The American Bear

› At least four people killed in Yemen drone strike | chicagotribune.com

May 18th, 2013

At least four people were killed and a number of others wounded in a drone strike on a vehicle carrying suspected al Qaeda members in southern Yemen, a local official said on Saturday. The official said the strike took place at dawn on Saturday on a road to the north of Jaar in Abyan Governorate, near Aden.

› White House extends application of Executive Order 13611 which declared a state of emergency in Yemen

From the letter:

Section 202(d) of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622(d)) provides for the automatic termination of a national emergency unless, within 90 days prior to the anniversary date of its declaration, the President publishes in the Federal Register and transmits to the Congress a notice stating that the emergency is to continue in effect beyond the anniversary date. In accordance with this provision, I have sent to the Federal Register for publication the enclosed notice stating that the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13611 of May 16, 2012, with respect to Yemen is to continue in effect beyond May 16, 2013.

The actions and policies of certain members of the Government of Yemen and others[*] continue to threaten Yemen’s peace, security, and stability, including by obstructing the implementation of the agreement of November 23, 2011, between the Government of Yemen and those in opposition to it, which provided for a peaceful transition of power that meets the legitimate demands and aspirations of the Yemeni people for change, and by obstructing the political process in Yemen.

* The U.S. government is not included in the “others” that “threaten Yemen’s peace, security, and stability” of course, because the murder/drone program/not-so-secret secret war there is nothing if not benificent. (Just ask the Yemeni people about the peace and stablity the US frequently brings to the country).

Milquetoast media report on the sanctions/”National Emergency” order originally signed in May of 2012 here.

› “A Full Two Month Period” that Covers John Brennan’s Entire Drone Propaganda Campaign | emptywheel

AP’s most recent story on the seizure seems to suggest that “full two-month period” spanned April and May of last year.

In all, the government seized the records for more than 20 separate telephone lines assigned to AP and its journalists in April and May of 2012.

If so, it means the government grabbed phone records for Adam Goldman, Matt Apuzzo, Kimberly Dozier, Eileen Sullivan, and Alan Fram for three weeks after (and five weeks before) the UndieBomb 2.0 story Goldman and Apuzzo by-lined.

That would mean they’d get the sources for this Kimberly Dozier story published May 21 which starts,

White House counterterror chief John Brennan has seized the lead in guiding the debate on which terror leaders will be targeted for drone attacks or raids, establishing a new procedure to vet both military and CIA targets.

The move concentrates power over the use of lethal U.S. force outside war zones at the White House.

The process, which is about a month old, means Brennan’s staff consults the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies as to who should go on the list, making a previous military-run review process in place since 2009 less relevant, according to two current and three former U.S. officials aware of the evolution in how the government targets terrorists.

Within 10 days of the time Dozier published that story, John Brennan had rolled out an enormous propaganda campaign — based on descriptions of the drone targeting process that Brennan’s power grab had replaced, not the new drone targeting process — that suckered almost everyone commenting on drones that drone targeting retained its previous, more deliberative, targeting process, the one Brennan had just changed.

And that propaganda campaign, in turn, hid another apparent detail: that UndieBomb 2.0, a Saudi sting had actually occurred earlier in April, and that UndieBomb 2.0 preceded and perhaps justified the signature strikes done at the behest of the Yemenis (or more likely the Saudis).

April 18: Greg Miller first reports on debate over signature strikes

Around April 20: UndieBomb 2.0 device recovered

Around April 22: John Brennan takes over drone targeting from JSOC

April 22: Drone strike that–WSJ reports, “Intelligence analysts [worked] to identify those killed” after the fact, suggesting possible signature strike

April 24: Robert Mueller in Yemen for 45 minute meeting, presumably to pick up UndieBomb

April 25: WSJ reports that Obama approved use of signature strikes

April 30: John Brennan gives speech, purportedly bringing new transparency to drone program, without addressing signature strikes

May 6: Fahd al-Quso killed

May 7: AP reports on UndieBomb 2.0

May 8: ABC reports UndieBomb 2.0 was Saudi-run infiltrator

May 15: Drone strike in Jaar kills a number of civilians

Now, frankly, I think the witch hunt response to the UndieBomb 2.0 plot was mostly just an excuse to start investigating the AP, though it did lead John Brennan to make it clear that it was a Saudi-manufactured plot in the first place.

But the response to that Dozier article, which provided the final piece of evidence for the timeline above showing Brennan grabbed control of drone targeting at roughly the moment we started signature strikes in Yemen, was more dramatic, at least in terms of the breathtaking propaganda the White House rolled out to pretend the drone strikes were more orderly than they actually were.

I’m guessing, but when [AP’s President Gary] Pruitt says this,

These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP’s activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know.

I’m guessing he might have other AP stories in mind.

I know I’m as least as worried about DOJ targeting Dozier’s sources, who revealed a critical detail of how illegal the drone program was, as I am about the original UndieBomb 2.0 story.

› If 40 Months of Drone Strikes in Yemen Haven’t Made Transfers Safe … | Marcy Wheeler

… [B]ack when the moratorium [on releasing cleared Yemeni prisoners from Guantanamo] was announced 40 months ago, the Obama Administration suggested that it was a response to a recent setback in security in Yemen, one which would be fixed by its new counterterrorism efforts in the country [i.e. death by robot, signature strikes, guilt by association, location, etc.]

Midway through the ensuing period, the Obama Administration succeeded in killing Anwar al-Awlaki, whom they would implicate in that Christmas Day attack.

And yet 40 months after the moratorium (and the drone strikes) started and 19 months since Awlaki’s death, the Administration still hasn’t removed the moratorium.

It may well be that things in Yemen haven’t gotten more stable since January 2010 and on that basis the Administration continues the moratorium (though Yemen’s treatment of Adnan Latif sure made it sound like the Administration was moving toward some shift). Indeed, Brennan’s most recent estimates say the number of AQAP members has grown fivefold through this period of moratorium.

Clearly, the Gitmo policy has to change. But what about the Yemen policy, which over 40 months time hasn’t brought the stability Obama’s team was promising when the moratorium started?

› Yemen human rights minister in Washington to talk about Guantanamo detainees | McClatchy

With a weeks-long hunger strike focusing new attention on conditions at the United States’ controversial detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the minister of human rights for Yemen is due in Washington on Friday for talks she hopes will lead to the repatriation of at least some of the scores of Yemenis held at the island prison.

Speaking on the eve of her trip, Hooriya Mashhour told McClatchy that the Yemeni government’s ultimate goal is to gain custody of all its citizens currently held at Guantanamo – a number that is uncertain but includes at least 84 of the 166 men imprisoned there. But she said her current hope is more modest – the return of the two dozen or so Yemenis that a special Obama administration task force determined in 2010 could be returned to their homeland.

“At the very least, we want the release of the detainees who have been cleared – those who have already been determined to present no threat to the U.S.,” she said. “That, however, is just the first step.”

What to do with the Yemenis at Guantanamo is one of the major decisions that President Barack Obama must make if he is to accomplish his first-term campaign pledge to close the detention center – a goal he [sort of] reiterated at a news conference Tuesday.

The State Department said this week that 26 of the Yemenis at the center have been cleared for release, and that 30 others could be transferred to Yemen if the government could take “appropriate measures to reduce the risks associated with their return.” But their return is blocked by a moratorium on the transfer of any detainees to Yemen, which Obama imposed after the attempted Christmas Day 2009 midair bombing of an aircraft over Detroit. The Nigerian who confessed to that attempt said he’d been recruited for the mission by al Qaida-linked people in Yemen.

[…] With whom Mashhour will meet in Washington is unclear. The State Department did not respond to requests for information. Last month, Mashhour said she would seek permission to visit the prison to see for herself the conditions of the Yemenis there. But previous requests for such a visit have been denied, and Pentagon spokesman Todd Breasseale said Thursday he was unaware of any current request from Mashhour to visit Guantanamo.

Breasseale said such visits typically are restricted to foreign intelligence and law enforcement officials.

Mashhour’s delegation includes officials from Yemen’s intelligence service and the Foreign Ministry, she said.

› Written testimony of Ibrahim Mothana for the United States Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights

“I was inspired by President Obama’s promise of ‘a new era of leadership that will bring back America’s credibility on human rights Issues and reject prioritizing safety to ideals.’ But happiness and inspiration gave way to misery. My admiration for the American dream and Obama’s promises has become overshadowed by the reality of the American drone strike nightmare in Yemen.”

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, we Yemenis are the ones who suffer the most from the presence of Al Qaeda and getting rid of this exhausting plague is a top priority for the majority of people in the country. But we also see that there is no easy way to end terrorism. Only a long-term approach that strengthens democracy, accountability and justice, together with programs to address structural economic and social drivers of extremism can bring about security in my country.

When I think of solutions, I think of our common ideals. The drone program is far from these. Edward S. Herman offers us a critique and an opportunity in his reflection on Hannah Arendt’s concept of the Banality of Evil: “Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on ‘normalization.’ This is the process whereby ugly, degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine and are accepted as ‘the way things are done.’ ”

As a Yemeni citizen, I urge the US government not normalize crimes committed under the name of your great country. I call on the US administration to be transparent regarding the strikes it has authorized in Yemen and to compensate affected civilians. I call on the United States to critically reflect on using targeted strikes and the existing counterterrorism policy in Yemen and to see that, it is insecurity and not security that these are creating in my country, the region, the US, and the entire world.

READ →

› Jeremy Scahill: The Secret Story Behind Obama’s Assassination of Two Americans in Yemen | Democracy Now!

JEREMY SCAHILL: [In] December of 2009, the U.S. started bombing Yemen for the first time in seven years. Bush had bombed Yemen once. It was a drone bombing in 2002, November, and ended up killing a U.S. citizen in that strike, though he wasn’t the target of the strike. So the first time that the U.S. did a targeted strike that killed a U.S. citizen in Yemen that we know of was under Bush in November of 2002. In December of 2009, President Obama authorizes a series of missile strikes, not just drone strikes. The most deadly one that we know of was December 17th, 2009, cruise missile attack on the Yemeni village of al-Majalah, and it killed 46 people, three dozen of whom were women and children, which is stunning and horrifying. And we have video footage in our film of the aftermath of that strike, interviews with the survivors of when the missile hit. But it was in pursuit of one person that they said was an al-Qaeda operative, and they wiped out an entire Bedouin village. And we went there, and the cruise missile parts are still strewn across the desert. They’re there to this day just rusting out there. But the U.S. also used—

AMY GOODMAN: How many people were killed?

JEREMY SCAHILL: Forty-six people were killed, and I think 35 or 36 of them were women and children. And I was leaked the official parliamentary investigation in Yemen with the names and ages of all of the dead. And I have it—I have it stained in my head, the images that I’ve seen of the videos that people I met there had taken on the scene. You know, one tribal leader, Sheikh Saleh bin Fareed, who’s the head of the Awlak tribe in Yemen, he went there right after the attack. And he said to me, “If someone had weak heart, they would collapse, because you saw meat, and you couldn’t tell if it was goat meat or human meat. And you saw limbs of children.” And he, himself—and he’s this older man—actually found body parts and helped to bury—try to bury people with dignity. And he’s this incredibly wealthy man who went there himself and is the main reason why there still is agitation for justice for the victims of the Majalah bombing, that—because these tribal leaders have said, “We will not forget what you did to this village of nobodies, one of the poorest tribes in all of Yemen.”

Who knows why the U.S. bombed it? It could have been that the Yemeni government was under pressure from Obama’s administration, and they said, “No one will care about these people. Let’s just say this is an al-Qaeda camp, because it’s in the middle of nowhere. No one is going to care about them, and no one’s going to go there to investigate.” But when we went there, we saw it. The cluster bombs, these are flying land mines, they’re banned. And yet the United States continues to use them, and they shred people into meat. I saw it in Yugoslavia in the ’90s, and I’ve seen it again now in Yemen.

AMY GOODMAN: So the weapons used were?

JEREMY SCAHILL: The weapons used? They used a Tomahawk cruise missile, and they used cluster bombs. And the cluster bombs are—they are like flying land mines. And they drop in these parachutes, and they explode, and they can shred people. I mean, it’s their—they’re probably the most horrifying weapon I have ever seen the aftermath of in a war zone.

So, this is the first strike that President Obama authorizes, and it’s unclear who the real target even was. They claimed it was this one man and that he was killed. When I talked to people in Yemen, they said, “That guy is old—that guy is—yeah, he was a mujahideen in Afghanistan, but he had nothing to do with the leadership.”

AMY GOODMAN: Mujahideen, who the U.S. worked with.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Who the U.S. worked with, right. You know, Yemenis went to Afghanistan in the ’80s in huge numbers. And, you know, they have a very serious fighting spirit, and there were a lot of Yemenis that had gone there and fought on the same side as the United States. But the point I’m getting at here is that—so, the Obama administration starts to intensify this bombing in Yemen. They bomb al-Majalah. And then, seven days later, they—but remember that the Yemeni government claimed responsibility for the strike, and Obama’s administration released a statement praising Yemen for this attack. Yemen doesn’t have cruise missiles. Yemen doesn’t have cluster bombs.

So, but for, you know, some brave local journalists going there and photographing it initially, we probably would—never would have been able to prove that it was a U.S. strike. And we could talk about him later, but Obama, President Obama, is directly responsible for the first Yemeni journalist to report on this story, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, continuing to be in prison. He was arrested after he exposed the Majalah bombing, and he remains in prison to this day. In fact, the last line in my book is to say that he’s still in prison, and he should be set free. This was a journalist that had worked with major U.S. media outlets, broke this huge story that the U.S. had bombed Yemen for the first time in seven years, using cluster bombs, and then he ends up in prison on trumped-up terrorism charges, put on trial in a court that was set up specifically to prosecute journalists, and then when he was going to be pardoned, President Obama called Ali Abdullah Saleh and said, “We don’t want him released,” and he remains in prison to this day. So, he was the first journalist to do that. He’s in prison. [watch]

› Excerpt from "Dirty Wars" | Jeremy Scahill

… On the morning of September 30, 2011, [US citizens Anwar] al-Awlaki and [Samir] Khan, a young Pakistani-American from North Carolina who is believed to have been the editor of Inspire, finished their breakfast inside the house. US spy cameras and satellites broadcast images back to Washington and Virginia of the two men and a handful of their cohorts piling into vehicles and driving away. They were headed toward the province of Marib. As the vehicles made their way over the dusty, unpaved roads, US drones, armed with Hellfire missiles, were dispatched to hunt them down. The drones were technically under the command of the CIA, though JSOC aircraft and ground forces were poised to assist. A team of commandos stood at the ready to board V-22 helicopters. As an added measure, Marine Harrier jets scrambled in a backup maneuver.

Six months earlier, Awlaki had narrowly avoided death by US missiles. “This time eleven missiles missed [their] target but the next time, the first rocket may hit it,” he had said. As the cars sped down the road, Awlaki’s prophecy came true. Two of the Predator drones locked onto the car carrying him, while other aircraft hovered as backup. A Hellfire missile fired by a drone slammed into his car, transforming it into a fireball. A second missile hit moments later, ensuring that the men inside would never escape if they had managed to survive. [read]

› Inside America's Dirty Wars | Excerpt from Jeremy Scahill's New Book

… At the White House, President Obama was faced with a decision—not of morality or legality, but of timing. He had already sentenced Anwar al-Awlaki to death without trial. A secret legal authorization had been prepared and internal administration critics sidelined or brought on board. All that remained to be sorted out was the day Awlaki would die. Obama, one of his advisers recalled, had “no qualms” about this kill. When the president was briefed on Awlaki’s location in Jawf and also told that children were in the house, he was explicit that he did not want to rule any options out. Awlaki was not to escape again. “Bring it to me and let me decide in the reality of the moment rather than in the abstract,” Obama told his advisers, according to author Daniel Klaidman. Although scores of US drone strikes had killed civilians in various countries around the globe, it was official policy to avoid such deaths if at all possible. “In this one instance,” an Obama confidant told Klaidman, “the president considered relaxing some of his collateral requirements.”

› Yemeni Officials Say Drone Strike Killed "Al-Qaeda Militants"

April 21st, 2013

A suspected U.S. drone strike has killed two men in Yemen who officials say were “Al-Qaeda militants.”*

The strike on April 21 also reportedly destroyed an arms cache in the town of Wadi Abida in central Marib Province.

An unnamed Yemeni security official told journalists that the strike was carried out at dawn. It is the second suspected U.S. drone strike in Yemen in less than a week.

* The Obama administration’s policy for drone strikes deems all adult male victims as militants, unless exculpatory evidence emerges after their deaths.

› Using Social Media, Yemeni Pushes Back Against US Drone Strike Narrative | Common Dreams