New Yorker Magazine cover after Obama election

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Cover of New Yorker Magazine after Obama's election. More Halos. Time.com, equally breathless, notes about the cover:

• "Why is the cover great? It doesn't do a victory dance. Rather, it whispers to the reader (the tribe): "Everything's okay now — we have our country back." It's set at night, a time when creepy things happen, but also a time when people sleep, safe and sound. It is beautifully rendered. Simply spectacular."

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About your Nobel Peace Laureate:

7/18/11, "The War on Terror, now starring Yemen and Somalia," Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

"There is a concerted campaign underway to ensure that the War on Terror bonanza continues unimpeded in the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, and even despite Leon Panetta's acknowledgment that Al Qaeda has a grand total of "fewer than two dozen key operatives" on the entire planet. That effort relies primarily on touting a growing villainous alliance -- the scariest since Marvel Comic's Masters of Evil -- between Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (mostly in Yemen) and the al Shabab group in Somalia. To accomplish this, all the standard fear-mongering propaganda is being trotted out, and the War on Terror apparatus is simply being re-directed to those nations. Most notably,

• the establishment media is being used to disseminate these messages,

using its familiar journalistically bankrupt practices to serve this agenda. In recent months, government officials have been insisting that the greatest Terrorist threat now resides in Yemen. Almost before the Al Qaeda leader's body hit the ocean floor, U.S. citizen Anwar Awlaki, in Yemen, assumed his (fabricated) role in American government and media depictions as The Next Osama bin Laden.

The Obama administration has escalated the existing drone program and begun a new CIA drone campaign in Yemen (one that just killed numerous people over the weekend); it also, contrary to public denials, provided the arms to Saudi Arabia to attack a rebel group in Northern Yemen. Yemen is also the justification for Obama's attempt to institutionalize a

• due-process-free assassination program aimed at U.S. citizens.

The administration just commenced a separate drone campaign in Somalia. And, as Jeremy Scahill revealed last week, the U.S. is relying upon interrogations conducted in a secret prison in Mogadishu, filled with people from that country and those rendered at the behest of the U.S. from other African nations.

Just like The Communist was seamlessly replaced by the Terrorist when

• a new enemy was needed,

the death of Osama bin Laden and the virtual non-existence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan means that

• Yemen and Somalia are the New War on Terror Battlegrounds.

Typifying the subservient role played by the establishment media in propagating this narrative is this new article in The Los Angeles Times by Brian Bennett. Headlined

• "Al Qaeda's Yemen branch has aided Somalia militants, U.S. says,"

the article grants anonymity to "U.S. counter-terrorism officials" to do nothing more than echo the official administration line: that we now face "a widening alliance of terrorist groups."...

In December, 2009, U.S. cruise missile carrying cluster bombs were dropped in Yemen, killing 41 people, including 14 women and 21 children. Cables released by WikiLeaks subsequently revealed that the Obama administration perpetrated that attack, as well as a second air strike that same month (which targeted Awlaki). In May, 2010, the Obama administration launched another attack in that country, one that

• "killed the province's deputy governor, a respected local leader who Yemeni officials said had been trying to talk Qaeda members into giving up their fight,"
  

which was "at least the fourth such assault" in Yemen since December, 2009....

Those 2009 and 2010 attacks...are playing a very significant role in why there is a Terrorism problem in Yemen in the first place. As The Christian Science Monitor explained when reporting on the 2009 American cluster bomb attack in Yemen:

Just as high civilian casualties in US attacks on militants have fed extremism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the same phenomenon is now playing out in Yemen, says Yemen specialist Gregory Johnsen....

If you drop cluster bombs in a country and slaughter dozens of women and children with drones and then kill a popular governor, you're going to spawn pervasive amounts of anger and hostility towards the responsible foreign country and also embolden the message of extremists that they are under attack from the U.S and jihad is thus warranted: a shocking observation, I know -- but readers of the LA Times, or at least this article on the supposed emerging threat, would have no idea that the U.S. has even been doing that in Yemen. That the U.S. is creating the very Terrorism problem it claims to be combating is one of the most crucial points in discussions of American Terrorism policy -- it was one explicitly recognized even by a Rumsfeld-created Terrorism task force back in 2004 -- but it barely is heard in American political discourse....

American media reports such as the one appearing this weekend in the LA Times reflexively depict escalating American military attacks as a response to the growing Terrorist threat rather than as what they are: a leading cause of that threat. One might also take cognizance of the obvious connection between these escalating attacks under Obama and the

• plummeting of U.S. public standing in the Arab and Muslim world."...

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