(One in an occasional series regarding U.S. drone strikes and the nations under them)
Think of this post as a wedding present.
"Strikes on Qaeda base over two days kill 55, Yemen says; Assault believed to be bolstered by US drones" by Ahmed Al-Haj | Associated Press April 22, 2014
SANA, Yemen — Yemeni forces, reportedly backed by US drone strikes, hit Al Qaeda militants for a second straight day Monday in what Yemen officials said was an assault on a major base of the terror group hidden in the remote southern mountains. The government said 55 militants were killed so far.
The sprawling base was a rare instance of a permanent infrastructure set up by Al Qaeda’s branch in the country, Yemeni security officials said.
It's almost August, isn't it?
And is it not "Al-Saleh-Duh" in Yemen?
In this instance it appears to be a true people's revolution with the U.S changing faces while increasing its presence in a coastal country next to a vital shipping lane.
Built over the past months, it includes a training ground, storehouses for weapons and food, and vehicles used by the group to launch attacks, they said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release details to the press.
The assault appeared to be a significant escalation in the US and Yemeni campaign against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the terror group’s powerful branch in the southern Arabian nation.
The United States has been striking Al Qaeda positions in the country with drone strikes the past two years, trying to cripple the group after it was driven out of several southern cities it took over in 2011.
But the group has proven to be highly resilient, spreading around the country and working from mountain areas. In a show of the group’s boldness, a video recently posted on Islamic militant websites showed the group’s leader, Nasser al-Wahishi, meeting openly with a gathering of dozens of militants in the southern province of Abyan.
The base is in a remote mountain valley called Wadi al-Khayala in the rugged Mahfad region at the border between Abyan and the neighboring provinces of Shabwa and al-Bayda.
In Washington, a Pentagon spokesman said he could not comment on any specific actions. ‘‘But as you know, we have a very strong and collaborative relationship with the Yemeni government. We work closely together with them on various initiatives in the counterterrorism realm,’’ Army Colonel Steve Warren said.
A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment.
In a separate development Monday, a federal appeals court in New York said the US government must publicly disclose in redacted form secret papers describing its legal justification for using drones to kill citizens suspected of terrorism overseas, because President Obama and senior government officials have commented on the subject.
That will be part of this continuing series at some further point in time.
The Second US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a Freedom of Information Act case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and two reporters for The New York Times. In 2011, they sought documents in which Department of Justice lawyers had discussed the highly classified ‘‘targeted-killing’’ program.
The requests came after a September 2011 drone strike in Yemen killed Anwar Al-Awlaki, an Al Qaeda leader who had been born in the United States, and another US citizen, Samir Khan, and after an October 2011 strike killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, the former leader’s teenage son and also a US citizen.
See: AmeriKan Missiles Keep Things All in the Family in Yemen
Some legal scholars and human rights activists complained it was illegal for the United States to kill American citizens away from the battlefield without a trial. The Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In the latest antiterrorism operation in Yemen, the first strikes came Sunday in an attack on training grounds for the group. Yemeni officials and tribal leaders said more strikes, believed to include US drone hits, came early Monday. Another airstrike Saturday in al-Bayda killed at least nine militants.
The Interior Ministry said Monday that the strikes killed at least 55 militants, including three prominent figures. It identified the three as Mohammed Salem Abed Rabbo al-Mashibi, Fawaz Hussein al-Mahrak, and Saleh Said Mahrak.
It said identification of the dead was continuing and non-Yemeni Arab fighters were among those killed. It said the strikes hit in Wadi al-Khayala and two other locations, Lodiya and Ramtha. Tribal leaders in the area said those are locations at either end of the valley.
Yemen’s Supreme Security Committee, which includes the president, the defense and interior ministers, and the head of intelligence, said Sunday the strikes targeted an important training camp that housed leading figures of Al Qaeda.
One security official said the infrastructure for the base has been destroyed.
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"Terror takes a hit in Yemen" by Daniel Benjamin | April 25, 2014
IT HAS become fashionable to say that the fight against Al Qaeda is again going badly. Despite gains made in removing terrorist chieftains in Pakistan, Syria has become a magnet for jihadists, and that failing state will bedevil the West for years to come. Repression of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is also recreating — and even turbo-charging — the kind of conditions that produced an earlier generation of extremist killers.
I don’t disagree. Syria is en route to being the new problem from hell: a land of atrocities and terrorists, which is attracting more militants from around the Muslim world than Iraq and Afghanistan did together. When an Egyptian court convicts 529 supporters of ousted Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi to death in one murder case, it is hard to be optimistic about the long-term tranquility of millions of Brotherhood members and followers.
Transfixing though those messes may be, it is also important to recognize the success stories — even if they are incomplete — because we need an accurate overall threat picture and we need to learn what works. Yemen, as demonstrated by the counterterrorism strikes that killed more than 50 militants earlier in the week, is a little-reported success story.
In 2009, cooperation between Washington and Sana’a was at a low point because a senior US official had crowed about a targeted killing that the regime of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh wanted to go unremarked. In the years that followed, the Yemeni-based Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula grew to be a major concern. It became the first Al Qaeda franchise — as distinct from the core group in Afghanistan/Pakistan — to threaten the United States at home.
So much became clear in December of 2009, when an ambitious plot was launched to destroy the US embassy in Sana’a and Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate a bomb sewn into his underwear by AQAP on a Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit.
Don't crap your pants about that.
President Saleh resumed working with the United States. A world-class schemer, he limited cooperation to try to extract greater support for his pet projects from Washington. Once the country was enveloped by Arab Spring demonstrations – and Saleh was sidelined by a nearly fatal bomb blast – AQAP took advantage of the disarray to take hold of large swaths of territory throughout Yemen.
As Saleh drew back from politics, the United States pressed for deeper engagement to train and equip Yemeni counterterrorism forces. It was pleasantly surprised to find in Vice President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, who replaced Saleh, a man dedicated to wiping out the terrorists who threatened his county.
AQAP’s territorial gains were rolled back, and the cooperation between the United States and Yemen has deepened. The recent strikes show that joint effort is paying off. According to press reports, the action included a combination of US air power and Yemeni field operations. Yemen is a country where much territory is ungoverned, and the Yemeni piece of this involved a deployment into the dangerous Shabwa Governate.
That already represents progress over what was possible in the very recent past. Yemen is a country where military appointments are often made on the basis of tribal and clan connections, so training is challenging. If these joint operations are found to have taken off the battlefield either AQAP leader Naser al-Wuhayshi or the master bomb maker, Ibrahim al-Asiri, who reportedly created the underwear bomb and even more diabolical devices, this will have been a big leap forward.
It will also be a testament to the virtue of sticking with the program, however difficult. American engagement in Yemen began more than four years ago, and it will take many years until the country can comprehensively deal with the threats inside its borders. The United States has not always demonstrated strategic patience in areas where this kind of capacity-building is required. But there is no other way to help our partners get where they want to go. Ultimately, it must be our goal to have others deal with the dangers in their neighborhood, because if large-scale US intervention is required, we risk large-scale blowback.
Another key lesson is that the US must demonstrate to its partners that it cares about more than its own security. Yemen is a country with endless woes. It has the largest and fastest-growing population on the Arabian Peninsula, the poorest citizenry in the Arab world, a water table near exhaustion, and a dying hydrocarbon industry that brings in scant profits.
Since President Hadi took power, the United States has spent $250 million on humanitarian efforts, $100 million on economic development, and $40 million in support of the ambitious political transition that he is leading.
Obama has $400 million for Yemen but only $5 million for American families (while wanting $2 Billion for illegal immigrant kids who were encouraged to come here to create a contrived crisis and force an immigration bill through?).
That total is more than the US has spent on support for Yemeni counterterrorism efforts, and one crucial reason why the Yemenis are also sticking with a program that benefits everyone — except the terrorists.
Daniel Benjamin served as ambassador-at-large and coordinator for counterterrorism at the State Department from 2009 to 2012. He is now director of Dartmouth’s John Sloan Dickey Center for International Understanding.
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A government mouthpiece -- literally.
For some reason this article never made my printed paper:
"US officers killed armed civilians in Yemeni capital" by Eric Schmitt | New York Times May 10, 2014
WASHINGTON — A US Special Operations commando and a CIA officer in Yemen shot and killed two armed Yemeni civilians who tried to kidnap them while the Americans were in a barber shop in the country’s capital two weeks ago, US officials said Friday.
Do you think they didn't put it in print because this piece of propaganda is so ridiculous?
The two Americans were whisked out of the volatile Middle East nation within a few days of the shooting, with the blessing of the Yemeni government, two senior US officials said.
To keep them from being charged and tried with crimes in Yemen!
News of the shootings comes at a perilous moment for the government of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi, whose collaboration with US drone strikes against suspected Al Qaeda militants is a subject of seething resentment here.
Because those drones strikes, far from killing the ghostly Al-CIA-Duhs, is killing regular people who are unhappy with their new U.S.-backed puppet and flattening their villages.
Yemenis believe, with some evidence, that the drone strikes often kill nearby civilians as well as their targets, so any indication that Hadi’s government helped conceal the killing of Yemenis by US commandos could be explosive.
Already the barbershop story is looking like complete shit, and what we have here is AmeriKan agents murdering two innocent Yemenis.
No wonder this article never appeared in print.
Violence in the country is increasing, and on Friday, militants attacked the presidential palace, apparently in retaliation for the government’s roughly 10-day offensive against Al Qaeda strongholds.
CIA-Duh's way of keeping pressure on Hadi.
Exactly what the two Americans were doing at the time of the shooting is unclear.
Alert, alert: cover up in progress.
Some US officials said they were merely getting a haircut in a barber shop on Hadda Street in Sana, in an upscale district frequently visited by foreigners, downplaying any suggestions that they were engaged in a clandestine operation.
Late Friday, the Pentagon and CIA declined to comment on the April 24 shooting, and referred all questions to the State Department.
“We can confirm that, last month, two US Embassy officers in Yemen fired their weapons after being confronted by armed individuals in an attempted kidnapping at a small commercial business in Sanaa,” a State Department spokeswoman, Marie Harf, said in an e-mail response to questions from The New York Times. “Two of the armed individuals were killed. The Embassy officers are no longer in Yemen.”
A spokesman for the Yemeni Embassy in Washington, Mohammed Albasha, said he was aware of the shooting but had no information about any US role in the matter or his government’s response to that role.
The killings were reported in the Yemeni news media in the days after the shooting but attributed to unknown gunmen.
I always knew they were CIA!
Administration officials refused to identify the Americans or their jobs in Yemen, where the Pentagon and the CIA have been training Yemeni security forces in addition to carrying out the drone strikes.
But a senior US official said one individual involved in the shooting was a lieutenant colonel with the elite Joint Special Operations Command and the other was a CIA officer.
Doesn't it all just stink?
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This next item, oddly, did make my printed version:
"Yemeni minister survives ambush" Associated Press May 10, 2014
SANA, Yemen — Yemen’s defense minister escaped an assassination attempt Friday when militants ambushed his motorcade as he was visiting strategic areas in the south and a sprawling Al Qaeda base recaptured by the army security, and military officials said.
How did they know he was coming?
Officials said Mohammed Nasser Ahmed was on his way to check on forces in the Mahfad region when gunmen opened fire on the convoy.
The attack came as government forces pushed back militants in fighting atop a hill overlooking the region’s main road, they added. Troops killed three militants and captured two.
The officials also said troops in an army post in Meyfaa town in Shabwa province killed an Al Qaeda militant Friday as he was attempting a suicide attack in an explosive-laden car.
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"Yemen suicide bomber kills 11 officers" Associated Press May 12, 2014
SANA, Yemen — A suicide bomber detonated his explosives-laden car outside a police station in the country’s south on Sunday, killing 11 police officers and wounding 15, the interior ministry said.
Police officials said the attack took place in Mukalla, the capital of Hadramawt province. The bomber, believed to be an Al Qaeda militant, drove his car close to the station and argued with officers to draw in more victims before detonating the explosives, they said. The blast collapsed part of the building while police officers were having lunch inside, killing the civilian cook, they added.
So to where was this CIA-Duh quickly rushed?
A senior police officer said the attack was believed to be retaliation for the big losses sustained by Al Qaeda militants over the past two weeks, after government forces struck them in the southern region of Mahfad and recaptured a sprawling Qaeda base between Shabwa and Abyan provinces.
We have heard this yo-yo story so often over the last decade it has become boring. Come up with another trick, pos war paper.
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Back to the basics:
"US drone strike in Yemen kills 6 Al Qaeda militants" by Ahmed Al-Haj | Associated Press May 13, 2014
SANA, Yemen — A suspected US drone strike in southern Yemen killed six Al Qaeda militants on Monday, military and security officials said.
The drone hit a car with Al Qaeda fighters in Marib province, in the Husoun al-Jalal area in Abieda Valley, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations. They said authorities were checking for the identities of the slain militants.
Last year and in early January, drone strikes killed more than 12 suspected Qaeda militants in the same area.
The United States considers Yemen’s branch of Al Qaeda to be the most dangerous in the world. The group overran large swaths of territory in southern Yemen in 2011, but the military has pushed back and over the past few weeks, the army and security forces have stepped up their offensive.
The United States, which trains Yemen’s counterterrorism forces, has been waging a heavy campaign of drone strikes in the impoverished country against suspected Al Qaeda targets, launching more than 100 such strikes since 2002, according to the nonpartisan public policy institute New America Foundation.
However, civilian casualties in the drone strikes have sparked anger in the country and among human rights groups.
Yemen’s Interior Ministry corrected late Sunday an earlier press release saying three suspected Al Qaeda militants were killed in clashes with security forces near the presidential palace in the capital, Sana, during the day. The new statement said the three victims were civilians who died in the crossfire.
What that tells you is in any report we get the first thing is all terrorists dead. Then you find out later -- maybe -- that it was in fact all innocent people killed.
And you wonder why the world hates us, Amurkn, on this Fourth of July!
Meanwhile, Yemen’s Defense Ministry said two Al Qaeda militants were killed and one was wounded in Sunday’s clashes with government troops in Hadramawt and Shabwa provinces.
The statement identified the slain militants as Abu Mohammed al-Hadrami, who was killed in Hadramawt, and Yahia Baruwais, killed in Shabwa. It said Al Qaeda fighter Said Bawazeer, also known as Abu Fatima, was wounded in Hadramawt.
Outside Yemen, the country’s Al Qaeda branch is blamed for a number of unsuccessful bomb plots aimed at Americans, including an attempt to bring down a US-bound airliner with explosives hidden in the bomber’s underwear, and a second plot to send mail bombs hidden in toner cartridges on planes headed to the United States.
What a joke both of those events were!
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"Militants, army clash in Yemen streets" Associated Press May 15, 2014
SANAA, Yemen — Fierce fighting between soldiers and Al Qaeda militants in southern Yemen killed at least 42 people Wednesday, as families fled past destroyed homes, burning cars, and streets littered with corpses, witnesses and officials said.
The fighting in the town of Azzan in Shabwa province comes amid an ongoing army offensive against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen’s local branch of the terror group that the United States considers the world’s most dangerous.
Al Qaeda militants tried to retake the town in a dawn attack as government warplanes and naval forces bombed militants hiding in homes, officials said. Soldiers battled militants for hours in street clashes.
Major General Ahmed Seif al-Yafie said that the fighting killed at least 30 Al Qaeda militants, including six local leaders of the terrorist group.
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"Military retakes terror stronghold
SANA — Yemen’s military said Saturday it had regained control of an Al Qaeda stronghold in the south as part of an ongoing offensive. The military said the fighting that saw it take over the town of Azzan in Shabwa province killed seven militants and two soldiers."
"Yemen says it killed Al Qaeda fighter" Associated Press May 26, 2014
SANA, Yemen — Yemen said Sunday that it killed one of the country’s most wanted Al Qaeda militants, hours after military officials said antiterrorism units supported by army troops and US drones launched an attack against hideouts of the group in the mountainous Arhab region north of Sana, leaving five militants and six soldiers killed.
The statement by the defense ministry did not provide details on where or when Saleh al-Tays was killed. His name is on the country’s list of 25 most wanted terrorists issued last year.
The military has targeted Tays with operations and airstrikes before. He had been suspected to have been killed before in targeted attacks, including in US drone strikes in 2013, 2009, and 2008.
Translation: the propaganda pre$$ is playing you with government garbage that is disrespectful. They keep yanking these guys in and out of the grave so fast the head begins to spin, and they just throw any name out there, some of them downright in-your-face laughable. At least propagandists prove they also have a sense of humor.
The statement said Tays was involved in the assassination of a Yemeni politician this year, and in killing foreign diplomats and Yemeni civilians. It did not give details.
In Tunisia on Sunday, authorities arrested three suspected Islamist militants near the Libyan border and said they uncovered a terror plot targeting industrial and tourist sites and politicians.
The three were Tunisians believed to have been living recently in Libya with backing by armed groups that train Tunisians in Libyan camps, said Interior Ministry spokesman Mohamed Ali Aroui.
The government has blamed a string of political assassinations and terrorist attacks over the last two years on the radical Islamist Ansar al-Shariah group, also suspected in an attack by a mob in 2012 against the US embassy and a nearby American school.
Also Sunday, the European Union Naval Force and the African Union condemned an attack the government said involved two Somali suicide bombers in the tiny East African nation of Djibouti that is reported to have killed three people.
Somalia another nation under drone attack.
The attack happened Saturday night when a blast detonated in a busy restaurant.
Al-CIA-Bab the culprit, no doubt, and Somalia and Yemen bookend the entrance to the Red Sea and Suez Canal very nicely, don't they?!
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We keep killing them, and yet like Syria and Somalia, they are coming home to perform acts of terror despite the hodgepodge of government agency monitoring and NSA surveillance.
"Yemen emigre plotted to kill returning troops, FBI says" Associated Press June 03, 2014
ROCHESTER, N.Y. — A New York business owner from Yemen plotted vengeance attacks against members of the US military for American actions overseas and Shi’ite Muslims over the civil war in Syria, according to federal officials.
That's a new one! Business owner, huh?
Authorities said in court papers that Mufid Elfgeeh, 30, of Rochester, bought two handguns and two silencers as part of a plan to kill members of the US armed forces returning from war, as well as Shi’ites in the Rochester area.
Thus giving a lift to the gun-grabbers!
Elfgeeh was arrested Saturday and faces two counts of receiving and possessing an unregistered firearm silencer. No plea was entered during a court appearance Monday. Public defender Mark Hosken, who was appointed to handle the case, was not available for comment.
The investigation included linking Elfgeeh’s home computer to tweets from alias Twitter accounts expressing support for Al Qaeda, violent holy war, and Sunni insurgent groups in Syria, according to court papers.
So how much was the CIA paying this guy?
The FBI gave an informant a Walther PPK .32-caliber handgun and a Glock 26, 9 mm handgun, both with functional silencers affixed to the barrels, two boxes of .32-caliber ammunition, and two boxes of 9-millimeter ammunition, according to the affidavit.
Oh, it is ANOTHER FBI FRAME JOB!
Elfgeeh, a naturalized US citizen who operates Halal Mojo and Food Mart in Rochester, paid the informant $1,050 in the transaction completed Saturday afternoon and was immediately arrested for possession of the silencers not registered in his name.
US Attorney William Hochul said Monday Elfgeeh faces 10 years in prison for each silencer and the possibility of a $250,000 fine.
Elfgeeh frequently used Twitter to tweet and retweet messages expressing support for various terrorist groups and holy war, seeking donations to assist fighters in Syria, and praising Al Qaeda as ‘‘our only savior,’’ authorities said.
I condemn Al-CIA-Duh as well as all this rank rot propaganda.
Readers, I have been here eight years, six on this side of my blogs, and this stuff has gotten so old it is sickening. Once the curtain is down and the machine is naked, this just isn't getting it done anymore. Government propaganda passed along as series news sucks.
According to an FBI affidavit, a government informant taped a December conversation with Elfgeeh in which he stated: ‘‘I’m thinking about doing something here to be honest with you. I’m thinking about just go buy a big automatic gun from off the street or something and a lot of bullets and just put on a vest or whatever and just go around and start shooting.’’
Why bother going to that trouble? Just go over to the NSA and ask for the day they scooped up stuff.
Authorities said Elfgeeh changed his plans in March to killing returning soldiers, and he said in a taped conversation with an informant that he planned to act alone: ‘‘It could be right now in the daytime, and I could be . . . like this guy here or something . . . I could just go back and wait for him to when he leave to go to his garage, and just walk up slowly, boom, boom, boom, inside his garage.’’
Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!
Lone gunman telegraphing his shot! Can you really believe what you see and hear coming from this government and the ma$$ media?
When an informant asked him whether he was going to release a video message of his attacks, Elfgeeh responded, ‘‘Once we do five or ten already, 15, something like that . . . then we gonna say something,’’ according to the affidavit.
Even though Elfgeeh used the word ‘‘we,’’ most of his comments indicated he intended to act alone and not immediately.
The FBI said it had been investigating Elfgeeh since early last year.
After his appearance Monday before a federal magistrate, Elfgeeh was sent to Monroe County Jail.
A bail hearing has been scheduled for June 16.
Never saw another word in my printed or web version Globes, but the mental impression has been achieved, right?
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Ending where we began yet again:
"Militants killed in drone airstrike
SANA — A suspected US drone in Yemen’s south targeted a car carrying Al Qaeda militants Saturday, killing all five passengers, Yemeni security officials said. One of those killed in the attack was a suspected Al Qaeda leader named Musaad al-Habashi, officials said (AP)."
Well, they always say that and then later it is found to be innocent civilians.
Btw, if they are tracking and targeting these guys in cars don't give us the "terrorists have returned home and we can't find them before the false flag" garbage being telegraphed for this Fourth.
Also see: The Drone Wars: Pakistan
I doubt they will be blamed this time; however, a Malaysina airliner may resurface. Remember the early story that terrorists had hijacked it and flown it to Pakistan?
