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US Widens Terror War to Yemen
The United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against the Al-Qaeda terror network in Yemen, according to The New York Times newspaper.
Yemeni protesters staged a demonstration in the southern part of the country on Thursday after a raid against Qaeda militants. (Agence France-Presse - Getty Images)
A year ago, the Central Intelligence Agency sent a number of its top field
operatives with counter-terrorism experience to the country, the newspaper
said.
At the same time, some of the most secretive special operations commandos have begun training Yemeni security forces in counter-terrorism tactics, the report said.
The Pentagon is to spend more than $70 million (£48.3m) over the next 18 months, and use teams of Special Forces to train and equip Yemeni military, Interior Ministry and coast guard forces.
Yemen became the focus of US attention after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a known Nigerian extremist who tried to blow up a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day, confessed to training with an Al-Qaeda bombmaker in Yemen, security officials told the US media.
The country has become a refuge for jihadists, in part because Yemen's government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s, but al Qaeda militants have made much more focused efforts to build a base in the country recently, drawing recruits from throughout the region and mounting attacks more frequently on foreign embassies and other targets.
Fears are also growing of a resurgent Islamist extremism in nearby Somalia and East Africa. Administration officials and American lawmakers said Yemen could become Al Qaeda’s next operational and training hub, rivaling the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan where the organization’s top leaders operate.
“Yemen now becomes one of the centers of that fight,” said Senator Joseph Lieberman, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who visited the country in August. “We have a growing presence there, and we have to, of Special Operations, Green Berets, intelligence,” he said on Fox News Sunday.
The White House is now seeking to nurture enduring ties with the government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and prod him to combat the local Al-Qaeda affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
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34 Comments so far
Show AllYemen, Somalia, Nigeria,Darfur.
In this chess game of global war on Terror, he US military are the white pieces, and terrorists and free democracy's are the black.
With the US military the Queen on both sides of the board, the goal is simple, one world order, one world government, one world currency.
The question is, who are the kings. The banks, oil company's, and the world stazi and spy networks.
Terrorists are allowed to move to country's with weak governments or target rich resources, then red flag events follow and so does our war on terror.
Where ever they go , we follow and engage - destroy and conquer, and then let the terrorists leaders go to the next country.
The pawns in this game of global one world order is all the free people in country's with strong constitutions.
With fear mongering , and a war on global criminals,not nations, its easy to go from one country to the next.
As a victim of right wing republican christian gang stalking torture, I can tell you without a doubt, the enemy's of the US are here, they are domestic stazi spys, and they are well funded and organized by our government.
They are, Citizen Corp, Infragard, community watch groups and the patriot act and Homeland security.
Prove me wrong, abolish the Patriot act, and make the Constitution the supreme law of the land.
Remember, its a true patriots job to protect the constitution from enemy's Foreign and Domestic.No matter what happens, and what our national threats to security might be.
Anything less, is anti-American and unconstitutional behavior.
You can not trust Christians that organize to ignore American constitutional liberty's.
The Elites in this country must all be insane -- they do the same old thing, over and over, thinking each time that something different will result.
Perhaps only national bankruptcy will stop them -- but I fully expect they'll fight tooth and nail and no holds barred to keep from losing their domestic power, even if they lose the ability to influence world events.
Not insane at all. The OUTCOME they get is exactly the one they wish. That is ever more wealth, less in the way of Civil Liberties , more Corporate power, less Citizen power and a Government that will do whatever it requests them to do.
You make the mistake of ascribing to these "elites" , good intentions. They have none.
Fascists do not really care if the fellow fascist sitting across the table is Brazilan , Canadian, American or Jewish. Just so long as he is a fascist.
On the contrary, GwNorth, I ascribe nothing to those monsters in Mordor-on-the-Potomac but the WORST intentions.
So they're wishing to cause the downfall of the or their U.S. empire? I have a feeling that this is not something they wish for. Instead, it most likely is a consequence of their greed and psychopathy, and their refusal to critically analyse what their plans and ways are bound to lead to or cause, including to themselves.
In the short or shorter term, however, they get what their greed and hunger for power causes them to wish for; PROFIT and power. Oh, and expansion of the U.S. empire; until it completely collapses.
Put it this way.
The head of Royal Dutch shell sits across the table from the head of Exxon.
At that table a worker from Britan, The Netherlands and the USA also sits.
Will the hea dof Exxon feel grater loyalty to the American Worker and his demands or to the head of Royal Dutch Shell who is British?
The fascists are loyal to MONEY. Not Country. That is why they so easily move jobs to China.
That only is about the corporate chiefs. There are also the politicians and they should be where the greatest concern about causing the U.S. empire to collapse should be found. So while I agree with you about the corporate chiefs, I don't know if the same would apply regarding the politicians, but maybe they don't realise that their personal interests are at stake if the U.S. empire totally collapses; or maybe they have concern for this, a little, while thinking they'll never be hit hard like millions of the general population have been and will be.
After all, the corporate chiefs can't run the government without the use of the political body members. Some people might say that CIA ops people or like enough could secretly work for "Corporate America" to eliminate dissenting politicians, but either all of these assassins would be ready to abandon the USA when the empire totally collapses, or they'd want to try to help this outcome to be avoided. Not all, if even any majority, of such U.S. citizens would want to contribute to the downfall of the U.S.
Some of the politicians who are complicit with the corporate chiefs may be planning on the possible eventual need to immigrate to another country and move out of the USA, but all of the members of the Congress and Senate, or even a majority of them?
Anyway, you covered the easy and obvious part of this and I'm not sure about the politicians, the political body of the government. They act like they don't care about causing the collapse of the USA, but do they really want to cause this, and if they do, then what do they plan on doing for their own greedy lives when the empire is totally collapsed?
Otoh, chiefs of war-profiteering corporations (oil and gas, mineral, and other natural resources, the MIC, and other corporations, as well as Wall Street) need a superpower government to be able to achieve their ultimate objective, global economic dominance, and they must surely realise that if and when the US empire totally collapses, then it's hardly going to be able to continue to provide global military dominance, which is needed for achieving the economic dominance. The government needs a lot of taxpayer dollars to pay for these wars and with millions of working Americans having lost their jobs and the more who'll lose jobs, I don't imagine the tax revenues will be anywhere near what they were before the economy started to seriously and clearly collapse. Eventually, there'll be too little of tax revenue for the government to be able to continue to fund the wars, and war-occupations and -expansions.
They clearly believe that they'll only profit, and big-time so, but they know basic accounting and finance, so they must surely realise that they're also playing a losing game, say. Some of the corporate chiefs involved in this might not have this realisation, but surely some must; I think.
Anyway, I don't think we should take an explanation as simplistic as yours and think that it is complete; not without very careful and exacting evaluation, first, anyway.
who are the rooks?
(we know who the crooks are - in their ivory towers)
B.S.
What a remarkable "coincidence" that the U.S. military is already set to spend 70 million dollars in Yemen!
This article blatantly contradicts itself on the history of U.S. involvement in Yemen. Then, these cheerleaders turn to quoting the chief cheerleader for brutality, Joe LIEberman.
An accurate history of U.S. schemes in Yemen is what we need.
"It's all... part of the plan." - my best Joker/Heath Ledger
By calling it a "war on terror" it conveniently allows the USA to attack anywhere they want. An Al-Qaeda outpost here, a terror camp there, and all the casualties are "insurgents". (Even 6 year old insurgents, pregnant insurgents, and 90 year old disabled insurgents)
Remember the "terrorists" you hear about will always be where the USA has financial interest. The "terrorists" that live elsewhere won't ever be mentioned.
In addition, whenever a country (like Yemen) is mentioned in the "war on terror", one of it's citizens or allies may try to blow up and airliner or something (like on Christmas). But it's just coincidence isn't it?
So it's NOT a coincidence that this Nigerian kid just so happened, on Christmas Day, to try to blow up a plane. Covert operations were there all along and they needed an excuse to announce this latest round of imperialistic, murderous activities. This is not about terrorism but oil as many of you have said. Please indulge me as I step out of the matrix.
I like how he publicly admits that he received his terror training at Al-Quada camps in Yemen. He named the country and the terror network. But it's all just coincidence.
TheLorax, we were writing at the same time, thinking the same things :) Yes, it's all just a big coincidence. And I think more and more Americans are starting to recognize the propoganda and outright lies. The internet is making it more difficult to keep citizens tuned into the same channel.
clownshoes and The Lorax and everybody else: it needs to be said, indeed shouted from the rooftops, that there is indeed a high level of probability that the U.S. raid in Yemen and the appearance of the Detroit underpants bomber who (supposedly) implicated al Qaeda agents in Yemen is NO coincidence. Indeed they are likely part of the same black operation in which a contrived "near-catastrophe" is staged to justify public acceptance of the ongoing military operation. Nobody has heard from Mr. Underpants except by way of the "authorities" who are interrogating him. If these authorities feel the need to "parade" their suspect before the public he may feel like Lee Harvey Oswald needing to shout "I'm just a patsy" during his brief appearance before he awaits the same fate of Oswald at the hands of his own Jack Ruby. As with Oswald, there is every likelihood that the current bomber was groomed by intelligence agents to play his charade of a suicide-aborted-by-the-heroic-efforts-of-fellow-passengers, those folks who were the unwitting pawns (forget the rooks) and who, like Jessica Lynch or Pat Tillman, participated naively in these charades.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I have the strong and growing suspicion that we the people have just been treated to a softening-up raid preparatory to escalating the U.S. actions in Yemen from the clandestine to the shamefully open level, as we are given justifications in advance for our country doing what it might be reluctant to do without this initial softening. So, people, we need to harden our own resolve and keep our brains about us and call out a black op if there is a black op. We may be heard only as "conspiracy nuts" as reward for our efforts, but if we don't cry the cry, who will?
Re. coincidence, or not, maybe we can say it's a coincidental event or statement that was made, but whether it's unrelated or not is another matter; and it's clearly enough not an unrelated coincidence. The mere association with the purpose of the U.S. ops in Yemen makes it clear that the two matters are related, but while the U.S. government is trying to treat this as if "Mr Underpants" admitting what he purportedly said is not just part of a stage act meant to try to deceive the public.
Re. the interrogation of "Mr Underpants" and his purported confession, if he was indeed interrogated by "authorities" of Yemen and did make the purported confession, then the question to ask is whether this was after being tortured, or not. If it was after being tortured and Yemen is quite a torturer, like Egypt, f.e., is known to be, then his confession can't be justly treated as truthful.
Given that the government of Yemen is ally of the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, torture was surely used and it was probably quite brutal. That, of course, is only if he was really interrogated and we have no proof that he was. This may've been like several U.S. government and military claims about the ops in Yemen, so far, a complete lie; that is, regarding finding and/or killing terrorists, including some associated with the so-called Al Qaeda.
Mike Corbeil: Good points about the integrity of any "confession" by the suspect, though I hadn't heard that he had been interrogated and confessed to the Yemeni police; only that he had said this about al Qaeda in Yemen apparently quite casually as he was hustled from the plane in Detroit. I suspect U.S. police lying ahead of Yemeni torture, but I don't know this without more facts.
On another CD article today, I'm posting on the Chris Hedges piece on this same topic and inviting others who share our suspicions to write me "off-cyberspace" to see it we can get some dialogue and accumulation of facts on what I suspect as a black ops manuever designed to justify an escalated attack on Yemen. If you're interested in doing this, my e-mail address is jerrydrose11@yahoo.com (that 11 is eleven). I've had a spot of experience in putting together a "critical community" of researchers on the JFK assassination, and I'd like to do something on a smaller scale with what looks very much like a similar operation.
I believe to have read in another article that he was interrogated and that this was learned from some Yemeni government official or officer; but I don't recall which article this was and won't take the time to try to find which one it was in order to be able to provide a link to it. If this was said about his case, then we should be seeing some other articles in which this is recounted.
The article for this page doesn't say either interrogation or casual, so the article is evidently not your source about him having supposedly said this casually. And I doubt he would have casually said this to U.S. officials hauling him away if he was truly associated with or a member of Al Qaeda, the one headed or formerly headed by Osama bin Ladin; unless he was being threatened with torture, which we of course would not be told about by either government.
It is a black ops sort of situation; it's been reported, maybe in this above article or in Chris Hedges' article at CD today, or in one yesterday at CD, that this is covert U.S. operations, or very much were covert anyway; although, they still remain considerably covert. This surely means that the U.S. Congress has not been asked to approve of this, being rather unilateral decisions on the part of the Obama administration and U.S. military "leaders"; and this is criminal, so certainly black. The Obama administration doesn't have any legal or ethical right to be expanding any U.S. warfare into Yemen.
I would not worry much about accumulating facts. We don't need much more than what we already know, including from articles at www.globalresearch.ca, f.e. Accumulating facts, making a project out of this, wouldn't really benefit anyone.
I must have missed the trial...where the 30 or so "alleged" al qaeda operatives that were murdered by Predator Drone were found guilty by a jury of their peers, and sentenced to death, along with all their neighbours and their kids.
Or did I simply miss the Congressional Declaration of War against Yemen?
I must have missed something. It is illegal for one country to unilaterlally murder residents of another country...and the USA would surely not do anything illegal under the leadership of Saint Barry of Obama
Would he be the same as St. 0gustine of just war fame?
No, you didn't miss anything. Its called "summary execution" which is now the US SOP.
It is important to take control of Yemen.
Why?
The US military has a base in Djibouti (Camp Lemonnier). If Yemen can also be controlled, it allows complete control of the choke-point at the bottom of the Red Sea. All merchant traffic / shipping coming down from the Mediterranean Sea will be under US control. Check out the maps and it's crystal clear what's up.
It's likely for that reason, but also more; like as much U.S. control or dominance over the Middle East that the U.S. can achieve.
We know Iran's part of the Middle East, so who knows, maybe the U.S. and Saudi strikes in Yemen and which have definitely not been only in the southern part of the country, but also the northern part, which mostly consists of Shi'ites, not Al Qaeda allies, might eventually be linked (through lies) to Iran, which, in turn, the U.S. "elites", or some of them anyway, haven't given up on trying to dominate.
They say these ops in Yemen are related to the GW-of-T, although they say 'on', instead of the true 'of', and this is about global dominance, full spectrum dominance, ..., with the underlying base or basis being economic domination, as much as can be achieved. And the U.S. "elites" plan on trying to fully achieve this. They [plan], and like many people have correctly said, all prior empires fell to their dooms or total collapses, nearly total anyway. It's an outcome that I suppose the U.S. "elites" driving all of this criminal and hegemonic warring plan on avoiding, but plans can fail; perhaps all the more certainly when the planners are psychopaths, too. This criminal warring isn't driven by non-psychopaths.
Now why can't all terrorists be as coöperative as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab?
Think of all the water it would save.
vdb: because they (most of them) are not paid by the U.S. government. Those of the Iraqi Awakening and Afghan Mujadeen are VERY cooperative. Wonder what UFA's salary is.
Don't write in all-uppercase characters if you want more than maybe one or two people to bother to read your posts. I'm certainly not one of them.
I agree. A few upper case characters are fine for emphasis but I feel like I am being shouted at when the entire post is this way. I always scroll past these upper case posts.
Black Hawk Down with Boots on the Ground?
Quoting from the article, "“Yemen now becomes one of the centers of that fight,” said Senator Joseph Lieberman, the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who visited the country in August".
Who the hell elected that s.o.b. [again]? And senators who made him the chairman of that Committee are hellbent fiends and should all be replaced at the next elections for senate seats. They should all be OUTED, entirely, from serving in public office. They could also be all imprisoned, but this would require a government that truly believes in real [justice] and voters evidently aren't "friendly" to this sort of governance.
If Obama was really a "good man" like Dennis Kucinich referred to or said about him in the interview with Russia Today last week, then Obama would order a stop to these U.S. ops in Yemen and without any delay. Well, we're not going to get that and maybe Dennis Kucinich should spend some time watching "One Who Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest". The inmates in it were less cuckoo and weren't liars, though.
It is clear from this attempted bombing involving Al-Queda in Yemen that terrorism is a world-wide network that defies conventional military operations. Our military is chasing a phantom. As we chase them out of Afghanistan and Pakistan, they merely relocate to Yemen and other areas. Are we going to invade every nation that has an Al-Queda connection? The only way to deal with this highly dispersed terror network is through targeted intelligence and small-scale police and military operations aimed at particular terror cells scattered around the globe. We are trying to defeat terrorism with a hammer when it requires a scalpel.
Allegedly involving Al Qaeda. The U.S. has lied many times when claiming that acts of terrorism or plots for them were by Al Qaeda members or associates working in collaboration with Al Qaeda.
You have some brushing up study to do.