The Saudi Arms Finding State Redacted Even for Congress
by: Dana Reyes

The Saudi Arms Finding State Redacted, Even for Congress

The most revealing page of the State Department inspector general’s 2020 report on arms sales to Saudi Arabia isn’t in the report. It’s the cover memo, in which Acting Inspector General Diana Shaw explains what the office couldn’t make public. The department, the memo says, “withheld significant information in the classified annex necessary to understand OIG’s finding and recommendation,” and asked that it be kept from Congress, too.

That finding was about civilian casualties in Yemen. It matters again this week. On Sunday, Yemen’s Saudi-backed government launched a ground offensive against the Houthis, and U.S. officials have told several outlets that the American military is giving Saudi Arabia intelligence and targeting help while declining to strike. The last time Washington backed a Saudi air war in Yemen, two federal watchdogs checked whether anyone was tracking the harm to the civilians underneath it. We read both reports.

The auditors’ $54.6 billion question

Start with the later one. In June 2022, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Pentagon had administered at least $54.6 billion in military support to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates from fiscal 2015 through 2021, the vast majority of it weapons and defense services the two countries bought through the Foreign Military Sales program.

GAO found that the Defense and State departments “have not fully determined” how far that support contributed to civilian harm in Yemen, even though the government had indications that U.S.-made equipment may have been used in strikes that caused civilian harm. The Pentagon had not reported, and State could not show, that it had investigated any incident of possible misuse of equipment transferred to either country. GAO made four recommendations, including that both departments write guidance for doing exactly that.

Even that report came with a gap. GAO notes on its first page that the public version is a cut-down copy of a sensitive report issued two months earlier, with material the two departments considered sensitive omitted.

Eight billion dollars and an emergency

The inspector general’s report, published in August 2020, goes deeper into a single decision.

On May 24, 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Congress he had “determined that an emergency exists” under the Arms Export Control Act, CNN reported at the time, allowing about $8.1 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Jordan to skip congressional review. According to the inspector general, 15 of the 22 cases had been on informal congressional hold, six of them for more than a year. The held cases included at least $3.8 billion in precision-guided munitions and related items.

The report says lawmakers placed those holds mainly over civilian casualties from coalition airstrikes. It cites United Nations figures attributing 10,852 of 17,640 combat-related civilian casualties in Yemen between March 2015 and November 2018 to coalition airstrikes. It lists a March 2016 strike on a market that killed 97 civilians, an October 2016 strike on a funeral hall that killed 140, and an August 2018 strike on a school bus that killed 51, 40 of them children. Open-source reporting, the report notes, said the munitions in each may have been made by U.S. companies.

Congress passed three resolutions to block the sales. President Trump vetoed them on July 24, 2019, and the Senate failed to override five days later.

What the inspector general found, and where it went

The inspector general concluded that the emergency certification itself followed the law. The act doesn’t define “emergency,” and the office said it didn’t second-guess the Iran threat Pompeo cited.

The other findings go further. The office found the department “did not fully assess risks and implement mitigation measures to reduce civilian casualties and legal concerns” tied to the precision-guided munitions in the emergency sale. In the public report, that finding gets a brief paragraph. The details, and the office’s only recommendation, sit in the classified annex.

The report also found that since January 2017, State had approved 4,221 smaller arms transfers to Saudi Arabia and the UAE, worth an estimated $11.2 billion, that fell below the dollar thresholds requiring notice to Congress. They included components of precision-guided munitions, the same kind of items Congress was holding up in larger sales. That was legal. In its response, the department agreed with the finding and said it has no practice of aligning approvals with informal congressional holds.

The redactions

The public version carries a banner on every page: “Redactions made by the Department of State.” Most are marked (b)(5), the Freedom of Information Act exemption for internal deliberations. They fall at the most specific moments of the timeline. The report says that on May 4, 2019, the secretary asked for something. The rest of the sentence is blacked out.

The cover memo explains the larger withholding. The department told the inspector general’s office that the secretary had authority to direct it not to disclose privileged information “without any final assertion of executive privilege,” and that redactions to the annex should be withheld from Congress over “executive branch confidentiality interests, including executive privilege.” The office wrote that the privilege belonged to the department and it was not in a position to overrule it. Congress would get the annex with the department’s redactions applied.

Two other details sit in the report’s appendix. The office asked to interview Pompeo beginning in late 2019, but he submitted a written statement in February 2020, citing his travel schedule. And the inspector general who started the review, Steve Linick, was removed before it was finished. President Trump fired Linick in May 2020. Rep. Eliot Engel, then chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said at the time that Linick’s office had been investigating the emergency arms declaration, Defense News reported.

We could find no public release of the classified annex. Six years later, the details of what the department did not assess remain out of view.

The answer State gave

The department’s written response to the inspector general is the part that reads differently in 2026. It pointed to a program it had set up with the Pentagon, the Advanced Target Development Initiative, whose sole purpose was to help partners using U.S.-made precision-guided munitions reduce the risk of civilian casualties. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, it said, were the first partners to use it.

The help U.S. officials describe today is also about targeting.

We covered the current offensive and the U.S. role in U.S. Stays Out of Yemen’s Offensive, but Supplies the Targets.

The Saudi Arms Finding State Redacted, Even for Congress

Primary source: U.S. Department of State Office of Inspector General, Review of the Department of State’s Role in Arms Transfers to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, ISP-I-20-19, August 2020 (PDF). Full context: GAO, Yemen: State and DOD Need Better Information on Civilian Impacts of U.S. Military Support to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, GAO-22-105988, June 2022.

Sources

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