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US to step up pressure on Al-Qaeda in Yemen: official
By Dan De Luce (AFP)
WASHINGTON — The United States is increasingly concerned about the threat posed by Al-Qaeda’s network 
While Al-Qaeda’s leadership based in Pakistan had suffered serious setbacks, its affiliates in Yemen had regrouped and emerged as a “virulent” danger, the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told AFP.
“They’re not feeling the same kind of heat — not yet, anyway — as their friends in the tribal areas” of Pakistan, he said.
“And everyone involved on our side understands that has to change.”
The official did not specify how the United States would counter militants in Yemen but in Pakistan, the Central Intelligence Agency has targeted Al-Qaeda and Taliban figures with a major bombing campaign using unmanned aircraft.
The Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post reported Wednesday that the new assessment of the threat raised the prospect of expanded US operations in Yemen, including CIA drone strikes.
Asked about the revised assessment of the threat in Yemen and possible stepped up US operations, CIA spokesman George Little said: “This agency and our government as a whole work against al-Qaeda and its violent allies, wherever they appear.”
A US effort to counter militants in Yemen has been led mostly by the US military, but some inside the administration have proposed a larger role for the CIA, similar to the drone strikes in Pakistan, the Journal wrote, citing unnamed officials.
The US counter-terrorism official said the administration would take a “tailored approach” to Yemen and that it was not a case of choosing intelligence agencies over the military.
“When it comes to who carries out that policy, it’s not a zero-sum game or a question of this organization or that. You have to combine and apply the tools and tactics that make the most sense, given the specific situation,” the official said.
“Yemen isn’t Pakistan, and the United States in any case takes a tailored approach.”
The CIA and the US military’s special operations forces have deployed surveillance equipment, robotic aircraft and personnel in Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia to target Al-Qaeda’s network in Yemen as well as Islamist militants in Somalia’s Shebab movement, the Journal reported.
US officials believe Al-Qaeda in Yemen and Shebab in Somalia are forging stronger links, the paper said.
Yemeni security forces meanwhile have been battling suspected Al-Qaeda militants for control of the southern town of Loder in recent days.
Yemeni authorities said late Tuesday they had gained back control of the town and that more than 12 suspected Al-Qaeda militants were killed in the fighting which started Friday.
US intelligence agencies had raised alarms about Al-Qaeda’s branch in Yemen even before the failed attempt to blow up a US-bound airliner on Christmas Day last year, a plot blamed on the group.
The administration has also confirmed it is actively hunting down Anwar Al-Awlaqi, a US-born cleric in Yemen who has defended the suspect in the Christmas Day plot, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian, and blessed a shooting rampage last year at Fort Hood in Texas by a Muslim US Army officer.
Obama to escalate slaughter in Yemen
By Bill Van Auken
WSWS28 August 2010
With the opening of a new front in Yemen for the CIA’s drone “targeted killing” program, the Obama administration is steadily escalating the role played by both the covert agency and secretive US military Special Operations forces as a global Murder Incorporated.
“The White House, in an effort to turn up the heat against Al Qaida’s branch in Yemen, is considering adding the CIA’s armed Predator drones to the fight,” reported the Associated Press on Thursday, citing senior Washington officials.
“The US military’s Special Operation Forces and the CIA have been positioning surveillance equipment, drones and personnel in Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia” in preparation for the stepped-up killing spree, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.
The Washington Post quoted intelligence officials as saying that the CIA now views Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as a “more urgent” threat than the Qaeda organization in Pakistan.
Yemen, like Afghanistan and Iraq before it, is being targeted not to eradicate terrorism—the killing of civilians with cruise missiles and drone attacks will only produce more recruits for terrorist attacks—but because of its strategic location, bordering Saudi Arabia, the number-one oil exporter, and the vital Bab al-Mandab strait, through which three million barrels of oil pass daily.
“They’re not feeling the same kind of heat—not yet, anyway—as their friends in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” one official told Reuters Wednesday. “Everyone involved on our side understands that has to change.”
The “kind of heat” inflicted upon the population of Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas is well known. According to Pakistani officials quoted in the country’s media, at least 700 civilians were killed by drone attacks in 2009. According to an estimate by a Washington think tank sympathetic to the Obama administration, at least a third of those killed in drone attacks in Pakistan are civilians. This year, drone flights have increased ten-fold, with missile strikes increasing from one a week to at least one a day.
Even Pakistan’s devastating floods have not brought an end to these robotic assassinations. The latest reported attack came Monday in North Waziristan, leaving 20 dead, including four women and three children.
Now, in the name of combating terrorism, Washington is proposing to inflict this same kind of state terror on a desperately poor country that is already torn by regional, religious, ethnic and tribal conflicts. A secessionist movement in the south of Yemen, which had been a separate country until uniting with the north in 1990, has simmered for the last 16 years.
Supporters of the assassinated dissident Shi’a cleric Hussain Badr al-Din al-Huthi have battled the predominantly Sunni government for the past six years in the northern Sa’ada and Amran provinces.
And the entire population is mired in extreme poverty and deprivation, with fully one quarter of the 24 million Yemenis suffering chronic hunger and nearly half living on less than $2 a day. According to a 2008 World Bank report, fully 43 percent of children under five are malnourished.
To this already desperate situation, the Obama administration is proposing to contribute slaughter from the air by Hellfire missiles and assassination on the ground by special operations death squads.
The regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, having aligned itself with Washington, has utilized the US “global war on terror” as a justification for a brutal crackdown on all of its opponents.
“An extremely worrying trend has developed where the Yemeni authorities, under pressure from the USA and others to fight al-Qa’ida, and Saudi Arabia to deal with the Huthis, have been citing national security as a pretext to deal with opposition and stifle all criticism,” Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s director for the Middle East and North Africa program, said this week in releasing a new report from the human rights group documenting abuses in Yemen.
The Amnesty report provides harrowing details concerning the saturation bombing of residential areas, the gunning down of peaceful demonstrators, and the imprisonment, torture and disappearance of the government’s political opponents, including lawyers, journalists and human rights advocates.
The government of Yemen publicly rejected this week’s assessment from Washington, charging that it and the Western media “exaggerate the size of al-Qaeda and the danger that it poses to Yemen’s stability and security,” and insisting that “fighting terrorism in Yemen remains the responsibility of Yemeni security authorities.”
In reality, however, hundreds of US military and intelligence operatives are already deployed in Yemen, and the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh has repeatedly given a green light for US attacks on Yemeni soil. The statement repudiating any US escalation was no doubt issued for domestic consumption. The American military attacks have provoked widespread outrage, while intensifying opposition to the Yemeni government.
A CIA drone war will add to the war crimes already committed by the US military in Yemen on Obama’s command. In the worst of these, at least 41 people, 21 of them children and 14 of them women, were slaughtered last December 17 when their homes in the southern district of Abyan were struck by US cruise missiles carrying cluster bombs—a weapon banned by international treaties.
Last June, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, charged the US government with arrogating to itself “an ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe” and a “strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability.”
This “license to kill” has also been claimed in relation to US citizens. Among those targeted in Yemen is the American Islamic cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Last April, US officials revealed that the Obama administration had authorized the “targeted killing” of al-Awlaki, whose family is Yemeni. This marks the first time that a US government has admitted seeking the assassination of one of its own citizens.
Al-Awlaki’s family and civil liberties lawyers have attempted to secure a restraining order against this extra-judicial execution and gross abuse of power, insisting that if the New Mexico-born man is guilty of any crime, he should be charged and tried in a US court.
The Obama administration sought to stifle any lawsuit, however, claiming that because the government has deemed al-Awlaki a terrorist, it would be a criminal offense to seek a court order barring his assassination by the CIA or the US military. Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights were finally allowed to proceed with the action only after obtaining a special license from the US Treasury Department.
The Obama administration is escalating and spreading criminal wars abroad while continuing where Bush left off in erecting the scaffolding for a police state dictatorship at home. No section of the political establishment or the corporate media seriously opposes these measures, because they are driven by the interests of the financial aristocracy that both major parties and the government represent.
The preparations for a new war in Yemen must be taken as a serious warning to working people in the US. The unchecked growth of American militarism, coupled with the shredding of basic democratic rights and mounting attacks on jobs, wages and social conditions, threatens to unleash a catastrophe. No answer can be found within the present capitalist setup. Only the development of an independent and politically conscious movement of the working class fighting for socialism can provide an alternative.
Deadly protests rock Yemen’s south
Saturday, 10, April, 2010
At least four Yemenis, including a policeman, have been killed in two days of clashes between police and anti-government protesters.
Another 13 people were wounded in the exchanges of fire on Saturday and Sunday, which followed demonstrations in the south of the nation against the Sanaa government, medics and police said.
In one clash on Sunday in the village of Labouss, in Lahij province, a policeman and demonstrator were killed.
Another protester was killed in Dali, north of the port of Aden, in south Yemen, when police used firearms to disperse the crowd.
“One protester, Tufiq al-Jaadi, died while being operated on in hospital. He was hit by a bullet,” medical sources said of the Dali incident.
In al-Eind village, near Labouss, a third protester was killed in similar circumstances.
Violence also occurred in a hospital when police attempted to arrest a demonstrator, causing injuries to two people.
One demonstrator died in clashes with police on Saturday in the village of Ashehir, in the southeastern Hadramut region.
Uneasy union
Aden is the former capital of South Yemen, which was united with the north of the country in 1990.
Protesters carried banners with anti-government messages and posters of Ali Nasser Mohammed, the former president of South Yemen.
The death toll since protests started in the south in late April is now 16, including five security personnel.
Socialists, who formerly ruled the south, previously tried to gain secession in 1994, igniting a two-month civil war before the movement was crushed by forces loyal to the government.
Some southerners want independence because of alleged discrimination and neglect.
However, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has give warning that the nation could split up into several entities.
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| Obama to escalate slaughter in Yemen |