuck on the beach. And the woman was arrested for adultery not the guy though and neither one of them were married but it was just like sex out of weblock is is illegal it's pretty bad i mean that doesn't apply to all the like rich emirati like princes right who you know bring in instagram models and stuff and pay them tens of thousands of dollars. Right.

Specifically as high-class escorts. But if you're just some dumbass Australian, yeah, you're going to jail. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the part of the story where we normally would say, and then this is where General Steve

went off to work for Raytheon or DynCorp or whoever, some military contractor. It's like a tried and true pipeline of officer to soulless weapons broker that everybody knows really well at this point. But that's not the road Steve would take. He would take a road that I have never heard of before. And then it's becoming a colonel in the United Arab Emirates military. Kind of. It kind of depends if you squint hard enough.

I don't know. Now, if you're thinking this is illegal, that's because it is. It is, but it's not without a precedent in United States military history. in uh united states military history in 1993 a retired u.s army colonel named alexander einson became the first commander-in-chief of the post-soviet union estonian defense forces einson was a vietnam veteran and uh but he was actually born in estonia in 1931 so like at least he had some connection to the country unlike our non-Arab Christian friend from New Hampshire unlike Steve though so Einstein went through a lot of shit

before this is okay the US government threatened to revoke his citizenship and his pension but eventually the threats were dropped and Einstein was allowed to draw his colonel's pension at the same time he was commanding an entire foreign army but there's a major difference uh between the two statuses of those uh einstein never claimed anything other than being in the estonian

military tomajan has found a way around that um so steve had no connection to the uae whatsoever and the uae government decided to muddy the waters a bit so this is despite the fact that steve does at this at the time this happened they gave him the commission rank of colonel within the army but he was not actually being paid by the uae he's being paid by a private united arabic corporation who in turn was skirting around another law and had him contracted out to a U.S. company called Knowledge International, a company whose entire board of directors is made up of retired U.S. Army generals. One of those generals is Stanley McChrystal.

Holy shit. So, think about that for a moment. A guy who is being paid a fat retirement check by the u.s military is also being paid by the uae military to work for a u.s company but actually work directly for the uae and while doing so uh because of heavy u.s funding of the uae's military it meant that there's a very good chance the u.s is paying his salary there too so he's getting like double or is it triple pay i believe it's triple at this point and it never just like so that uh unlike the united states military if you google the u.s military you can look up the pay scale of any rank uh you cannot

do that for the uae and there's a very good chance that uh steve is not making the same amount of money an arab colonel would be making. I bet he's making three or four times more at least. Absolutely. Because he's not technically being paid as a colonel. He's being paid as an advisor. He doesn't make the contractor pay.

Through those back channels, Steve was officially licensed by the U.S. State Department as a chief aviation advisor to the UAE, and he was authorized to, quote, directly support the UAE Deputy Supreme Commander, his staff, and all essential and non-essential personnel and related systems

of the Joint Aviation Command. The Joint Aviation Command was created by Stephen Tomajan. They're not even trying anymore so despite the fact he was legally an advisor he also began to refer to himself in press and in public as a senior uae officer he also wore a military uniform that went along with his rank and position he was after his promotion his business card referred to him as brigadier general with no mention of the contractor he technically worked for.

Oh, man. I mean, like, why even go through all that bullshit? Like, we know the U.S. isn't going to prosecute him for, just straight up being a like an actual general or officer or whatever in the uae military so like why even bother with all this shit just like just do it i don't know i think it is for the plausible deniability of something we'll talk about a little later um steve has got his hands a bit dirty um now is very normal for u.s military contractors that are under services for foreign governments these services include training maintenance and doing support and related to missions for foreign armies i think we talked about quite a bit during our

iran iraq episode where you said that the reason why some people don't like getting weapons from the u.s as part of that package is uh like you have to use all these military contractors for maintenance and logistics yeah so yeah i mean you go to any military that the u.s has sold weapons to and you're going to find americans or at least american companies um helping maintainers supply or train or whatever. Yeah. And I can see why the UAE would want to be involved in that because they don't have the infrastructure to do anything else. But I mean, this is also something that was really popular during the height of the Iraq war.

Like when I was in Afghanistan, everything was done by contractors. We had maintenance people. Sure, those were our soldiers. But like the next person down the logistics chain was a contractor. The people who washed our clothes were contractors if we got the chance to use the laundry service. The people who fed us were contractors when we were at the big bases. I mean, like everything is contractors. But what the State Department does not do, at least openly, is license people to actually command foreign armies.

The State Department does not actually condone 100% no-shit mercenary work. It's technically illegal. So a State Department spokesperson said as much. So a state department spokesperson said as well. Yeah. I mean, if, if they, if they're sending an actual mercenaries,

like they're going to be like CIA paramilitary division type dudes, or like, they're not going to license them because it creates a fucking paper trail. But they also went, I don't think they would do something as overt as saying, yes, you can command an entire nation's military with our, with our go ahead. Like that's way too out in the open yeah um a state department spokesman

said as much saying quote the state department has never approved any contractors to provide direct command functions combat troops combatants or mercenaries uh you can debate how true that is uh but i actually will agree with them they probably have never approved of it they just kind of wink and nudge and don't create paperwork you know what's happening and don't do anything about it yeah and maybe facilitate it in some other respect right but they're not going to create like yes you were allowed to do this like that's just stupid that's bad statecraft yeah um and they don't really need to they have the entire caa to handle that exactly but that is exactly what steven was and still is working on he uh he skirted u.s law so obviously that a retired u.s army colonel named dan monaghan

who was actually in charge of compliance, like ethical compliance and law compliance, at Knowledge, that whole cover company he was technically supposed to work for, he fucking quit. You know you're a corrupt bastard when your actions make the compliance manager at your shell company quit. Yeah, I mean,

and if your shell company is almost certainly basically existing to facilitate this kind of shit, like, yeah. I mean, I guess CIA official was asked by BuzzFeed, who did this biography, I'm mostly using as a source. A former CIA official said, I'm aware of people doing things like this and it is incredibly illegal yeah well it doesn't um join i think technically i mean the first time i i got like my passport i was reading through it and it says like you know your citizen can be revoked if you join a foreign military and it's like can because obviously it's not always true right because you know a lot of u.s citizens go to join like foreign militaries

particularly if they're like uh like dual nationals or something or like people want to join the israeli military and of course the u.s isn't really going to do anything about that um it's probably selectively enforced at best. Oh, of course. Even people who've gone to join the YPG or something like that, they've received scrutiny when they come back to the U.S., but never, at least not that I've heard of, has anyone

been detained or detained for long periods of time, let alone have their citizenship revoked. But I know it has happened in the past i just don't can't think of any examples probably back in the day during like world war one or world war two or something like that i can think of one um and you're gonna like my example and the and he's also not a good example because he was legitimately a terrorist um miss commander evo from the nargano karbak war uh he was an american armenian born

in california and was involved in uh numerous terrorist acts he also was involved in like the uprising against the shah in iran of all places before he finally settled back in armenia but while he was taking part in that war the the U.S. revoked his citizenship. But I don't... He ended up getting burned? Yeah, he died. He's a national hero in Armenia. A rather large monument is to him, actually. But I think he got his citizenship revoked

because he was involved in taking hostages in France, I believe, and obviously touching Iran at the 10-foot pole during the era gets you shit-canned. citizenship revoked because like he was involved in taking hostages in france i believe um and obviously touching iran at the 10-foot pole during the area gets you shit canned yeah that's for sure um so i mean so steve was breaking all these rules and laws and everybody was turning a blind eye and but at the same time you have to think he's willing to risk a lot for this right so he has to be really powerful which brings us to what he's actually in charge of and the organization that he founded the joint aviation command uh so rather than coming up with my own bad explanation of this i'm going to pull

this directly from the uae's website quote his excellency major general staff pilot steven Quote, and direct commercial sales of aviation programs. So not only is he in command of all helicopters being used by the UAE army, he's also in charge of purchasing them and selling them. That's a lot of fucking power. Yeah. You know what that kind of his title reminds me of? You know, Idi Amin? Yes. What is it? kind of his title reminds me of um you know idi amin yes was it um his excellence his excellency president for life field marshal al haji dr idi amin dada victoria cross uh distinguished service order mc lord of all the beasts of earth and fishes of the seas and conquer of the british

empire in africa in general and uganda in particular i thought it was england in particular but also it's incredibly impressive that you remembered that so no i googled it oh yeah that's good funny story uh when i created the the the logo for the podcast i literally just told the the artist i want a donkey and edia means uniform because his uniform has so many fucking medals on it oh yeah uh but yeah you're absolutely right and i kind of expected like his excellency made excellency major general staff pilot steven tomajan first of his name or something stupid like that at the end i'm surprised it didn't make him like a prince or something and uh yeah like royal family i give it 10 more years he's a prince for sure

emir steve yeah the ruler of dubai uh bill over there yeah also so i was reading these uh these articles to nick who obviously is not taking part in this episode he's like does this count as cultural appropriation I'm honestly not sure because it's not like he changed his name the only thing he did to take part in MREDI culture is wearing the military's uniform and also

holding all of his meetings in a giant Bedouin tent like fucking Gaddafi. It's fucking ridiculous. There's so much to say about that. Just like, what an asshole. Right.

So since Steve has taken command, the UAE has unsurprisingly poured billions of dollars into state-of-the-art U.S. helicopters like the Apache, Chinook, and Blackhawks. And this is before the UAE got involved in the civil war in Yemen. They were also involved in a couple proxy wars before then, kind of testing out the concept of flexing their military muscles. I think they're involved in the unrest in berain um i could be wrong um so in 2015 uh the uae officially entered the civil war

in yemen and have been committing a long string of airborne war crimes ever since um yay yay and so i can't i'm probably gonna repeat myself about 100 times during the rest of my show notes here um at any point you are thinking there is um something resembling plausible deniability remember that the uae's own website it points out that he is in charge of all aviation forces. So in one incident on the morning of March 17th, 2017, a boat with 42 dead bodies in it floated to the dock in Hogadeh, Yemen. I probably pronounced it terribly. The survivors were all Somali migrants. They said a helicopter had fired on them on the the boat for about five minutes it circled around and fired on them again survivors said they had to hide under a pile of dead bodies for over an

hour in order to escape the continuous gun runs from the helicopters so the uae admitted that they had helicopters operating in the area but said but said that the attack must have been perpetrated by the houthi rebels yeah Yeah, who operate Apache helicopters, of course. Yes. Me and Travis do not have to point this out that the Houthis do not have helicopters of any kind at their disposal. And this is something that has

happened multiple times. We talked in the last episode about double-tap airstrikes. The UAE has been doing virtually the same thing with helicopters. The UAE's air force is very small but they have a ton of helicopters and they've been using them accordingly um so this crime is very well known to journalists from multiple firsthand accounts and so they approached steve to question him question him about his role in the UAE's military. And despite, like I said, the UAE's own website saying that he is in command of the entire army's helicopter component, Steve insists he actually isn't. He also refuses to say whether or not helicopters under his command are deployed to fight Yemen, despite overwhelming evidence that they are.

Again, he was in charge of every helicopter in the uae i will keep saying this until it burns into everybody's brains uh and he has openly admitted to as such in a video he shot during a joint u.s uae training mission at fort irwin california uh a u.s It's the U.S. National Training Center, NTC. It's a miserable place to be. But during an interview, he said that the training would serve his soldiers very well. And they went over to fight in Yemen. A little side note about this video, and I'll post on the Twitter page. It is really weird to watch a video of a retired U.S. colonel in a different uniform talking about how thankful for he is for the Americans to allow him over to their country for training.

He leans so heavily into the fact that he's a totally real Emirati general and not some American playing dress up. Like it is so weird to watch. He probably thinks he's like Lawrence of Arabia or something. Except like shittierier stupider and like

even more war crimey yeah at least lawrence of arabia is trying to liberate the arabs not fucking genocide them exactly it's like the whole video is super surreal he's like you know we don't have these these capabilities in our country uh you know thank thank thank you for opening the the doors up for for my people and stuff like jesus christ he's like the air of rachel dolezal i bet he barely speaks a word of arabic oh dude i could not find any video of him speaking yeah yeah he probably speaks exactly as much as i do and i just say inshallah to piss off people on twitter like i cannot find one video of him speaking arabic um and i looked word uh everything i found of him like speaking at weapons conferences since he's the the primary purchaser

of all the uh emirati aviation stuff he's speaking english um everything that he's ever written for as far as i can show is in english uh yeah i don't think he speaks arabic at all i there's no evidence he had any connection whatsoever to like to the uae before going there in 2007 well you never know i mean maybe during the armenian genocide like some relatives just kept going south and uh got lost in the desert somewhere and ended up in dubai yeah going going to a uh lebanon was just like too popular he had to do the hipster route. The genocide victim hipsters. Multiple reports have come out implicating General Steve's helicopters in massacres. That means that a retired U.S. officer is

implicated in war crimes while serving in the uniform of a second country that we also support, fund, and train. If you remember from the UAE's description of Steveve's job another one of his duties is uh directing the massive influx of american military industrial complex dollars that come into the uae and he makes sure that all of those go through him uh in an organization this big like the u.s army's command that's in charge of like buying all this stuff i don't even know what it's called didn't look it up because i'm a fraud and a charlatan but like you can imagine it is a large staff of people like not everybody's going directly to one person that is absolutely not how steve

runs it everything goes through him um according to steve himself he has personally been in charge of 10 billion dollars put towards the creation, modernization, and development of his Joint Aviation Command. This accounts for half of all military aid the U.S. has given to the UAE to date. Jesus. That means he probably

has more direct control over the funds going into the UAE than like the the Emir himself. Yeah. Crazy. So an arms dealer that works in the region, sorry,

contractor that works in the region said, quote, I know he's extraordinary influential. You don't do anything in aviation over there without him popping into meetings. He has the run of the place. Uh, yeah. there without him popping into meetings he has the run of the place uh yeah and the thing that i don't understand is how it's not like the emirates has like a a shortage of like well educated people who are experienced and like doing war crimes like uh emirati soldiers have

been involved in you know afghan Afghanistan and the first Gulf war. And I think in Iraq and two after 2003. So it's like, why do they have this weird, like, uh, breast enhancement store running crazy, crazy helicopter pilot guy,

like, and in charge of all of that shit, like how did they let him do that? That's my biggest question. Yeah. And I mean, I worked with Emirati of that shit. Like, how did they let him do that? That's my biggest question. Yeah, and I mean, I worked with Emirati soldiers in Afghanistan. Actually, I think I sent you pictures of us playing poker. Yeah, I did. We worked together in Parwan in northeast Afghanistan,

and I don't have good things to say about the Emirati soldiers, but what can be said about them is none of them, like, when you think of a U.S. Army private when you think of a u.s army private you think of a young dumb kid uh i did not get that impression from the um emirati lower ranking enlisted like they all had college degrees they were all like showing pictures of their fucking sweet cars and mansions and shit and uh they were just doing it for status, which also shows that the complete lack of motivation of any soldier skills. Yeah, well, I mean, we briefly touched on it last episode, but the actual Emirati population themselves are very much a elite class like to be

an Emirati citizen means you're probably at a minimum like comfortably middle class yeah it's a whole society based on slave labor effectively basically yeah there's a caste system based on race basically with Emiratis being basically

at the top and white people being just below them um or equal depending on how rich the white person is or how many helicopters they control yeah how many war crimes they can do i guess but like yeah i mean for the to be an emirati soldier means that you're probably well educated pretty worldly and like well off and not just some like dumb from the middle of nowhere who joined up to you know get the gi bill to go to community college or something to learn to be a welder right and because i think the very different thing yeah and i think the because i mean there's only like a million actual citizens in the UAE because they don't give citizenship to the vast armies of like indentured servants.

So the vast majority of their military can't, or the vast majority of the population can't actually join the military, which is really weird. But I guess when you steal people's passports and like beat and rape them you don't want to give them a gun well unless you're saudi arabia that's true um and that's like another thing is that the uae is incredibly adverse to casualties um which i'm not going to fault them for i wish the u.s army was adverse to casualties as well but like you know uh from you know my anecdotal evidence is

that the uae did not go on patrols um they they simply would not um and uh another thing is uae soldiers by and large are not deployed into yemen on the ground uh other people are who we will talk about in the next episode uh but they're not emiratis um so now that everybody knows that his excellency brigadier general steve is an arms dealing war crime committing mercenary he's about to be charged loses pension and loses citizenship or something's going to happen to him right uh you must be new uh not even remotely uh so he routinely comes to the united states and last time he was seen stateside he was shaking hands

and taking pictures with American generals in a huge Bedouin tent outside the Gaylord Opryland Convention Center a giant showroom for weapons manufacturers and military contractors now imagine going like to an Opry

and seeing a large Momar Gaddafi looking fucking Bedouin Tet and just some dude in a tux chilling in it. Some white dude. Yeah. Like, oh my God. He doesn't have the decency to grow a shitty beard. Jesus,

dude. Like if you're going to like pretend to go native and like enact some like bizarre Orientalist fantasy, like at least go all in, you yeah yeah um so a journalist um went to talk to him uh assuming that the guy's american uh he still has some american customs in him like you know when a journalist is talking to you at least give him a soundbite or something uh not to mention that this journalist wasn't known to steve like it wasn't known that he was doing a background on him he could have just been talking to him about the uae's military who knows um so instead uh when the journalist went into the tent to talk to him steve ordered his uae soldiers to forcefully remove the guy he's like wait wait i work for a despotic fucking monarchy i'm gonna act like it

was this in the u.s or in yes yes this is in fucking tennessee what are uae soldiers doing there just like helping sell weapons or something or buy weapons i'm assuming they went with them as some either kind of personal security attachment or I don't know. I mean, when a general, when a U.S. general goes anywhere, he always has staff with him. And there are, you know, the lampreys to his shark fin or whatever. the lamp race to his shark fin or whatever but um i don't think i've ever seen a general's aid or staff forcefully fuck up a journalist before um but i i'm willing to bet he brought them as a personal security detachment because he doesn't seem like a guy that has a large staff he likes to handle everything himself. And there's actually

General Steve is not the only mercenary commander on the UAE payroll, and he might not even be the worst one. The second guy has his hand definitely more directly and directly in the

Yemeni war crimes crimes and that is retired Australian general former commander of the Australian special air services the entire Middle Eastern operations command theater and current major general for the UAE Mike Hindmarsh one of the most decorated soldiers in Australian history

go Australia Australia ever since the emu war they've really been trying to make up for lost time and uh yeah so hin marsh is a veteran of iraq and afghanistan and has an array of awards to chart his service to australia before retiring in 2009 much like steve he after retirement he immediately removed uh himself from australia to go to the UAE and accept a position. Just like Steve, it's under the guise of being an advisor. Just like Steve, he does this while wearing a UAE general's uniform and calling himself a general in the service of the UAE.

Unlike Steve, however, he does not deny what he is doing. unlike steve however he does not deny what he is doing when he was asked by the australian broadcasting corporation in 2016 about his work hen marsh did not fucking beat around the bush he said quote i am a serving officer in the uae armed forces well you know i admire the honesty right uh he's leaning real hard into it and at the same time much like general steve uh he is still drawing his pension and honors from australia and he has a lot of supporters uh back home uh when the when the australian broadcasting corporation kind of did that piece on him when it didn't show him in the best light they had a lot of fucking pushback oh my god i feel like australians are like i don't know they're mixed between like really nice and like super crazy racist yeah that's kind of what i've gotten

as well uh i mean they have an interesting history uh to say the least yeah uh if you look at hin marsh's entry on the uae's website you'll see he's the commander of the Presidential Guard. By that title, you would think that Hinmarsh is the commander of some ceremonial unit or a group of bodyguards or something. Not quite. It's pretty much the UAE's version of SEAL Team 6. The Presidential Guard is actually the most elite unit in the UAE and is considered one the best trained in the entire arab world the guard is heavily involved in the ameni civil war and has been the most forward deployed unit in the entire uae military so there's like hello war crimes oh man uh we actually so in our next episode uh hin marsh ends up being

directly connected to a mercenary death squad by proxy and so that what the presidential guard exactly does is a fucking mystery because they don't report it and obviously the uae is again an embed journalist with their fucking death squads um right and the exact uh size and composition of the guard itself is not really known but is generally accepted to be pretty small and encompasses elements of land sea and air as well as the entirety of the uae Special Forces. The unit, just like the Joint Aviation Command, was the brainchild of Hen Marsh himself. He based the entire thing around the Australian SAS. Just some of the things that the Presidential Guard is possibly connected to is running secret prisons,

assassinations, bombing of civilian targets guiding air airstrikes into funerals and school buses and the list goes on and on um but like any good shadowy force uh no one can directly connect the presidential guard to any of those um exactly there's always like a haze there uh but hin marsh himself is not uh alone in the unit uh he took a lot of friends with him uh so according to rory donaghy the founder of the emirate center for human rights quote mike hin marsh reports directly to the crown prince muhammad bin zayed of abu dhabi and he's obviously right at the top. He brought in a lot of his own men. There are dozens.

We don't exactly know how many, but there are dozens of Australians who evolved in the command positions of the Presidential Guard. That means that the UAE has not only outsourced its entire aviation command to a foreigner,

and also with Steve came a lot of other American pilots one of the things that he does at those trade shows is get people to retire and come work for him because I mean it takes years to train a helicopter pilot it takes 15 minutes to steal one

that means that the UAE in effect has outsourced its entire special operations and aviation command to foreign mercenaries. Yay! That's a really great idea. And it's definitely not a lesson that had to be learned painfully by European

powers during the religious wars of the 17th century that maybe having massive mercenary armies that are loyal only to the money is a bad idea right like i don't understand what the end game here is and i just don't get it like the uae effectively bought a military because before 2010 ish they didn't have much of anything so like in the last

decade less than they've bought an army almost specifically to commit awful war crimes in Yemen also like we talked about last episode every bit of support and

logistics and training and everything that the united states gives to saudi arabia we have done as much and significantly less time with the uae because the uae was seen as like a really good ally in the area and in order to be an ally of the u.s you have to be a military state so the ua just fucking swiped their debit card and bought one yeah i just thought i found something pretty funny on the uh like one of the wikipedia pages for like the emirati army or something is that james mattis called it uh little sparta um oh god because because of uh you know how like how much of a military state it is, which I think is pretty funny because, like, A, Sparta is famous for, like, you know, all the, like, child rape and stuff. Right.

State sponsored. Yeah. And then losing the Peloponnesian War to Athens. And then, like, also the persians were like actually the good guys um and like the story like the battle of thermopylae and all that kind of stuff because like while the spartans were like busy doing like lots of slavery and like pedophilia and rape and all that kind of stuff right all that stuff was like illegal in the persian empire so like you know really 300 is the story of like you know the liberating army like failing tragically and like the horrible pedophiles winning so i don't know that's not calling

someone little sparta isn't like a compliment. And coming from fucking James Mattis, that means absolutely nothing. So did you know Mattis was involved in that fucking Silicon Valley grift from Theranos? Yeah, I heard he was on the board or something. Yes, he was.

And then he became fucking Secretary of Defense. I hate the fact, I know a couple of people who um uh who i otherwise like i respect a lot um and they're in the military um but like every so often they'll share one of the like a meme about like you know some quote-unquote badass thing james mattis said um and like he criticized Trump. Wow, he criticized Trump. That's so cool. I guess that makes up for all of the war crimes and covering

up the Haditha massacre and Theranos and God knows what else. Yeah, he used his military connections directly to get Theranos into the Department of Defense to be involved with TRICARE and stuff.

He's not a fucking scientist. He's a goddamn Marine, so I don't know how much exactly of it he knew was bullshit, but he had to know that it was not working. Different story for a different time with that guy. So that is the Yemeni Civil War Part 2.

And Part 3, we're going to talk about... On Part 2, we talked about the mercenary commanders. And Part 3, we're going to talk about... Well, so on Part 2, we talked about the mercenary commanders. On Part 3, we're going to talk about the mercenary armies. And there is so many of them. Yeah. Jesus. It's a real clusterfuck over there.

Yeah, and it's not ending. Well, there's some kind of peace process going on right now, but it's all trash. I'm not too hopeful. No. Yeah, I'm just like looking at how the peace process in Syria has gone. I mean, there's been ceasefire after ceasefire, negotiation after negotiation. It's just no side is willing to give up anything. And in the case of Yemen, like the clear aggressors, namely like the Saudi coalition, Emiratis and so on,

they're of course not going to give anything up because they don't really lose anything by just continuing to do all of these war crimes. So that's part two. Tune in next week to hear about the mercenary armies that the mercenary commanders lead into battle and get

them to do awful war crimes. So thank you for reading and reviewing us on iTunes. Thank you for supporting the show on Patreon. You can get access to our bonus content and our regular content early for just $1 or you can buy a shirt on Teespring. You have to wear shirts places. Why not make it ours? You can follow the show on Twitter

at lions underscore by follow me, JKS99. You can follow Travis at Haycraft underscore Travis, and we will see you next week. Thank you. Hi, this is Nate Bethea, and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. This show is brought to you by Audible. And as it just so happens, Audible is offering our listeners a free audio book with a 30-day trial membership. Just go to audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys and browse the selection of audio programs. Download its title for free and start listening. Once again, that's www.audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys to get started.