[Peace-discuss] Obama to escalate slaughter in Yemen

[C. G. Estabrook]

  {President Lyndon Johnson said shortly after he took office in 1963, 
commenting on the Kennedy brothers' Cuban policy, "We had been operating a 
damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.”  That's just one example from far too 
many. Here - under the obvious lying excuse of "combating terrorism" - the US is 
attempting to destroy the resistance to its control of the approaches to the 
energy-producing region.]

     Obama to escalate slaughter in Yemen
      28 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...

Bill Van Auken

http://www.kominform.eu/