Yemen under Assault

Yemen under Assault: Drone Strike Kills 4 “Suspected Al-Qaeda” Members

By Timothy Alexander Guzman

Washington’s approved drone strikes claimed the lives of 4 suspected Al-Qaeda members in the Maarib Province in Yemen on Tuesday.  It took place in the wake of the “Terror Alert” issued by Washington last week.  Reuters stated that “The New York Times reported on Monday that the closure of the U.S. embassies was prompted by intercepted communication between al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri and Nasser al-Wuhaishi, head of Yemen-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).”  

The report also said that “The Yemeni tribal leaders said five missiles struck a vehicle travelling in Maarib Province in Tuesday’s strike, killing all of its occupants.  State news agency Saba also said initial reports indicated that four suspected al Qaeda militants were killed in the air strike in Maarib, but gave no further details.” 

Were civilians killed by this particular drone strike?  In the past, civilians killed by drone strikes in Yemen have been the usual outcome.  Obama’s war on Al-Qaeda in Yemen has been more aggressive than the previous Bush administration according to the New America Foundation based in Washington D.C., stated “As of August 6, 2013, U.S. drone and airstrikes had killed an estimated 610 to 849 people in Yemen, according to the New America Foundation data. Of these deaths, 99% occurred during Obama’s presidency.” 

The drone strike initiative began under U.S. President George W. Bush, but Obama has expanded the drone war in the Middle East and other parts of the world.  In a report conducted by the ‘Alkarama Foundation’ a human rights organization based in Switzerland called ‘The United States’ War on Yemen: Drone Attacks’ clarified what impact the drone war in Yemen has on the civilian population:

From the first air strike in November 2002 until the month of May 2013, there have been between 134 and 226 U.S. military operations in Yemen, including strikes by aircraft, drone missiles, or attacks launched from warships stationed in the Gulf of Aden. However, the exact number of operations is unknown due to the secrecy surrounding the United States’ military interventions in Yemen. As such, the number of casualties is also unknown. In a study of civilian victims of U.S. attacks in Yemen by Yemeni journalist Ali Al-Sha’bani, he notes the difficulty of obtaining accurate information about the number of strikes and people affected. In 2012, he counted 109 air strikes in nine provinces, causing the deaths of 490 people, including 390 civilians.

While the Bureau of Investigative Journalism counted nearly 1,150 deaths between 2002 and April 2013 due to U.S. attacks, Dennis Kucinich, a representative of the U.S. Congress, placed the number of deaths in Yemen at 1,952, in a speech to Congress. He says: “We have not declared war on any of these nations [Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia] but our weapons have killed innocent civilians there. Highly reputable research shows that the number of high-level targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is estimated at about 2 percent.” The head of national security in Yemen, Ali Hassan Al-Ahmady, announced that during 2012, a hundred members of al-Qaeda had been killed by U.S. aircraft strikes

The latest reports on the U.S. drone strike in Yemen can be a prelude to a military intervention led by American and British forces if the current civil war in Syria leads to an attack on Iran in the future.  The “Gulf of Aden” is a strategic waterway for oil exports vital to America’s interests.    The “Gulf of Aden” is located between Yemen, Somalia and the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula were the majority of people are anti-American because of America’s relentless drone strike policy.  As told by a Yemeni journalist and activist Farea al-Muslimi in a U.S. Senate hearing reported by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism last April:

‘Drone strikes are the face of America to many Yemenis,’ Farea al-Muslimi told a rare US Senate hearing on targeted killing yesterday.The Yemeni journalist and activist gave emotive testimony at a Senate subcommittee about the impact of drone strikes and targeted killings on his homeland. His statement was a view from beneath the strikes that is almost unique in Washington and drew some applause from the chamber.
In stark terms he described the human toll of the US’s covert campaign in Yemen, such as the aftermath of the catastrophic December 2009 cruise missile strike on al-Majala that killed over 40 civilians, including children and pregnant women. After the attack the bodies of the women and children were indistinguishable from the livestock that died alongside them, a tribesman told him.  ‘Just six days ago, this so-called war came straight to my village,’ said al-Muslimi, who was educated in the US. A reported drone strike on April 18 left farmers ‘scared and angry’ and ‘tore my heart’, he added.

Drone strikes will continue in both Yemen and Somalia so that Washington can establish a strategic point of operations that will secure oil shipments to the U.S. Military and its oil corporations.  The Yemeni population will continue to experience drone strikes with or without the approval of the Washington-backed Yemen government.  The collaboration between Washington and Sana’a can  establish a future military base in the Gulf of Aden.  Reuters says that “Security in Yemen is a global concern as it is home to AQAP, considered one of the most aggressive branches of the global militant organization, and shares a long border with Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally and the world’s top oil exporter.  The U.S. government backs Yemeni forces with funds and logistical support.” 

Drone strikes in Yemen have had severe consequences for U.S. Foreign policy in the Middle East.  But, the question is whether continuous drone strikes in Yemen will only target Al-Qaeda and its leadership including Osama Bin Laden’s right hand man Ayman al-Zawahri who is affiliated with the leader of  Jabhat Al-Nusra, Mohammed al-Jawlani who “is a CIA operative in the Al Nusra” according to former Al-Qaeda member Sheikh Nabil Naiim in a recent video or will it continue to kill and injure innocent civilians.  Washington utilizes Ayman Al Zawahiri for its drone war within Yemen as they did for the overall “War on Terror” with Osama Bin Laden.  An American based news agency called the worldtribune.com had an interesting article back in January with a title that explains what the U.S. plans in Yemen.  It was called “U.S. to establish military bases in Yemen”:

The United States was said to planning to build at least three military bases in Yemen.  Yemeni sources said the administration of President Barack Obama intends to enhance defense and military cooperation in 2013 with a range of new projects. They said this would include arms deliveries and the construction of military bases in the Arab League state.  “The projects would begin over the next few months,” a source said.  The Yemeni daily Al Shaara reported that Washington has also agreed to construct 1,000 housing units in Yemen. The newspaper said the Defense Department would oversee the building of three bases, including one on the island of Socotra.

The objective of US policy in Yemen and its surrounding countries is to establish a permanent U.S. base to assure safe passage of oil exports out of Saudi Arabia and Yemen which has vast oil fields as well.  The Yemen Times reported on May 27^th of this year that “In a speech delivered at the first Yemeni-Turkish forum held in Sana’a this past Saturday, oil and minerals’ minister, Ahmed Dares,  confirmed that 35 international companies are currently competing to invest in 20 oil sites throughout Yemen.”  Yemen is a strategic location.  Expect more drone strikes to intensify that would result in more civilian deaths across the Middle East as the US and its allies continue to wage its “War on Terror.”      

 

US Government “Protection” of Al-Qaeda

US Government “Protection” of Al-Qaeda Terrorists and the US-Saudi “Black Hole”

By Prof Peter Dale Scott

For almost two centuries American government, though always imperfect, was also a model for the world of limited government, having evolved a system of restraints on executive power through its constitutional arrangement of checks and balances.

Since 9/11 however, constitutional American government has been overshadowed by a series of emergency measures to fight terrorism. The latter have mushroomed in size and budget, while traditional government has been shrunk. As a result we have today what the journalist Dana Priest has called

two governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to only a carefully vetted cadre – and its entirety…visible only to God.[1]

More and more, it is becoming common to say that America, like Turkey before it, now has what Marc Ambinder and John Tirman have called a deep state behind the public one.[2] And this parallel government is guided in surveillance matters by its own Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, which according to the New York Times “has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court.”[3] Thanks largely to Edward Snowden, it is now clear that the FISA Court has permitted this deep state to expand surveillance beyond the tiny number of known and suspected Islamic terrorists, to any incipient protest movement that might challenge the policies of the American war machine.

Americans have by and large not questioned this parallel government, accepting that sacrifices of traditional rights and traditional transparency are necessary to keep us safe from al Qaeda attacks. However secret power is unchecked power, and experience of the last century has only reinforced the truth of Lord Acton’s famous dictum that unchecked power always corrupts. It is time to consider the extent to which American secret agencies have developed a symbiotic relationship with the forces they are supposed to be fighting – and have even on occasion intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots.

“Intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their plots”? These words as I write them make me wonder yet again, as I so often do, if I am not losing my marbles, and proving myself to be no more than a zany “conspiracy theorist.” Yet I have to remind myself that my claim is not one coming from theory, but from certain undisputed facts, about incidents that are true even though they have been systematically suppressed or under-reported in the American mainstream media.

Worse, I am describing a phenomenon that occurred not just once, but consistently, almost predictably. We shall see that, among the al-Qaeda terrorists who were first protected and then continued their activities were

1) Ali Mohamed, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 68) as the leader of the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing;

2) Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, Osama bin Laden’s close friend and financier while in the Philippines of Ramzi Yousef (principle architect of the first WTC attack) and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (next)

3) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, identified in the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 145) as “the principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.”

4) Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. two of the alleged 9/11 hijackers, whose presence in the United States was concealed from the FBI by CIA officers for months before 9/11.[4]

It might sound from these three citations that the 9/11 Commission marked a new stage in the U.S. treatment of these terrorists, and that the Report now exposed those terrorists who in the past had been protected. On the contrary, a principal purpose of my essay is to show that

1) one purpose of protecting these individuals had been to protect a valued intelligence connection (the “Al-Qaeda connection” if you will);

2) one major intention in the 9/11 Commission Report was to continue protecting this connection;

3) those on the 9/11 Commission staff who were charged with this protection included at least one commission member (Jamie Gorelick), one staff member (Dietrich Snell) and one important witness (Patrick Fitzgerald) who earlier had figured among the terrorists’ protectors.

In the course of writing this essay, I came to another disturbing conclusion I had not anticipated. This is that a central feature of the protection has been to defend the 9/11 Commission’s false picture of al-Qaeda as an example of non-state terrorism, at odds with not just the CIA but also the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. In reality, as I shall show, royal family protection from Qatar and Saudi Arabia (concealed by the 9/11 Commission) was repeatedly given to key figures like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.”

This finding totally undermines the claim that the wars fought by America in Asia since 9/11 have been part of a global “war on terror.” On the contrary, the result of the wars has been to establish a permanent U.S. military presence in the oil- and gas-rich regions of Central Asia, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan – the principal backers of the jihadi terrorist networks the U.S. been supposedly fighting. Meanwhile the most authentic opponents in the region of these Sunni jihadi terrorists – the governments of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran – have found themselves overthrown (in the case of Iraq and Libya) subverted with U.S. support (in the case of Syria), or sanctioned and threatened as part of an “axis of evil” (in the case of Iran). We should not forget that, just one day after 9/11, “Rumsfeld was talking about broadening the objectives of our response and ‘getting Iraq.’”[5]

The protection to terrorists described in this essay, in other words, has been sustained partly in order to support the false ideology that has underlain U.S. Asian wars for more than a decade. And the blame cannot be assigned all to the Saudis. Two months before 9/11, FBI counter-terrorism expert John O’Neill described to the French journalist Jean-Charles Brisard America’s “impotence” in getting help from Saudi Arabia concerning terrorist networks. The reason? In Brisard’s paraphrase, “Just one: the petroleum interests.”[6] Former CIA officer Robert Baer voiced a similar complaint in complained about the lobbying influence of “the Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in the Caspian. . . . The deeper I got, the more Caspian oil money I found sloshing around Washington.”[7]

The decade of protection for terrorists demonstrates the power of this extra dimension to the American deep state: the dark forces in our society responsible for protecting terrorists, over and above the parallel government institutionalized on and after 9/11.[8] Although I cannot securely define these dark forces, I hope to demonstrate that they are related to the black hole at the heart of the complex U.S-Saudi connection, a complex that involves the oil majors like Exxon, the military domination of oil and gas movements from the Persian Gulf and Central Asia, offsetting arms sales, Saudi investments in major U.S. corporations like Citibank and the Carlyle Group, and above all the ultimate United States dependency on Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and OPEC, for the defense of the petrodollar.[9]

This deeper dimension of the deep state, behind its institutional manifestation in our parallel government, is a far greater threat than foreign terrorism to the preservation of U.S. democracy. 

Continue reading:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-government-protection-of-al-qaeda-terrorists-and-the-us-saudi-black-hole/5344934