5/9/14, "US Embassy officials killed two Yemeni civilians in thwarting abduction," AP via UK Telegraph
"Two Americans, reported to be a CIA officer and lieutenant colonel with the elite Joint Special Operations Command, were visiting a barber shop when the attempted abduction took place."
"Two officers at the US Embassy in Yemen shot and killed a pair of armed Yemeni civilians during an attempted abduction of the Americans last month, the State Department said on Friday.
The officers have left Yemen, Marie Harf, a spokeswoman for the State Department, said in a statement. No other details were provided.
Citing
unidentified US officials, The New York Times reported that the
Americans were a CIA officer and a lieutenant colonel with the elite
Joint Special Operations Command who were visiting a barber shop in an
upscale district in Yemen's capital.
.
.
Within
days of the shooting, both Americans left Yemen with the approval of
the Yemeni government, the newspaper reported. It said the shooting
occurred on April 24.
.
.
Earlier this
week, the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa closed temporarily because of attacks on
Westerners. A day before Tuesday's closure, gunmen opened fire on three
French security guards working with the European Union mission in the
Yemeni capital, killing one and wounding another.
The US has waged a heavy campaign of drone strikes in Yemen against the group al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. This month, the Yemeni government has been waging an offensive against the militant group, and violence around the country has been on an upswing.
On Friday, gunmen believed to be al-Qaida militants ambushed the motorcade of Yemen's defense minister in the Mahfad region, officials said. The assassination attempt failed.
Later in the day, a security checkpoint near the presidential palace in Sanaa came under attack, and at least two policemen died."
==============================
Significant Yemen drone attacks ordered by Obama in 2009 and 2010 aren't known to the public. Years of these attacks have made militants angrier and fanned flames of America-hatred:
.
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,
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
The US has waged a heavy campaign of drone strikes in Yemen against the group al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. This month, the Yemeni government has been waging an offensive against the militant group, and violence around the country has been on an upswing.
On Friday, gunmen believed to be al-Qaida militants ambushed the motorcade of Yemen's defense minister in the Mahfad region, officials said. The assassination attempt failed.
Later in the day, a security checkpoint near the presidential palace in Sanaa came under attack, and at least two policemen died."
==============================
Significant Yemen drone attacks ordered by Obama in 2009 and 2010 aren't known to the public. Years of these attacks have made militants angrier and fanned flames of America-hatred:
.
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,
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
- a new enemy was needed,
- Yemen and Somalia are the New War on Terror Battlegrounds.
- "Al Qaeda's Yemen branch has aided Somalia militants, U.S. says,"
- that paper uncritically headlined these scary developments.
In a sign of the expanding front, U.S. drone aircraft fired missiles at suspected militants in Yemen in May, and in Somalia in June. They were the first known U.S. military attacks in Yemen since 2002 and in Somalia since 2009.That claim is factually false, in a very significant way. 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,"
- to falsely and publicly claim sole responsibility.
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. Further bolstering that fact is the work of Noor Berham, who has spent three years systematically documenting the results of American drone attacks in Pakistan with on-the-scene photojournalism:
"It is incredibly dangerous what the US is trying to do in Yemen at the moment because it really fits into AQAP’s broader strategy, in which it says Yemen is not different from Iraq and Afghanistan," says Mr. Johnsen of Princeton University in New Jersey, who adds that AQAP can recruit militants from outside Yemen as well. "They are able to make the argument that Yemen is a legitimate front for jihad… They've been making that argument since 2007, but incidents like this are all sort of fodder for their argument."
Noor Behram says his painstaking work has uncovered an important -- and unreported -- truth about the US drone campaign in Pakistan's tribal region: that far more civilians are being injured or dying than the Americans and Pakistanis admit. . . .
"For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant," he said. "I don't go to count how many Taliban are killed. I go to count how many children, women, innocent people, are killed" . . .
According to Noor Behram, the strikes not only kill the innocent but injure untold numbers and radicalise the population. "There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can't find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.
"The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack. The Americans think it is working, but the damage they're doing is far greater."
Even when the drones hit the right compound, the force of the blast is such that neighbours' houses, often made of baked mud, are also demolished, crushing those inside, said Noor Behram. One of the photographs shows a tangle of debris he said were the
- remains of five houses blitzed together.
Minimum number of people killed by CIA drone attacks in Pakistan last year : 607American 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
Number of those who appeared on a U.S. list of most-wanted terrorists : 2
Independently, note this amazing passage from that LA Times article, regarding how these anonymous officials learned of what they are claiming concerning an AQAP/Shabab grand alliance:
The CIA gained other information when Somali authorities allowed them to interview Shabab militants imprisoned in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, U.S. officials said. The CIA asked about the militants' ability to launch attacks outside Somalia as well as the group's command structure.That claim presumably refers to the secret Mogadishu prison Scahill revealed, the one the CIA pays Somali agents to guard and at which they're constantly present. The notion that Somali authorities generously "allowed" the CIA to "interview" prisoners there mindlessly disseminates CIA propaganda and ignores the facts Scahill revealed: that this is effectively a U.S.-maintained-and-engineered prison. And, of course, there is no discussion of the legal and human rights repercussions of interrogating prisoners in secret facilities beyond the reach of human rights monitoring agencies, nor any discussion of the role such practices play in
- further spawning anti-American sentiment.
US
Embassy officers killed armed civilians in Yemen - See more at:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-officers-killed-armed-civilians-in-yemen-official/article1-1217689.aspx#sthash.zHrDsAhL.dpuf
US
Embassy officers killed armed civilians in Yemen - See more at:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-officers-killed-armed-civilians-in-yemen-official/article1-1217689.aspx#sthash.zHrDsAhL.dpuf
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