Saturday, 30 January 2010
Monday, 25 January 2010
Thursday, 21 January 2010
Wednesday, 20 January 2010
The Yemen Hidden Agenda: A Strategic Oil Transit Chokepoint
The Yemen Hidden Agenda: Behind the Al-Qaeda Scenarios, A Strategic Oil Transit Chokepoint
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, January 5, 2010
On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was "suspected" of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.
For some months the world has seen a steady escalation of US military involvement in Yemen, a dismally poor land adjacent to Saudi Arabia on its north, the Red Sea on its west, the Gulf of Aden on its south, opening to the Arabian Sea, overlooking another desolate land that has been in the headlines of late, Somalia. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon and US intelligence are moving to militarize a strategic chokepoint for the world’s oil flows, Bab el-Mandab, and using the Somalia piracy incident, together with claims of a new Al Qaeda threat arising from Yemen, to militarize one of the world’s most important oil transport routes. In addition, undeveloped petroleum reserves in the territory between Yemen and Saudi Arabia are reportedly among the world’s largest.
The 23-year-old Nigerian man charged with the failed bomb attempt, Abdulmutallab, reportedly has been talking, claiming he was sent on his mission by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. This has conveniently turned the world’s attention on Yemen as a new center of the alleged Al Qaeda terror organization.
Notably, Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran who advised President Obama on the policy leading to the Afghan troop surge, wrote in his blog of the alleged ties of the Detroit bomber to Yemen, "The attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day underscores the growing ambition of Al Qaeda's Yemen franchise, which has grown from a largely Yemeni agenda to become a player in the global Islamic jihad in the last year... The weak Yemeni government of President Ali Abdallah Salih, which has never fully controlled the country and now faces a host of growing problems, will need significant American support to defeat AQAP."[1].
Some basic Yemen geopolitics
Before we can say much about the latest incident, it is useful to look more closely at the Yemen situation. Here several things stand out as peculiar when stacked against Washington’s claims about a resurgent Al Qaeda organization in the Arabian Peninsula.
In early 2009 the chess pieces on the Yemeni board began to move. Tariq al-Fadhli, a former jihadist leader originally from South Yemen, broke a 15 year alliance with the Yemeni government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and announced he was joining the broad-based opposition coalition known as the Southern Movement (SM). Al-Fadhli had been a member of the Mujahideen movement in Afghanistan in the late 1980’s. His break with the government was reported in Arab and Yemeni media in April 2009. Al-Fadhli’s break with the Yemen dictatorship gave new power to the Southern Movement (SM). He has since become a leading figure in the alliance.
Yemen itself is a synthetic amalgam created after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, when the southern Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) lost its main foreign sponsor. Unification of the northern Yemen Arab Republic and the southern PDRY state led to a short-lived optimism that ended in a brief civil war in 1994, as southern army factions organized a revolt against what they saw as the corrupt crony state rule of northern President Ali Abdullah Saleh. President Saleh has held a one-man rule since 1978, first as President of North Yemen (the Yemen Arab Republic) and since 1990 as President of the unified new Yemen. The southern army revolt failed as Saleh enlisted al-Fadhli and other Yemeni Salafists, followers of a conservative interpretation of Islam, and jihadists to fight the formerly Marxist forces of the Yemen Socialist Party in the south.
Before 1990, Washington and the Saudi Kingdom backed and supported Saleh and his policy of Islamization as a bid to contain the communist south.[2] Since then Saleh has relied on a strong Salafist-jihadi movement to retain a one-man dictatorial rule. The break with Saleh by al-Fadhli and his joining the southern opposition group with his former socialist foes marked a major setback for Saleh.
Soon after al-Fadhli joined the Southern Movement coalition, on April 28, 2009 protests in the southern Yemeni provinces of Lahj, Dalea and Hadramout intensified. There were demonstrations by tens of thousands of dismissed military personnel and civil servants demanding better pay and benefits, demonstrations that had been taking place in growing numbers since 2006. The April demonstrations included for the first time a public appearance by al-Fadhli. His appearance served to change a long moribund southern socialist movement into a broader nationalist campaign. It also galvanized President Saleh, who then called on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council states for help, warning that the entire Arabian Peninsula would suffer the consequences.
Complicating the picture in what some call a failed state, in the north Saleh faces an al-Houthi Zaydi Shi’ite rebellion. On September 11, 2009, in an Al-Jazeera TV interview, Saleh accused Iraq’s Shi’ite opposition leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, and also Iran, of backing the north Yemen Shi’ite Houthist rebels in an Al-Jazeera TV interview. Yemen’s Saleh declared, "We cannot accuse the Iranian official side, but the Iranians are contacting us, saying that they are prepared for a mediation. This means that the Iranians have contacts with them [the Houthists], given that they want to mediate between the Yemeni government and them. Also, Muqtada al-Sadr in al-Najaf in Iraq is asking that he be accepted as a mediator. This means they have a link."[3]
Yemen authorities claim they have seized caches of weapons made in Iran, while the Houthists claim to have captured Yemeni equipment with Saudi Arabian markings, accusing Sana’a (the capital of Yemen and site of the US Embassy) of acting as a Saudi proxy. Iran has rejected claims that Iranian weapons were found in north Yemen, calling claims of support to the rebels as baseless. [4]
What about Al Qaeda?
The picture that emerges is one of a desperate US-backed dictator, Yemen’s President Saleh, increasingly losing control after two decades as despotic ruler of the unified Yemen. Economic conditions in the country took a drastic downward slide in 2008 when world oil prices collapsed. Some 70% of the state revenues derive from Yemen’s oil sales. The central government of Saleh sits in former North Yemen in Sana’a, while the oil is in former South Yemen. Yet Saleh controls the oil revenue flows. Lack of oil revenue has made Saleh’s usual option of buying off opposition groups all but impossible.
Into this chaotic domestic picture comes the January 2009 announcement, prominently featured in select Internet websites, that Al Qaeda, the alleged global terrorist organization created by the late CIA-trained Saudi, Osama bin Laden, has opened a major new branch in Yemen for both Yemen and Saudi operations.
Al Qaeda in Yemen released a statement through online jihadist forums Jan. 20, 2009 from the group’s leader Nasir al-Wahayshi, announcing formation of a single al Qaeda group for the Arabian Peninsula under his command. According to al-Wahayshi, the new group, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, would consist of his former Al Qaeda in Yemen, as well as members of the defunct Saudi Al Qaeda group. The press release claimed, interestingly enough, that a Saudi national, a former Guantanamo detainee (Number 372), Abu-Sayyaf al-Shihri, would serve as al-Wahayshi’s deputy.
Days later an online video from al-Wahayshi appeared under the alarming title, "We Start from Here and We Will Meet at al-Aqsa." Al-Aqsa refers to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that Jews know as Temple Mount, the site of the destroyed Temple of Solomon, which Muslims call Al Haram Al Sharif. The video threatens Muslim leaders -- including Yemeni’s President Saleh, the Saudi royal family, and Egyptian President Mubarak -- and promises to take the jihad from Yemen to Israel to "liberate" Muslim holy sites and Gaza, something that would likely detonate World War III if anyone were mad enough to do it.
Also in that video, in addition to former Guantanamo inmate al-Shihri, is a statement from Abu-al-Harith Muhammad al-Awfi, identified as a field commander in the video, and allegedly former Guantanamo detainee 333. As it is well-established that torture methods are worthless to obtain truthful confessions, some have speculated that the real goal of CIA and Pentagon interrogators at Guantanamo prison since September 2001, has been to use brutal techniques to train or recruit sleeper terrorists who can be activated on command by US intelligence, a charge difficult to prove or disprove. The presence of two such high-ranking Guantanamo graduates in the new Yemen-based Al Qaeda is certainly ground for questioning.
Al Qaeda in Yemen is apparently anathema to al-Fadhli and the enlarged mass-based Southern Movement. In an interview, al-Fadhli declared, "I have strong relations with all of the jihadists in the north and the south and everywhere, but not with al-Qaeda."[5] That has not hindered Saleh from claiming the Southern Movement and al Qaeda are one and the same, a convenient way to insure backing from Washington.
According to US intelligence reports, there are a grand total of perhaps 200 Al Qaeda members in southern Yemen. [6]
Al-Fadhli gave an interview distancing himself from al Qaeda in May 2009, declaring, "We [in South Yemen] have been invaded 15 years ago and we are under a vicious occupation. So we are busy with our cause and we do not look at any other cause in the world. We want our independence and to put an end to this occupation."[7] Conveniently, the same day, Al Qaeda made a large profile declaring its support for southern Yemen’s cause.
On May 14, in an audiotape released on the internet, al-Wahayshi, leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, expressed sympathy with the people of the southern provinces and their attempt to defend themselves against their "oppression," declaring, "What is happening in Lahaj, Dhali, Abyan and Hadramaut and the other southern provinces cannot be approved. We have to support and help [the southerners]." He promised retaliation: "The oppression against you will not pass without punishment... the killing of Muslims in the streets is an unjustified major crime." [8]
The curious emergence of a tiny but well-publicized al Qaeda in southern Yemen amid what observers call a broad-based popular-based Southern Movement front that eschews the radical global agenda of al Qaeda, serves to give the Pentagon a kind of casus belli to escalate US military operations in the strategic region.
Indeed, after declaring that the Yemen internal strife was Yemen’s own affair, President Obama ordered air strikes in Yemen. The Pentagon claimed its attacks on December 17 and 24 killed three key al Qaeda leaders but no evidence has yet proven this. Now the Christmas Day Detroit bomber drama gives new life to Washington’s "War on Terror" campaign in Yemen. Obama has now offered military assistance to the Saleh Yemen government.
Somali Pirates escalate as if on cue
As if on cue, at the same time CNN headlines broadcast new terror threats from Yemen, the long-running Somalia pirate attacks on commercial shipping in the same Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea across from southern Yemen escalated dramatically after having been reduced by multinational ship patrols.
On December 29, Moscow’s RAI Novosti reported that Somali pirates seized a Greek cargo vessel in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia's coast. Earlier the same day a British-flagged chemical tanker and its 26 crew were also seized in the Gulf of Aden. In a sign of sophisticated skills in using western media, pirate commander Mohamed Shakir told the British newspaper The Times by phone, "We have hijacked a ship with [a] British flag in the Gulf of Aden late yesterday." The US intelligence brief, Stratfor, reports that The Times, owned by neo-conservative financial backer, Rupert Murdoch, is sometimes used by Israeli intelligence to plant useful stories.
The two latest events brought a record number of attacks and hijackings for 2009. As of December 22, attacks by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the east coast of Somalia numbered 174, with 35 vessels hijacked and 587 crew taken hostage so far in 2009, almost all successful pirate activity, according to the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center. The open question is, who is providing the Somali "pirates" with arms and logistics sufficient to elude international patrols from numerous nations?
Notably, on January 3, President Saleh got a phone call from Somali president Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed in which he briefed president Saleh on latest developments in Somalia. Sheikh Sharif, whose own base in Mogadishu is so weak he is sometimes referred to as President of Mogadishu Airport, told Saleh he would share information with Saleh about any terror activities that might be launched from Somali territories targeting stability and security of Yemen and the region.
The Oil chokepoint and other oily affairs
The strategic significance of the region between Yemen and Somalia becomes the point of geopolitical interest. It is the site of Bab el-Mandab, one of what the US Government lists as seven strategic world oil shipping chokepoints. The US Government Energy Information Agency states that "closure of the Bab el-Mandab could keep tankers from the Persian Gulf from reaching the Suez Canal/Sumed pipeline complex, diverting them around the southern tip of Africa. The Strait of Bab el-Mandab is a chokepoint between the horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean." [9]
Bab el-Mandab, between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Oil and other exports from the Persian Gulf must pass through Bab el-Mandab before entering the Suez Canal. In 2006, the Energy Department in Washington reported that an estimated 3.3 million barrels a day of oil flowed through this narrow waterway to Europe, the United States, and Asia. Most oil, or some 2.1 million barrels a day, goes north through the Bab el-Mandab to the Suez/Sumed complex into the Mediterranean.
An excuse for a US or NATO militarization of the waters around Bab el-Mandab would give Washington another major link in its pursuit of control of the seven most critical oil chokepoints around the world, a major part of any future US strategy aimed at denying oil flows to China, the EU or any region or country that opposes US policy. Given that significant flows of Saudi oil pass through Bab el-Mandab, a US military control there would serve to deter the Saudi Kingdom from becoming serious about transacting future oil sales with China or others no longer in dollars, as was recently reported by UK Independent journalist Robert Fisk.
It would also be in a position to threaten China’s oil transport from Port Sudan on the Red Sea just north of Bab el-Mandab, a major lifeline in China’s national energy needs.
In addition to its geopolitical position as a major global oil transit chokepoint, Yemen is reported to hold some of the world’s greatest untapped oil reserves. Yemen’s Masila Basin and Shabwa Basin are reported by international oil companies to contain "world class discoveries."[10] France’s Total and several smaller international oil companies are engaged in developing Yemen’s oil production. Some fifteen years ago I was told in a private meeting with a well-informed Washington insider that Yemen contained "enough undeveloped oil to fill the oil demand of the entire world for the next fifty years."
by F. William Engdahl
Global Research, January 5, 2010
On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was "suspected" of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.
For some months the world has seen a steady escalation of US military involvement in Yemen, a dismally poor land adjacent to Saudi Arabia on its north, the Red Sea on its west, the Gulf of Aden on its south, opening to the Arabian Sea, overlooking another desolate land that has been in the headlines of late, Somalia. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon and US intelligence are moving to militarize a strategic chokepoint for the world’s oil flows, Bab el-Mandab, and using the Somalia piracy incident, together with claims of a new Al Qaeda threat arising from Yemen, to militarize one of the world’s most important oil transport routes. In addition, undeveloped petroleum reserves in the territory between Yemen and Saudi Arabia are reportedly among the world’s largest.
The 23-year-old Nigerian man charged with the failed bomb attempt, Abdulmutallab, reportedly has been talking, claiming he was sent on his mission by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. This has conveniently turned the world’s attention on Yemen as a new center of the alleged Al Qaeda terror organization.
Notably, Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran who advised President Obama on the policy leading to the Afghan troop surge, wrote in his blog of the alleged ties of the Detroit bomber to Yemen, "The attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day underscores the growing ambition of Al Qaeda's Yemen franchise, which has grown from a largely Yemeni agenda to become a player in the global Islamic jihad in the last year... The weak Yemeni government of President Ali Abdallah Salih, which has never fully controlled the country and now faces a host of growing problems, will need significant American support to defeat AQAP."[1].
Some basic Yemen geopolitics
Before we can say much about the latest incident, it is useful to look more closely at the Yemen situation. Here several things stand out as peculiar when stacked against Washington’s claims about a resurgent Al Qaeda organization in the Arabian Peninsula.
In early 2009 the chess pieces on the Yemeni board began to move. Tariq al-Fadhli, a former jihadist leader originally from South Yemen, broke a 15 year alliance with the Yemeni government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and announced he was joining the broad-based opposition coalition known as the Southern Movement (SM). Al-Fadhli had been a member of the Mujahideen movement in Afghanistan in the late 1980’s. His break with the government was reported in Arab and Yemeni media in April 2009. Al-Fadhli’s break with the Yemen dictatorship gave new power to the Southern Movement (SM). He has since become a leading figure in the alliance.
Yemen itself is a synthetic amalgam created after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, when the southern Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) lost its main foreign sponsor. Unification of the northern Yemen Arab Republic and the southern PDRY state led to a short-lived optimism that ended in a brief civil war in 1994, as southern army factions organized a revolt against what they saw as the corrupt crony state rule of northern President Ali Abdullah Saleh. President Saleh has held a one-man rule since 1978, first as President of North Yemen (the Yemen Arab Republic) and since 1990 as President of the unified new Yemen. The southern army revolt failed as Saleh enlisted al-Fadhli and other Yemeni Salafists, followers of a conservative interpretation of Islam, and jihadists to fight the formerly Marxist forces of the Yemen Socialist Party in the south.
Before 1990, Washington and the Saudi Kingdom backed and supported Saleh and his policy of Islamization as a bid to contain the communist south.[2] Since then Saleh has relied on a strong Salafist-jihadi movement to retain a one-man dictatorial rule. The break with Saleh by al-Fadhli and his joining the southern opposition group with his former socialist foes marked a major setback for Saleh.
Soon after al-Fadhli joined the Southern Movement coalition, on April 28, 2009 protests in the southern Yemeni provinces of Lahj, Dalea and Hadramout intensified. There were demonstrations by tens of thousands of dismissed military personnel and civil servants demanding better pay and benefits, demonstrations that had been taking place in growing numbers since 2006. The April demonstrations included for the first time a public appearance by al-Fadhli. His appearance served to change a long moribund southern socialist movement into a broader nationalist campaign. It also galvanized President Saleh, who then called on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council states for help, warning that the entire Arabian Peninsula would suffer the consequences.
Complicating the picture in what some call a failed state, in the north Saleh faces an al-Houthi Zaydi Shi’ite rebellion. On September 11, 2009, in an Al-Jazeera TV interview, Saleh accused Iraq’s Shi’ite opposition leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, and also Iran, of backing the north Yemen Shi’ite Houthist rebels in an Al-Jazeera TV interview. Yemen’s Saleh declared, "We cannot accuse the Iranian official side, but the Iranians are contacting us, saying that they are prepared for a mediation. This means that the Iranians have contacts with them [the Houthists], given that they want to mediate between the Yemeni government and them. Also, Muqtada al-Sadr in al-Najaf in Iraq is asking that he be accepted as a mediator. This means they have a link."[3]
Yemen authorities claim they have seized caches of weapons made in Iran, while the Houthists claim to have captured Yemeni equipment with Saudi Arabian markings, accusing Sana’a (the capital of Yemen and site of the US Embassy) of acting as a Saudi proxy. Iran has rejected claims that Iranian weapons were found in north Yemen, calling claims of support to the rebels as baseless. [4]
What about Al Qaeda?
The picture that emerges is one of a desperate US-backed dictator, Yemen’s President Saleh, increasingly losing control after two decades as despotic ruler of the unified Yemen. Economic conditions in the country took a drastic downward slide in 2008 when world oil prices collapsed. Some 70% of the state revenues derive from Yemen’s oil sales. The central government of Saleh sits in former North Yemen in Sana’a, while the oil is in former South Yemen. Yet Saleh controls the oil revenue flows. Lack of oil revenue has made Saleh’s usual option of buying off opposition groups all but impossible.
Into this chaotic domestic picture comes the January 2009 announcement, prominently featured in select Internet websites, that Al Qaeda, the alleged global terrorist organization created by the late CIA-trained Saudi, Osama bin Laden, has opened a major new branch in Yemen for both Yemen and Saudi operations.
Al Qaeda in Yemen released a statement through online jihadist forums Jan. 20, 2009 from the group’s leader Nasir al-Wahayshi, announcing formation of a single al Qaeda group for the Arabian Peninsula under his command. According to al-Wahayshi, the new group, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, would consist of his former Al Qaeda in Yemen, as well as members of the defunct Saudi Al Qaeda group. The press release claimed, interestingly enough, that a Saudi national, a former Guantanamo detainee (Number 372), Abu-Sayyaf al-Shihri, would serve as al-Wahayshi’s deputy.
Days later an online video from al-Wahayshi appeared under the alarming title, "We Start from Here and We Will Meet at al-Aqsa." Al-Aqsa refers to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that Jews know as Temple Mount, the site of the destroyed Temple of Solomon, which Muslims call Al Haram Al Sharif. The video threatens Muslim leaders -- including Yemeni’s President Saleh, the Saudi royal family, and Egyptian President Mubarak -- and promises to take the jihad from Yemen to Israel to "liberate" Muslim holy sites and Gaza, something that would likely detonate World War III if anyone were mad enough to do it.
Also in that video, in addition to former Guantanamo inmate al-Shihri, is a statement from Abu-al-Harith Muhammad al-Awfi, identified as a field commander in the video, and allegedly former Guantanamo detainee 333. As it is well-established that torture methods are worthless to obtain truthful confessions, some have speculated that the real goal of CIA and Pentagon interrogators at Guantanamo prison since September 2001, has been to use brutal techniques to train or recruit sleeper terrorists who can be activated on command by US intelligence, a charge difficult to prove or disprove. The presence of two such high-ranking Guantanamo graduates in the new Yemen-based Al Qaeda is certainly ground for questioning.
Al Qaeda in Yemen is apparently anathema to al-Fadhli and the enlarged mass-based Southern Movement. In an interview, al-Fadhli declared, "I have strong relations with all of the jihadists in the north and the south and everywhere, but not with al-Qaeda."[5] That has not hindered Saleh from claiming the Southern Movement and al Qaeda are one and the same, a convenient way to insure backing from Washington.
According to US intelligence reports, there are a grand total of perhaps 200 Al Qaeda members in southern Yemen. [6]
Al-Fadhli gave an interview distancing himself from al Qaeda in May 2009, declaring, "We [in South Yemen] have been invaded 15 years ago and we are under a vicious occupation. So we are busy with our cause and we do not look at any other cause in the world. We want our independence and to put an end to this occupation."[7] Conveniently, the same day, Al Qaeda made a large profile declaring its support for southern Yemen’s cause.
On May 14, in an audiotape released on the internet, al-Wahayshi, leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, expressed sympathy with the people of the southern provinces and their attempt to defend themselves against their "oppression," declaring, "What is happening in Lahaj, Dhali, Abyan and Hadramaut and the other southern provinces cannot be approved. We have to support and help [the southerners]." He promised retaliation: "The oppression against you will not pass without punishment... the killing of Muslims in the streets is an unjustified major crime." [8]
The curious emergence of a tiny but well-publicized al Qaeda in southern Yemen amid what observers call a broad-based popular-based Southern Movement front that eschews the radical global agenda of al Qaeda, serves to give the Pentagon a kind of casus belli to escalate US military operations in the strategic region.
Indeed, after declaring that the Yemen internal strife was Yemen’s own affair, President Obama ordered air strikes in Yemen. The Pentagon claimed its attacks on December 17 and 24 killed three key al Qaeda leaders but no evidence has yet proven this. Now the Christmas Day Detroit bomber drama gives new life to Washington’s "War on Terror" campaign in Yemen. Obama has now offered military assistance to the Saleh Yemen government.
Somali Pirates escalate as if on cue
As if on cue, at the same time CNN headlines broadcast new terror threats from Yemen, the long-running Somalia pirate attacks on commercial shipping in the same Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea across from southern Yemen escalated dramatically after having been reduced by multinational ship patrols.
On December 29, Moscow’s RAI Novosti reported that Somali pirates seized a Greek cargo vessel in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia's coast. Earlier the same day a British-flagged chemical tanker and its 26 crew were also seized in the Gulf of Aden. In a sign of sophisticated skills in using western media, pirate commander Mohamed Shakir told the British newspaper The Times by phone, "We have hijacked a ship with [a] British flag in the Gulf of Aden late yesterday." The US intelligence brief, Stratfor, reports that The Times, owned by neo-conservative financial backer, Rupert Murdoch, is sometimes used by Israeli intelligence to plant useful stories.
The two latest events brought a record number of attacks and hijackings for 2009. As of December 22, attacks by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the east coast of Somalia numbered 174, with 35 vessels hijacked and 587 crew taken hostage so far in 2009, almost all successful pirate activity, according to the International Maritime Bureau's Piracy Reporting Center. The open question is, who is providing the Somali "pirates" with arms and logistics sufficient to elude international patrols from numerous nations?
Notably, on January 3, President Saleh got a phone call from Somali president Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed in which he briefed president Saleh on latest developments in Somalia. Sheikh Sharif, whose own base in Mogadishu is so weak he is sometimes referred to as President of Mogadishu Airport, told Saleh he would share information with Saleh about any terror activities that might be launched from Somali territories targeting stability and security of Yemen and the region.
The Oil chokepoint and other oily affairs
The strategic significance of the region between Yemen and Somalia becomes the point of geopolitical interest. It is the site of Bab el-Mandab, one of what the US Government lists as seven strategic world oil shipping chokepoints. The US Government Energy Information Agency states that "closure of the Bab el-Mandab could keep tankers from the Persian Gulf from reaching the Suez Canal/Sumed pipeline complex, diverting them around the southern tip of Africa. The Strait of Bab el-Mandab is a chokepoint between the horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean." [9]
Bab el-Mandab, between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Oil and other exports from the Persian Gulf must pass through Bab el-Mandab before entering the Suez Canal. In 2006, the Energy Department in Washington reported that an estimated 3.3 million barrels a day of oil flowed through this narrow waterway to Europe, the United States, and Asia. Most oil, or some 2.1 million barrels a day, goes north through the Bab el-Mandab to the Suez/Sumed complex into the Mediterranean.
An excuse for a US or NATO militarization of the waters around Bab el-Mandab would give Washington another major link in its pursuit of control of the seven most critical oil chokepoints around the world, a major part of any future US strategy aimed at denying oil flows to China, the EU or any region or country that opposes US policy. Given that significant flows of Saudi oil pass through Bab el-Mandab, a US military control there would serve to deter the Saudi Kingdom from becoming serious about transacting future oil sales with China or others no longer in dollars, as was recently reported by UK Independent journalist Robert Fisk.
It would also be in a position to threaten China’s oil transport from Port Sudan on the Red Sea just north of Bab el-Mandab, a major lifeline in China’s national energy needs.
In addition to its geopolitical position as a major global oil transit chokepoint, Yemen is reported to hold some of the world’s greatest untapped oil reserves. Yemen’s Masila Basin and Shabwa Basin are reported by international oil companies to contain "world class discoveries."[10] France’s Total and several smaller international oil companies are engaged in developing Yemen’s oil production. Some fifteen years ago I was told in a private meeting with a well-informed Washington insider that Yemen contained "enough undeveloped oil to fill the oil demand of the entire world for the next fifty years."
Wednesday, 13 January 2010
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Sunday, 10 January 2010
Saturday, 9 January 2010
The Body Scanning Lobby...
January 05, 2009 "Mother Jones" - --
"Scan, baby, scan. That's the mantra among politicians at all levels in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to conventional wisdom, the would-be "underwear bomber" could have been stopped by airport security if he'd been put through a full-body scanner, which would have revealed the cache of explosives attached to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's groin.
Within days or even hours of the bombing attempt, everyone was talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the magic bullet that could stop this type of attack. In announcing hearings by the Senate Homeland Security Commitee, Joe Lieberman approached the use of scanners as a foregone conclusion, saying one of the "big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer" was "Why isn't whole-body-scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?" Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told the Washington Post, "You've got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren't easy to get at. It's either pat downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven't figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out."
Since the alternative is being groped by airport screeners, the scanners might sound pretty good. The Transportation Security Administration has claimed that the images "are friendly enough to post in a preschool," though the pictures themselves tell another story, and numerous organizations have opposed them as a gross invasion of privacy. Beyond privacy issues, however, are questions about whether these machines really work-and about who stands to benefit most from their use. When it comes to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.
Known by their opponents as "digital strip search" machines, the full-body scanners use one of two technologies-millimeter wave sensors or backscatter x-rays-to see through clothing, producing ghostly images of naked passengers. Yet critics say that these, too, are highly fallible, and are incapable of revealing explosives hidden in body cavities-an age-old method for smuggling contraband. If that's the case, a terrorist could hide the entire bomb works within his or her body, and breeze through the virtual strip search undetected. Yesterday, the London Independent reported on "authoritative claims that officials at the [UK] Department for Transport and the Home Office have already tested the scanners and were not persuaded that they would work comprehensively against terrorist threats to aviation." A British defense-research firm reportedly found the machines unreliable in detecting "low-density" materials like plastics, chemicals, and liquids-precisely what the underwear bomber had stuffed in his briefs.
Yet the rush toward full-body scans already seems unstoppable. They were mandated today as part of the "enhanced" screening for travelers from selected countries, and hundreds of the machines are already on order, at a cost of about $150,000 apiece. Within days of the bombing attempt, Reuters was reporting that the "greater U.S. government shift toward using the high-tech devices could create a boom for makers of security imaging products, and it has already created a speculative spike in share prices in some companies."
Which brings us to the money shot. The body scanner is sure to get a go-ahead because of the illustrious personages hawking them. Chief among them is former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, who now heads the Chertoff Group, which represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines, Rapiscan Systems. For days after the attack, Chertoff made the rounds on the media promoting the scanners, calling the bombing attempt "a very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery"-all without disclosing his relationship to Rapiscan. According to the Washington Post:
Chertoff's advocacy for the technology dates back to his time in the Bush administration. In 2005, Homeland Security ordered the government's first batch of the scanners-five from California-based Rapiscan Systems.
Today, 40 body scanners are in use at 19 U.S. airports. The number is expected to skyrocket at least in part because of the Christmas Day incident. The Transportation Security Administration this week said it will order 300 more machines.
In the summer, TSA purchased 150 machines from Rapiscan with $25 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds.
The Washington Examiner last week ran down an entire list of all the former Washington politicians and staff members who are now part of what it calls the "full-body scanner lobby":
One manufacturer, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is American Science & Engineering, Inc. AS&E has retained the K Street firm Wexler & Walker to lobby for "federal deployment of security technology by DHS and DOD." Individual lobbyists on this account include former TSA deputy administration Tom Blank, who also worked under House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Chad Wolf-former assistant administrator for policy at TSA, and a former aide to Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Tex., a top Senate appropriator and the ranking Republican on the transportation committee-is also lobbying on AS&E's behalf.
Smiths Detection, another screening manufacturer, employs top transportation lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Associates, including Kevin Patrick Kelly, a former top staffer to Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., who sits on the Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee. Smiths also retains former congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley, R-Md.
Former Sen. Al D'Amato, R-N.Y., represents L3 Systems, about which Bloomberg wrote today: "L-3 has ‘developed a more sophisticated system that could prevent smuggling of almost anything on the body,' said Howard Rubel, an analyst at Jefferies & Co., who has a ‘hold' rating on the stock."
In forecasting the fate of the full-body scanners, we can turn to recent history, which saw the rapid rise-and decline-of the previous "miracle" screening technology. In the years following 9/11, dozens of explosive trace portals (ETPs) were installed in airports across the country, at a cost of about $160,000 each. These "puffer" machines-so called because they blow air on passengers to dislodge explosive particles-were once celebrated as the "no-touch pat down." But in a Denver test by CBS in 2007, a network employee was sprayed with explosives and then walked through the airport's three puffers without any trouble. The machines also set off false alarms, and they frequently broke down, leading to sky-high maintenance costs.
After spending more than $30 million on the puffer machines-most of them purchased from GE-the TSA announced earlier this year that it was suspending their use. Only about 25 percent of the machines were ever even deployed at US airports. A report last month from the Government Accountability Office found that the TSA had not adequately tested the puffers before buying them.
What will happen if the full-body scanner goes the way of the puffer? Well, there's always the next generation of security equipment: the Body Orifice Security Scanner, or BOSS chair. This contraption, which has an uncomfortable resemblance to an electric chair, is used in prisons, mostly in the UK, for tracing cell phones, shivs, and other dangerous contraband that's been swallowed or inserted into body cavities by inmates. So far, it only detects metal, but you never know.
Give me a friendly German Shepherd any day.
By James Ridgeway"
"Scan, baby, scan. That's the mantra among politicians at all levels in the wake of the thwarted terrorist attack aboard a Detroit-bound passenger jet. According to conventional wisdom, the would-be "underwear bomber" could have been stopped by airport security if he'd been put through a full-body scanner, which would have revealed the cache of explosives attached to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's groin.
Within days or even hours of the bombing attempt, everyone was talking about so-called whole-body imaging as the magic bullet that could stop this type of attack. In announcing hearings by the Senate Homeland Security Commitee, Joe Lieberman approached the use of scanners as a foregone conclusion, saying one of the "big, urgent questions that we are holding this hearing to answer" was "Why isn't whole-body-scanning technology that can detect explosives in wider use?" Former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff told the Washington Post, "You've got to find some way of detecting things in parts of the body that aren't easy to get at. It's either pat downs or imaging, or otherwise hoping that bad guys haven't figured it out, and I guess bad guys have figured it out."
Since the alternative is being groped by airport screeners, the scanners might sound pretty good. The Transportation Security Administration has claimed that the images "are friendly enough to post in a preschool," though the pictures themselves tell another story, and numerous organizations have opposed them as a gross invasion of privacy. Beyond privacy issues, however, are questions about whether these machines really work-and about who stands to benefit most from their use. When it comes to high-tech screening methods, the TSA has a dismal record of enriching private corporations with failed technologies, and there are signs that the latest miracle device may just bring more of the same.
Known by their opponents as "digital strip search" machines, the full-body scanners use one of two technologies-millimeter wave sensors or backscatter x-rays-to see through clothing, producing ghostly images of naked passengers. Yet critics say that these, too, are highly fallible, and are incapable of revealing explosives hidden in body cavities-an age-old method for smuggling contraband. If that's the case, a terrorist could hide the entire bomb works within his or her body, and breeze through the virtual strip search undetected. Yesterday, the London Independent reported on "authoritative claims that officials at the [UK] Department for Transport and the Home Office have already tested the scanners and were not persuaded that they would work comprehensively against terrorist threats to aviation." A British defense-research firm reportedly found the machines unreliable in detecting "low-density" materials like plastics, chemicals, and liquids-precisely what the underwear bomber had stuffed in his briefs.
Yet the rush toward full-body scans already seems unstoppable. They were mandated today as part of the "enhanced" screening for travelers from selected countries, and hundreds of the machines are already on order, at a cost of about $150,000 apiece. Within days of the bombing attempt, Reuters was reporting that the "greater U.S. government shift toward using the high-tech devices could create a boom for makers of security imaging products, and it has already created a speculative spike in share prices in some companies."
Which brings us to the money shot. The body scanner is sure to get a go-ahead because of the illustrious personages hawking them. Chief among them is former DHS secretary Michael Chertoff, who now heads the Chertoff Group, which represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines, Rapiscan Systems. For days after the attack, Chertoff made the rounds on the media promoting the scanners, calling the bombing attempt "a very vivid lesson in the value of that machinery"-all without disclosing his relationship to Rapiscan. According to the Washington Post:
Chertoff's advocacy for the technology dates back to his time in the Bush administration. In 2005, Homeland Security ordered the government's first batch of the scanners-five from California-based Rapiscan Systems.
Today, 40 body scanners are in use at 19 U.S. airports. The number is expected to skyrocket at least in part because of the Christmas Day incident. The Transportation Security Administration this week said it will order 300 more machines.
In the summer, TSA purchased 150 machines from Rapiscan with $25 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds.
The Washington Examiner last week ran down an entire list of all the former Washington politicians and staff members who are now part of what it calls the "full-body scanner lobby":
One manufacturer, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, is American Science & Engineering, Inc. AS&E has retained the K Street firm Wexler & Walker to lobby for "federal deployment of security technology by DHS and DOD." Individual lobbyists on this account include former TSA deputy administration Tom Blank, who also worked under House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
Chad Wolf-former assistant administrator for policy at TSA, and a former aide to Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Tex., a top Senate appropriator and the ranking Republican on the transportation committee-is also lobbying on AS&E's behalf.
Smiths Detection, another screening manufacturer, employs top transportation lobbying firm Van Scoyoc Associates, including Kevin Patrick Kelly, a former top staffer to Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., who sits on the Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee. Smiths also retains former congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley, R-Md.
Former Sen. Al D'Amato, R-N.Y., represents L3 Systems, about which Bloomberg wrote today: "L-3 has ‘developed a more sophisticated system that could prevent smuggling of almost anything on the body,' said Howard Rubel, an analyst at Jefferies & Co., who has a ‘hold' rating on the stock."
In forecasting the fate of the full-body scanners, we can turn to recent history, which saw the rapid rise-and decline-of the previous "miracle" screening technology. In the years following 9/11, dozens of explosive trace portals (ETPs) were installed in airports across the country, at a cost of about $160,000 each. These "puffer" machines-so called because they blow air on passengers to dislodge explosive particles-were once celebrated as the "no-touch pat down." But in a Denver test by CBS in 2007, a network employee was sprayed with explosives and then walked through the airport's three puffers without any trouble. The machines also set off false alarms, and they frequently broke down, leading to sky-high maintenance costs.
After spending more than $30 million on the puffer machines-most of them purchased from GE-the TSA announced earlier this year that it was suspending their use. Only about 25 percent of the machines were ever even deployed at US airports. A report last month from the Government Accountability Office found that the TSA had not adequately tested the puffers before buying them.
What will happen if the full-body scanner goes the way of the puffer? Well, there's always the next generation of security equipment: the Body Orifice Security Scanner, or BOSS chair. This contraption, which has an uncomfortable resemblance to an electric chair, is used in prisons, mostly in the UK, for tracing cell phones, shivs, and other dangerous contraband that's been swallowed or inserted into body cavities by inmates. So far, it only detects metal, but you never know.
Give me a friendly German Shepherd any day.
By James Ridgeway"
Monday, 4 January 2010
Yemen...by Steve Lendman...4/01/10
Obama's War on Yemen - by Stephen Lendman
Besides waging direct or proxy wars on multiple fronts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Sudan, Eastern Congo, elsewhere in Africa, and likely to erupt almost anywhere at any time, Yemen is now a new front in America's "war on terror" under a president, who as a candidate, promised diplomacy, not conflict, if elected.
In 2008, he told the Boston Globe that:
"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."
None exists, yet he's done the opposite and much more. He:
-- reinvented a "Cold War" with Russia;
-- is encircling it and China with military bases, and proceeding with provocative plans to install interceptor missiles in Poland (for offense, not defense) and advanced tracking radar in the Czech Republic;
-- escalated war in Afghanistan;
-- appointed a hired gun assassin to lead it, General Stanley McChrystal, infamous for committing war crime atrocities as former head of the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC);
-- authorized death squad assaults to pursue it, including extrajudicial assassinations, torture, and indiscriminate bombing of Afghan communities without regard for civilian lives;
-- expanded the war into Pakistan and now to Yemen;
-- is militarizing Latin America using Colombia and the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curazao to fly unmanned surveillance/attack drones over Venezuela and perhaps elsewhere in the region;
-- plans to use Colombian insurgents to commit "false positive" border incidents blaming Venezuela as a pretext for a retaliatory attack, supported, of course, by Washington as a way to target and perhaps remove Hugo Chavez;
-- failed to subvert Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection; continues destabilization tactics for regime change; and may, preemptively without cause, attack Iran's nuclear facilities;
-- ousted the democratically elected Honduran president, installing a fascist regime to replace him;
-- supports the worst of Israeli war crimes and oppression against Palestinians;
-- governs America under police state laws to resist unrest if it arises in the wake of outlandish administration policies; and according to some
-- plans a major false flag US attack to enlist popular support, divert attention from the deepening economic crisis, and provide a pretext for new fronts in the "war on terror" with unlimited funding to pursue them at the expense of neglected homeland needs.
Target Yemen
Journalist Patrick Cockburn calls Yemen:
"a dangerous place. Wonderfully beautiful, the mountainous north of the country is guerrilla paradise. The Yemenis are exceptionally hospitable....humorous, sociable and democratic, infinitely preferable as company to the arrogant ignorant playboys of the (rich regional) oil states."
Sana'a is the capital, home to the central government and largest city, an ancient one dating back to the 6th century BC Sabaean dynasty. However, it's power is limited, given the strength of tribes, clans, and influential families in a society very much a gun culture and prone to direct action.
On average, Yemenis own three guns per person in a nation of 21 million people, including one or more automatic weapons, like an AK-47 as well as heavier arms. Yemeni Professor Ahmed al-Kibsi once told a British reporter: "Just as you have your tie, the Yemeni will carry his gun," and isn't at all shy about using it.
As a result, Cockburn says "Yemen has all the explosive ingredients of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan," so entanglement there may become another quagmire, besides the others in the region already. "It is extraordinary to see the US begin to make the same mistakes in Yemen as it previously made in Afghanistan and Iraq" - overextending and getting too involved to exit.
William Hartung, Arms and Security Initiative director at the New York-based New America Foundation, calls the Yemeni government one of the most unstable in the world, so weapons, training, and direct intervention may backfire if an anti-Washington regime replaces it.
Cockburn says America doesn't "learn from past mistakes and instead....repeats them by fresh interventions in countries like Yemen." Perhaps not, however, since part of Washington's scheme is to keep fighting, divert people from more pressing issues at home, and enrich thousands of war profiteers with public money, leaving future generations with the bill.
The UN says poverty in Yemen is widespread with about 45% of the population living on less than two dollars a day. The New York Times calls Yemen one of the world's oldest civilizations and poorest Middle East country (ignoring Occupied Palestine), "as well as a haven for Islamic jihadists:" to wit, the ubiquitous Al Qaeda, a 1980s CIA creation always trotted out whenever "war on terror" efforts need stoking and a convenient enemy to be blamed.
According to The Times:
"Yemen gained new attention in 2009 from American military officials, who are concerned about Al Qaeda's efforts to set up a regional base there."
In December, US officials claimed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian citizen, traveled to Yemen, was trained by Al Qaeda, obtained explosive chemicals (PETN), and tried using them to blow up an Amsterdam-Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day.
According to Webster Tarpley in a December 29 Russia Today interview, Abdulmutallab is a CIA "protected patsy (for the) provocation designed to facilitate US meddling in (Yemen's) civil war (pitting) the Saudi-backed central government against the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels," being bombed by US and Saudi air strikes.
He was denied a UK entrance visa, wasn't on a No Fly List, paid cash for a one-way ticket to Detroit, checked no luggage, had a US visa but no passport, and was helped on board by a "well-dressed Indian" to facilitate what appears to be a Washington false flag plot using Abdulmutallab as a convenient dupe.
The Wayne Madsen Report adds more calling the airliner incident a false flag operation "carried out by (the) intelligence tripartite grouping of CIA, Mossad, and India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)." Earlier they "worked together along with former Afghan KHAD intelligence agents to assassinate former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto....to destabilize Pakistan" for planned balkanization, the same scheme planned for Afghanistan.
Madsen added that Abdulmutallab's PETN "was weak (exploding like a fire cracker), technically deficient (and failed to go off properly)."
What's at stake? At most, Yemen has four billion proved barrels of oil reserves and modest amounts of natural gas, hardly a reason for war. More important is its strategic location near the Horn of Africa on Saudi Arabia's southern border, the Red Sea, its Bab el- Mandeb strait (a key chokepoint separating Yemen from Eritrea through which three million barrels of oil pass daily), and the Gulf of Aden connection to the Indian Ocean.
Tarpley believes Washington is:
"play(ing) Iran against Saudi Arabia so as to weaken both the pro-Moscow Ahmadinejad government in Iran, and also those Saudi forces that are fed up with their status as a US protectorate. The US is openly now sponsoring a regroupment of Al Qaeda in Yemen, including by sending fighters direct from Guantanamo. The new CIA-promoted synthetic entity is Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsule (AQAP), a gaggle of US patsies, dupes, and fanatics which is claiming credit for the (Abdulmutallab) incident."
Washington's usual tactics are at work:
-- create a false flag incident;
-- heighten fear through the complicit media;
-- ride to the rescue with popular support;
-- keep oil prices high;
-- boost market opportunities for security equipment manufacturers;
-- weaken civil liberties through new police state measures;
-- erode Iranian and Russian influence; and
-- gain greater control over the region's southern portion, the entire Middle East and all of Eurasia.
Coming next may be another enlisted or unwitting stooge to take down an airliner, blame it on Iran, Yemeni rebels, or Al Qaeda and provide an excuse for greater intervention, mass slaughter and destruction in another country, then on to the next one as part of an offensive to expand regional war and destabilization toward the ultimate goal of global "full spectrum dominance.
At Washington's behest, the Saudis began bombing and using tanks against Yemen in early November. So far, hundreds have been killed or wounded and thousands displaced. In addition, a rebel group called the Young Believers claims US jets launched multiple attacks in Yemen's northwest Sa'ada Province. Britain's Daily Telegraph also reports that US Special Forces (meaning death squads like in Afghanistan) are training Yemen's army, and likely operating covertly on their own.
On December 29, Iran accused Washington, the UK, and other western countries of fomenting the week's anti-government protests. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ramin Hahmanparast claimed a complicit minority in the country was involved with outside support, saying:
"This is intervention in our internal affairs. We strongly condemn it," after president Obama praised "the courage and the conviction of the Iranian people (and condemned the government's) iron fist of brutality."
Iranians have long memories of US meddling. In 1953, CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin's cousin, engineered a successful coup ousting democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq (the country's most popular politician) after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company following a dispute about revenue sharing. Now it's all about terrorism, Islamic extremists, and the ubiquitous Al Qaeda as convenient excuses Washington uses to threaten or attack anywhere.
It's no wonder that legitimate commentaries accuse America of fanning the flames of war with rhetoric, new troop deployments to Afghanistan, and General McChrystal naming the country's major insurgent group threats as the Qjetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqani Network (closely aligned with the Taliban), and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG, linked to Afghanistan's Hezbi Islami Party) - the latter two former CIA assets in the 1980s, and the Taliban an ally before 9/11.
They're now claimed to be active in Pakistan and mortal enemies in America's "war on terror," about to consume Yemen in Washington's fury, helped by headlines like the December 29 Times Online saying:
"Hundreds of al-Qaeda militants planning attacks from Yemen," according to its Foreign Minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, appealing for help to equip counterinsurgency forces.
"Of course there are....al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen and some of their leaders," he said. "We realize the danger. They may actually plan attacks like the one we have just had in Detroit."
On December 30, The New York Times published a Reuters report headlining, "US Seeks to Boost Yemen For Expanded Al Qaeda Fight," saying America plans:
"to expand military and intelligence cooperation with the government of Yemen to step up a crackdown on al Qaeda militants believed to be behind a failed plot to blow up a US passenger jet," according to unnamed US officials.
President Obama vowed "to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle, and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us - whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere where they are plotting attacks against the US homeland."
Without elaborating, Pentagon spokesperson Bryan Whitman said "We are going to work with allies and partners to seek out terrorist activity, al Qaeda....This is not new."
Increased US-Saudi attacks and military aid are part of the effort - up from $4.6 million in FY 2006 to $67 million in FY 2009, and according to the Wall Street Journal, citing an unnamed senior Pentagon official, to as much as $190 million in FY 2010. Included also are unknown black budget amounts, greater numbers of US Special Forces on the ground for training and covert death squad activities, and stepped up air attacks.
Whitman explained that Yemen is now America's second largest recipient of overt counterterrorism aid, after Pakistan, a sign of the area's importance to Washington. US Special Forces operated there in 2002, and according to The New York Times, the CIA sent in many counterterrorism operatives in 2008 along with other US forces for overt and covert purposes.
Reports in the US and foreign media suggest larger scale US-backed Yemeni attacks are imminent, and according to CNN, citing two unnamed senior US officials:
"The US and Yemen are now looking at fresh targets for a potential retaliation strike. The effort is to see whether targets can be specifically linked to the airline incident and its planning....the agreement would allow the US to fly cruise missiles, fighter jets or unmanned armed drones against targets in Yemen with the consent of that government," that's, of course, gotten and will proceed with or without it.
Inflammatory US media reports and commentaries now promote war by portraying Yemen as a hotbed of terrorism, citing ubiquitous Al Qaeda forces creating chaos throughout the country, and saying unless America acts, conditions will worsen and spread.
According to The New York Times on December 27:
Washington "has quietly opened (a) largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen," using CIA operatives and Special Operations commandos, according to an unnamed Agency official. Writers Eric Schmitt and Robert Worth call the country:
"a refuge for jihadists, in part because (the) government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s. (These) militants have made much more focused efforts to build a base in Yemen in recent years, drawing recruits from throughout the region and mounting attacks more frequently on foreign embassies and other targets."
Washington has close relations with Field Marshall Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen's ruling despot. From 1978 - 1990, he was president of the Yemen Arab Republic, and since then headed the united Republic of Yemen. During the Cold War, America backed the Islamist regime in the North against southern secular nationalists aligned with the Soviets. In the country's 1994 civil war, former Yemeni Afghan fighters helped Saleh secure the power he still holds.
Washington recruited him for its expanded regional wars. They cause great loss of lives, wider instability, an unsustainable expense, and leave vital homeland needs unmet, but are a bonanza for the war profiteers fueling them and others to follow for a sure-fire stream of blood money.
What's Next?
Up the ante in Afghanistan and Pakistan, entanglement in Yemen, then perhaps confront Iran with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs saying on November 27:
"Our patience and that of the international community is limited, and time is running out. If Iran refuses to meet its obligations, then it will be responsible for its own growing isolation and consequences." Apparently a "package of consequences" are planned, according to another unnamed official.
Air attacks may be one of them with New York Times support. On January 10, chief diplomatic correspondent, David Sanger, reported on US - Israeli talks over the past year about possibly striking Iran's nuclear sites as well covert sabotage efforts "to undermine electrical systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran relies."
Like Judith Miller's press agent role for the Pentagon in the run to the Iraq war, Sanger is a notorious Pentagon and State Department conduit, so his reports read more official propaganda than legitimate journalism - a longstanding Times pro-war, pro-business, anti-labor bias going back decades, and very evident now.
On December 23, The Times gave Alan Kuperman, Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program director at the University of Texas, op-ed space to headline, "There's Only One Way to Stop Iran," and he doesn't suggest diplomacy.
He says Obama should welcome Iran's rejection of his nuclear deal because it "did not require Iran to halt its enrichment program," even though it's in full compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) giving Washington and other nations no right to stop it.
Yet Kuperman insists Iran will likely divert its surplus higher-enriched fuel to weapons, and President Ahmadinejad "initially embraced the deal because he realized it aided Iran's bomb program."
However, "peaceful carrots and sticks cannot work, and an invasion would be foolhardy, (so Washington) faces a stark choice: military air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities or acquiescence to Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons."
IAEA inspections show no proof of a secret nuclear weapons program, and former IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, said in February 2009 said "many other countries are enriching uranium without the world making any fuss about it."
Five days before he retired on November 27, he told Reuters:
"We have no indication that there are other undeclared facilities in Iran. I want to be very clear about that." He also urged patience because Iran posed no imminent threat, and said "people should stop threatening the use of force because that simply....creates a justification or pretext for countries....to go underground because (they're) threatened."
He stressed that the IAEA found no evidence that Iranians had technology needed to assemble a nuclear warhead or that they're even trying.
Kuperman isn't convinced and accuses Iran of "suppl(ying) terrorist groups in violation of international embargoes. (So, if it) acquire(s) a nuclear arsenal, the risks would simply to too great that it could become a neighborhood bully or provide terrorists with the ultimate weapon, an atomic bomb."
Never mind that America's 2002 and 2006 National Security Strategy (NSS) and 2001 Nuclear Policy Review authorize the development of new type nuclear weapons, and the right to use them in first-strike preventive wars under the doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense."
Iran threatens no one, but Kuperman recommends military strikes anyway, regardless of the law, whether they'll succeed, and no matter the potentially horrific consequences, including inflaming the whole region, disrupting oil supplies, harming world economies when they're most vulnerable, and making America more hated than ever.
Still he says:
"Postponing military action merely provides Iran a window to expand, disperse and harden its nuclear facilities against attack. The sooner the United States takes action, the better."
In other words, two fronts aren't enough so add Yemen. Then make it a foursome with Iran, the sooner America does it the better, and The New York Times promotes this view after expressing caution in its January 3 editorial headlined, "No delusion of bombing Iran" and saying:
"Fortunately, President-elect Barack Obama says his approach to Iran will include 'a new emphasis on respect and a new emphasis on being willing to talk....' "
This approach "may or may not work," says The Times. "But it is a road that (should be tried and) should have been taken years ago."
Not now apparently or earlier, in fact, as Times writers play an indispensable role feeding misinformation to the world and supporting imperial wars with the rest of the dominant media. They'll have plenty to say as a new Yemen front unfolds and maybe an Iran one to follow.
Besides waging direct or proxy wars on multiple fronts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Sudan, Eastern Congo, elsewhere in Africa, and likely to erupt almost anywhere at any time, Yemen is now a new front in America's "war on terror" under a president, who as a candidate, promised diplomacy, not conflict, if elected.
In 2008, he told the Boston Globe that:
"The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation."
None exists, yet he's done the opposite and much more. He:
-- reinvented a "Cold War" with Russia;
-- is encircling it and China with military bases, and proceeding with provocative plans to install interceptor missiles in Poland (for offense, not defense) and advanced tracking radar in the Czech Republic;
-- escalated war in Afghanistan;
-- appointed a hired gun assassin to lead it, General Stanley McChrystal, infamous for committing war crime atrocities as former head of the Pentagon's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC);
-- authorized death squad assaults to pursue it, including extrajudicial assassinations, torture, and indiscriminate bombing of Afghan communities without regard for civilian lives;
-- expanded the war into Pakistan and now to Yemen;
-- is militarizing Latin America using Colombia and the Dutch islands of Aruba and Curazao to fly unmanned surveillance/attack drones over Venezuela and perhaps elsewhere in the region;
-- plans to use Colombian insurgents to commit "false positive" border incidents blaming Venezuela as a pretext for a retaliatory attack, supported, of course, by Washington as a way to target and perhaps remove Hugo Chavez;
-- failed to subvert Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's reelection; continues destabilization tactics for regime change; and may, preemptively without cause, attack Iran's nuclear facilities;
-- ousted the democratically elected Honduran president, installing a fascist regime to replace him;
-- supports the worst of Israeli war crimes and oppression against Palestinians;
-- governs America under police state laws to resist unrest if it arises in the wake of outlandish administration policies; and according to some
-- plans a major false flag US attack to enlist popular support, divert attention from the deepening economic crisis, and provide a pretext for new fronts in the "war on terror" with unlimited funding to pursue them at the expense of neglected homeland needs.
Target Yemen
Journalist Patrick Cockburn calls Yemen:
"a dangerous place. Wonderfully beautiful, the mountainous north of the country is guerrilla paradise. The Yemenis are exceptionally hospitable....humorous, sociable and democratic, infinitely preferable as company to the arrogant ignorant playboys of the (rich regional) oil states."
Sana'a is the capital, home to the central government and largest city, an ancient one dating back to the 6th century BC Sabaean dynasty. However, it's power is limited, given the strength of tribes, clans, and influential families in a society very much a gun culture and prone to direct action.
On average, Yemenis own three guns per person in a nation of 21 million people, including one or more automatic weapons, like an AK-47 as well as heavier arms. Yemeni Professor Ahmed al-Kibsi once told a British reporter: "Just as you have your tie, the Yemeni will carry his gun," and isn't at all shy about using it.
As a result, Cockburn says "Yemen has all the explosive ingredients of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq and Afghanistan," so entanglement there may become another quagmire, besides the others in the region already. "It is extraordinary to see the US begin to make the same mistakes in Yemen as it previously made in Afghanistan and Iraq" - overextending and getting too involved to exit.
William Hartung, Arms and Security Initiative director at the New York-based New America Foundation, calls the Yemeni government one of the most unstable in the world, so weapons, training, and direct intervention may backfire if an anti-Washington regime replaces it.
Cockburn says America doesn't "learn from past mistakes and instead....repeats them by fresh interventions in countries like Yemen." Perhaps not, however, since part of Washington's scheme is to keep fighting, divert people from more pressing issues at home, and enrich thousands of war profiteers with public money, leaving future generations with the bill.
The UN says poverty in Yemen is widespread with about 45% of the population living on less than two dollars a day. The New York Times calls Yemen one of the world's oldest civilizations and poorest Middle East country (ignoring Occupied Palestine), "as well as a haven for Islamic jihadists:" to wit, the ubiquitous Al Qaeda, a 1980s CIA creation always trotted out whenever "war on terror" efforts need stoking and a convenient enemy to be blamed.
According to The Times:
"Yemen gained new attention in 2009 from American military officials, who are concerned about Al Qaeda's efforts to set up a regional base there."
In December, US officials claimed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian citizen, traveled to Yemen, was trained by Al Qaeda, obtained explosive chemicals (PETN), and tried using them to blow up an Amsterdam-Detroit-bound airliner on Christmas Day.
According to Webster Tarpley in a December 29 Russia Today interview, Abdulmutallab is a CIA "protected patsy (for the) provocation designed to facilitate US meddling in (Yemen's) civil war (pitting) the Saudi-backed central government against the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels," being bombed by US and Saudi air strikes.
He was denied a UK entrance visa, wasn't on a No Fly List, paid cash for a one-way ticket to Detroit, checked no luggage, had a US visa but no passport, and was helped on board by a "well-dressed Indian" to facilitate what appears to be a Washington false flag plot using Abdulmutallab as a convenient dupe.
The Wayne Madsen Report adds more calling the airliner incident a false flag operation "carried out by (the) intelligence tripartite grouping of CIA, Mossad, and India's Research and Analysis Wing (RAW)." Earlier they "worked together along with former Afghan KHAD intelligence agents to assassinate former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto....to destabilize Pakistan" for planned balkanization, the same scheme planned for Afghanistan.
Madsen added that Abdulmutallab's PETN "was weak (exploding like a fire cracker), technically deficient (and failed to go off properly)."
What's at stake? At most, Yemen has four billion proved barrels of oil reserves and modest amounts of natural gas, hardly a reason for war. More important is its strategic location near the Horn of Africa on Saudi Arabia's southern border, the Red Sea, its Bab el- Mandeb strait (a key chokepoint separating Yemen from Eritrea through which three million barrels of oil pass daily), and the Gulf of Aden connection to the Indian Ocean.
Tarpley believes Washington is:
"play(ing) Iran against Saudi Arabia so as to weaken both the pro-Moscow Ahmadinejad government in Iran, and also those Saudi forces that are fed up with their status as a US protectorate. The US is openly now sponsoring a regroupment of Al Qaeda in Yemen, including by sending fighters direct from Guantanamo. The new CIA-promoted synthetic entity is Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsule (AQAP), a gaggle of US patsies, dupes, and fanatics which is claiming credit for the (Abdulmutallab) incident."
Washington's usual tactics are at work:
-- create a false flag incident;
-- heighten fear through the complicit media;
-- ride to the rescue with popular support;
-- keep oil prices high;
-- boost market opportunities for security equipment manufacturers;
-- weaken civil liberties through new police state measures;
-- erode Iranian and Russian influence; and
-- gain greater control over the region's southern portion, the entire Middle East and all of Eurasia.
Coming next may be another enlisted or unwitting stooge to take down an airliner, blame it on Iran, Yemeni rebels, or Al Qaeda and provide an excuse for greater intervention, mass slaughter and destruction in another country, then on to the next one as part of an offensive to expand regional war and destabilization toward the ultimate goal of global "full spectrum dominance.
At Washington's behest, the Saudis began bombing and using tanks against Yemen in early November. So far, hundreds have been killed or wounded and thousands displaced. In addition, a rebel group called the Young Believers claims US jets launched multiple attacks in Yemen's northwest Sa'ada Province. Britain's Daily Telegraph also reports that US Special Forces (meaning death squads like in Afghanistan) are training Yemen's army, and likely operating covertly on their own.
On December 29, Iran accused Washington, the UK, and other western countries of fomenting the week's anti-government protests. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Ramin Hahmanparast claimed a complicit minority in the country was involved with outside support, saying:
"This is intervention in our internal affairs. We strongly condemn it," after president Obama praised "the courage and the conviction of the Iranian people (and condemned the government's) iron fist of brutality."
Iranians have long memories of US meddling. In 1953, CIA operative Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin's cousin, engineered a successful coup ousting democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq (the country's most popular politician) after he nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company following a dispute about revenue sharing. Now it's all about terrorism, Islamic extremists, and the ubiquitous Al Qaeda as convenient excuses Washington uses to threaten or attack anywhere.
It's no wonder that legitimate commentaries accuse America of fanning the flames of war with rhetoric, new troop deployments to Afghanistan, and General McChrystal naming the country's major insurgent group threats as the Qjetta Shura Taliban, the Haqqani Network (closely aligned with the Taliban), and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin (HIG, linked to Afghanistan's Hezbi Islami Party) - the latter two former CIA assets in the 1980s, and the Taliban an ally before 9/11.
They're now claimed to be active in Pakistan and mortal enemies in America's "war on terror," about to consume Yemen in Washington's fury, helped by headlines like the December 29 Times Online saying:
"Hundreds of al-Qaeda militants planning attacks from Yemen," according to its Foreign Minister, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, appealing for help to equip counterinsurgency forces.
"Of course there are....al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen and some of their leaders," he said. "We realize the danger. They may actually plan attacks like the one we have just had in Detroit."
On December 30, The New York Times published a Reuters report headlining, "US Seeks to Boost Yemen For Expanded Al Qaeda Fight," saying America plans:
"to expand military and intelligence cooperation with the government of Yemen to step up a crackdown on al Qaeda militants believed to be behind a failed plot to blow up a US passenger jet," according to unnamed US officials.
President Obama vowed "to use every element of our national power to disrupt, to dismantle, and defeat the violent extremists who threaten us - whether they are from Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia, or anywhere where they are plotting attacks against the US homeland."
Without elaborating, Pentagon spokesperson Bryan Whitman said "We are going to work with allies and partners to seek out terrorist activity, al Qaeda....This is not new."
Increased US-Saudi attacks and military aid are part of the effort - up from $4.6 million in FY 2006 to $67 million in FY 2009, and according to the Wall Street Journal, citing an unnamed senior Pentagon official, to as much as $190 million in FY 2010. Included also are unknown black budget amounts, greater numbers of US Special Forces on the ground for training and covert death squad activities, and stepped up air attacks.
Whitman explained that Yemen is now America's second largest recipient of overt counterterrorism aid, after Pakistan, a sign of the area's importance to Washington. US Special Forces operated there in 2002, and according to The New York Times, the CIA sent in many counterterrorism operatives in 2008 along with other US forces for overt and covert purposes.
Reports in the US and foreign media suggest larger scale US-backed Yemeni attacks are imminent, and according to CNN, citing two unnamed senior US officials:
"The US and Yemen are now looking at fresh targets for a potential retaliation strike. The effort is to see whether targets can be specifically linked to the airline incident and its planning....the agreement would allow the US to fly cruise missiles, fighter jets or unmanned armed drones against targets in Yemen with the consent of that government," that's, of course, gotten and will proceed with or without it.
Inflammatory US media reports and commentaries now promote war by portraying Yemen as a hotbed of terrorism, citing ubiquitous Al Qaeda forces creating chaos throughout the country, and saying unless America acts, conditions will worsen and spread.
According to The New York Times on December 27:
Washington "has quietly opened (a) largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen," using CIA operatives and Special Operations commandos, according to an unnamed Agency official. Writers Eric Schmitt and Robert Worth call the country:
"a refuge for jihadists, in part because (the) government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s. (These) militants have made much more focused efforts to build a base in Yemen in recent years, drawing recruits from throughout the region and mounting attacks more frequently on foreign embassies and other targets."
Washington has close relations with Field Marshall Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen's ruling despot. From 1978 - 1990, he was president of the Yemen Arab Republic, and since then headed the united Republic of Yemen. During the Cold War, America backed the Islamist regime in the North against southern secular nationalists aligned with the Soviets. In the country's 1994 civil war, former Yemeni Afghan fighters helped Saleh secure the power he still holds.
Washington recruited him for its expanded regional wars. They cause great loss of lives, wider instability, an unsustainable expense, and leave vital homeland needs unmet, but are a bonanza for the war profiteers fueling them and others to follow for a sure-fire stream of blood money.
What's Next?
Up the ante in Afghanistan and Pakistan, entanglement in Yemen, then perhaps confront Iran with White House spokesman Robert Gibbs saying on November 27:
"Our patience and that of the international community is limited, and time is running out. If Iran refuses to meet its obligations, then it will be responsible for its own growing isolation and consequences." Apparently a "package of consequences" are planned, according to another unnamed official.
Air attacks may be one of them with New York Times support. On January 10, chief diplomatic correspondent, David Sanger, reported on US - Israeli talks over the past year about possibly striking Iran's nuclear sites as well covert sabotage efforts "to undermine electrical systems, computer systems and other networks on which Iran relies."
Like Judith Miller's press agent role for the Pentagon in the run to the Iraq war, Sanger is a notorious Pentagon and State Department conduit, so his reports read more official propaganda than legitimate journalism - a longstanding Times pro-war, pro-business, anti-labor bias going back decades, and very evident now.
On December 23, The Times gave Alan Kuperman, Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program director at the University of Texas, op-ed space to headline, "There's Only One Way to Stop Iran," and he doesn't suggest diplomacy.
He says Obama should welcome Iran's rejection of his nuclear deal because it "did not require Iran to halt its enrichment program," even though it's in full compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) giving Washington and other nations no right to stop it.
Yet Kuperman insists Iran will likely divert its surplus higher-enriched fuel to weapons, and President Ahmadinejad "initially embraced the deal because he realized it aided Iran's bomb program."
However, "peaceful carrots and sticks cannot work, and an invasion would be foolhardy, (so Washington) faces a stark choice: military air strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities or acquiescence to Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons."
IAEA inspections show no proof of a secret nuclear weapons program, and former IAEA director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, said in February 2009 said "many other countries are enriching uranium without the world making any fuss about it."
Five days before he retired on November 27, he told Reuters:
"We have no indication that there are other undeclared facilities in Iran. I want to be very clear about that." He also urged patience because Iran posed no imminent threat, and said "people should stop threatening the use of force because that simply....creates a justification or pretext for countries....to go underground because (they're) threatened."
He stressed that the IAEA found no evidence that Iranians had technology needed to assemble a nuclear warhead or that they're even trying.
Kuperman isn't convinced and accuses Iran of "suppl(ying) terrorist groups in violation of international embargoes. (So, if it) acquire(s) a nuclear arsenal, the risks would simply to too great that it could become a neighborhood bully or provide terrorists with the ultimate weapon, an atomic bomb."
Never mind that America's 2002 and 2006 National Security Strategy (NSS) and 2001 Nuclear Policy Review authorize the development of new type nuclear weapons, and the right to use them in first-strike preventive wars under the doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense."
Iran threatens no one, but Kuperman recommends military strikes anyway, regardless of the law, whether they'll succeed, and no matter the potentially horrific consequences, including inflaming the whole region, disrupting oil supplies, harming world economies when they're most vulnerable, and making America more hated than ever.
Still he says:
"Postponing military action merely provides Iran a window to expand, disperse and harden its nuclear facilities against attack. The sooner the United States takes action, the better."
In other words, two fronts aren't enough so add Yemen. Then make it a foursome with Iran, the sooner America does it the better, and The New York Times promotes this view after expressing caution in its January 3 editorial headlined, "No delusion of bombing Iran" and saying:
"Fortunately, President-elect Barack Obama says his approach to Iran will include 'a new emphasis on respect and a new emphasis on being willing to talk....' "
This approach "may or may not work," says The Times. "But it is a road that (should be tried and) should have been taken years ago."
Not now apparently or earlier, in fact, as Times writers play an indispensable role feeding misinformation to the world and supporting imperial wars with the rest of the dominant media. They'll have plenty to say as a new Yemen front unfolds and maybe an Iran one to follow.
Saturday, 2 January 2010
The Yemen Connection ..Part 3...
Over the past week I have been investigating our new terror target, the people of the nation of Yemen. Let’s not fool ourselves anymore, we aren’t going there to stop “al Qaeda” from lighting up more panty sparklers; we are going there to prop-up a failing corrupt regime who just happens to be “pro-Western”, “pro-business”, and deeply indebted to the World Bank and the IMF. The Yemeni government is in deep trouble from all sides and they need to be bailed-out. With all the money and resources at stake, the debauched Yemeni government is just “too big to fail”. At least, that’s how Washington sees it.
Our leaders in congress and the White House are in the process of trying to convince us that we have to go to the rescue of one of the most unethical and immoral dictators in the modern world, without ever mentioning his name; a man who was probably responsible for at least two violent coups in his country, who has been “president” of Yemen (North Yemen since 1978 and then the unified Yemen (north and south) since 1990) for over 30 years, and who has richly rewarded himself and his family at the cost of the dirt poor people of Yemen. That is who President Obama is determined to support in Yemen; a man who makes Saddam Hussein look like the Dalai Lama.
We are going to Yemen in order to save the snakes from the people they rob from and rule over: a self-appointed lifetime dictator and a massive new eight billion dollar Liquid Natural Gas pipeline that is partially owned by a long time Bush family friend, Ray L. Hunt.
But any examination of the fragile state of Yemen’s union would be completely remiss to ignore one of the biggest and most recent business developments that country has ever seen; the Yemen Liquid Natural Gas (YLNG) pipeline. Called ”largest economic project in the history of modern Yemen.”, this pipeline is an $8 billion dollar investment, which was just brought online on Nov. 7th of this year. Maintaining the security of the pipeline for the myriad of investors is of the up-most importance to the embattled President of Yemen. And apparently, it’s also very important to the White House. A cursory examination of the “investors” page of the YLNG website might explain why.
You see, aside from other prominent LNG companies, the 2nd largest investor in this multi-billion dollar project is none other than Hunt Oil. That’s the same Hunt Oil that got a major no-bid deal, at an estimated value of between $8 and $15 billion dollars, with the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq back in 2007. That deal, when it finally went public, was investigated by officials in the US, but neither Hunt Oil, the Kurdish Regional Government, nor the Bush administration would release any information on the deal at all. It was a lovily little sweetheart deal for Ray Lee Hunt, a longtime family friend of the Bushs, which helped thrust Hunt into the multi billionaire class of criminal. And that doesn’t even mention Hunt’s ties to the CIA… the same CIA that the “underwear bombers” daddy spoke with several times prior to the Christmas Day sparkler attack.
In the company of snakes.
Snake #1 – Field Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh – Dictator of Yemen for the past 30 years
"President" Saleh
Mr. Saleh (I can’t bring myself to call him “president”) has ruled Yemen since it’s unification in 1990 and he ruled North Yemen since 1979 when he apparently overthrew the president in one of his many coups. The first presidential “election” in Yemen was held 9 years later and, surprize, Mr. Saleh won the election with 91% of the vote. He immediately started changing the laws of Yemen, kept himself in power for a longer term and created a “111-member, presidentially appointed council of advisors with legislative power” which basically overruled the Yemeni Parliament rubber-stamping whatever Mr. Saleh and his cronies wanted. Then in 2006, after saying he wasn’t going to run again for the office, Mr. Salah changed his mind at the last-minute and “won” the “election”… this time with a slightly more believable 77% of the votes.
Mr. Saleh knows that his grip on the reigns of power in Yemen is slipping. He has known it for quite sometime. Between the rebels fighting in the north and the separatist movement in the south, Saleh’s corrupt government is in dire shape. His creditors at the World Bank and the IMF, as well as his global investors also know it. Years of oppression and vast economic inequality in his country have left many of Yemen’s 23 million citizens angry and ready for “CHANGE”.
This does not make for a stable business environment for their new $8 billion dollar LNG project and steps must be taken to insure the long-term viability of the returns on their investments.
Enter… the underwear bomber.
Even a cursory examination of the geography of Yemen shows the real threat facing the Saleh governement and their assorted investors.
LNG and OIL Map of Yemen 2009
As you can see from the map, several import highways and transport routes run right through the disputed territories north of the capital where the rebels are currently waging their own rebellion. The LNG pipeline runs from the south of the capital up to the north-eastern area where the only LNG refineries are, then down to the south.
Were the south to actually win their independence from Mr. Saleh’s Yemen, virtually all of the oil and LNG production and transportation facilities would no longer be under his control.
Effectively, were Mr. Saleh to lose both of these skirmishes, he would be president of a land-locked, oil and LNG producing state with virtually no means to transport what little natural resources he still controlled. He would be at the mercy of whatever government formed in the south, and so would his investors.
So they can’t allow that to happen. Yet the people of this nation, the United States, are getting sick and tired of waging endless wars for banks and oil-men while we desperately struggle to find a job to pay for our new mandated insurance policies. So how do we get involved without telling the US citizens what we are really doing there?
Well, a Nigerian banker, with direct financial ties to the nation of Yemen, goes to the State Department and then to the CIA and all of a sudden his son goes and lights himself on fire on a plane over Detroit. That little bonfire of the panties then serves as President Obama’s primary justification for engaging the American war machine and all it’s CIA/drone/mercenary powers.
One might think, if one were inclined too think, that perhaps the CIA had something to do with the planning of the “panty bomb”. I mean, after all, without a real detonator, the PETN in Umar’s pants would only provide a pleasant sparkly light show on Christmas Day, and any bomb maker certainly knows that. You couple that with a preplanned Danish film-maker who is ready to leap into action to put out the fire and keep the real passengers from beating the patsy to death, and you got yourself a first-rate false-flag operation with no death-toll, no horrible crash, and all the justification in the world to run down to Yemen and start drone-bombing those darn peasants. You whisk off the panty-bomber never to be seen again, plant all the right stories for the FBI to tell the media he “confessed” too, and you disappear the hapless Danish film-maker after he does one or two interviews, just in case he gets a little greedy.
Simple; clean; and relatively humanitarian… as far as false-flag operations go. All you have to do is connect the CIA to the panty bomber (done via Daddy Warbucks visit and follow-up phone calls) and then to someone heavily invested in Yemen.
Enter…
Snake #2 - Ray Lee Hunt - Texas Oil Man, Long Time Friend of the Bush Family, and CIA asset
CIA Asset Ray Hunt
Snake number two got his start in Yemen. Actually, he got his start at birth, being born into the Hunt Oil family fortune but then he moved on to create his own master of the universe pool of wealth in 1984 when he found and developed oil in Yemen. He built a refinery and laid a pipeline in Yemen which increased his wealth from an estimated $200 million to about $4 or 5 billion or so.
Ray Hunt is certainly one of those quiet powers running behind the scenes in DC. Not only was he a life-long friend of the Bush family but he also sat on the board of directors of Cheney’s Halliburton company, yet another no-bid beneficiary of the war on terror.
With respect to government service, in October 2001 and again in January 2006, Hunt was appointed by President George W. Bush to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in Washington, D.C. Hunt was also appointed to the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in 1998 and served as its chairman for four years until rotating off of the board on December 31, 2006. Additionally, he is currently a member of the National Petroleum Council (an industry advisory organization to the Secretary of Energy) and served as its chairman from June 1991 to July 1994. Hunt Oil website
While serving on the Presidents Foreign Intelligence advisory Board in 2007, Ray Hunt was able to parley that insider connection to a mega-deal in northern Iraq for control of the Kurdish oil fields. Now he finds that not only is his oil refinery and pipeline in danger in Yemen, but also his new 17% investment in the YLNG deal. Eight billion dollars invested and the potential of $30 to $40 billion in returns in the next few years alone. And all that investment sits in the southern part of a nation in turmoil which looks more and more each day like it might completely implode.
Texas’ Hunt Oil Co. and Kurdistan’s regional government said they have signed a production-sharing contract for petroleum exploration in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, the first such deal since the Kurds passed their own oil and gas law in August.
A Hunt subsidiary, Hunt Oil Co. of the Kurdistan Region, will begin geological survey and seismic work by the end of 2007 and hopes to drill an exploration well in 2008, the parties said in a news release Saturday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. CBS 2007
It’s not suprising that Hunt just happened to squeak out a pretty deal for this new Kurdish oil cash-cow under the Bush administration… after all, George H. W. Bush actually presided over the refinery inauguration of Hunt’s Yemeni plant in 1986 while he was vice president.
———-
Hunt (17.22%)
Hunt Oil is one of the world’s largest privately held independent oil and gas companies, with a strong domestic and international presence. Hunt’s 1984 oil and gas discovery in Yemen has generated over 1 billion barrels of oil exports to date. The hydrocarbon reserves discovered by Hunt contain sufficient quantities of natural gas to underpin the Yemen LNG project. Some US$2 billion have been invested in drilling wells and developing infrastructure to produce, process and export the reserves. Most of the infrastructure will also be utilised for the LNG project, with only relatively modest investments necessary to produce and deliver the gas for liquefaction. Yemen LNG Pipeline website
Two major investments in troubled regions for a politically well-connected billionaire oil man. What are the odds, huh? What are the odds that just as Yemen is losing control over their impoverished population, along comes the underwear bomber to provide just the right political cover for our escalation in Yemen… and without so much as hurting a hair on anyone’s head? Perfect timing you might say.
Hunt’s connections to the CIA go back a little ways. The Nov. 2006 flights to Camp Peary landing strip, a CIA base, are only part of the connection. The other is Poppy Bush himself. George H. W. Bush ran the CIA for several years so it is certainly reasonable to assume a connection there.
Of Dictators and Oil Men
So off we go to continue the Global War on Terror in yet another Middle Eastern country.
President Obama has announced that they are currently trying to pin-point the exact al Qaeda connections in Yemen who made the “sparkler bomb” while other unnamed officials are reporting that they and the Yemeni government (read as the Dictator) are carefully picking out “al Qaeda” targets to launch retaliatory attacks against using US cruise missiles and various drones. And all this they would have us believe, is because of the fizzly underpants of a lonely college kid.
No ladies and gentlemen, this is a much more complicated and dangerous snake pit we are about to jump into. It’s not “al Qaeda” that we are fighting over there, it’s the general population in the north and the south. The general population who wants to rid themselves of one of the worst snakes in modern history; their president.
And our president waves his silly Nobel Peace Prize and pledges to attack “the terrorists” half a world away for “freedom and democracy and all things Obama” in the world. Our president lies through his teeth and fails to remember that lovely speech he gave in Egypt just a little while ago. He launches off yet another war for dictators, bankers, and oil men while hoping against all hope that it takes a decade or two for the general population of this country to find out what is really behind it all.
Our leaders in congress and the White House are in the process of trying to convince us that we have to go to the rescue of one of the most unethical and immoral dictators in the modern world, without ever mentioning his name; a man who was probably responsible for at least two violent coups in his country, who has been “president” of Yemen (North Yemen since 1978 and then the unified Yemen (north and south) since 1990) for over 30 years, and who has richly rewarded himself and his family at the cost of the dirt poor people of Yemen. That is who President Obama is determined to support in Yemen; a man who makes Saddam Hussein look like the Dalai Lama.
We are going to Yemen in order to save the snakes from the people they rob from and rule over: a self-appointed lifetime dictator and a massive new eight billion dollar Liquid Natural Gas pipeline that is partially owned by a long time Bush family friend, Ray L. Hunt.
But any examination of the fragile state of Yemen’s union would be completely remiss to ignore one of the biggest and most recent business developments that country has ever seen; the Yemen Liquid Natural Gas (YLNG) pipeline. Called ”largest economic project in the history of modern Yemen.”, this pipeline is an $8 billion dollar investment, which was just brought online on Nov. 7th of this year. Maintaining the security of the pipeline for the myriad of investors is of the up-most importance to the embattled President of Yemen. And apparently, it’s also very important to the White House. A cursory examination of the “investors” page of the YLNG website might explain why.
You see, aside from other prominent LNG companies, the 2nd largest investor in this multi-billion dollar project is none other than Hunt Oil. That’s the same Hunt Oil that got a major no-bid deal, at an estimated value of between $8 and $15 billion dollars, with the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq back in 2007. That deal, when it finally went public, was investigated by officials in the US, but neither Hunt Oil, the Kurdish Regional Government, nor the Bush administration would release any information on the deal at all. It was a lovily little sweetheart deal for Ray Lee Hunt, a longtime family friend of the Bushs, which helped thrust Hunt into the multi billionaire class of criminal. And that doesn’t even mention Hunt’s ties to the CIA… the same CIA that the “underwear bombers” daddy spoke with several times prior to the Christmas Day sparkler attack.
In the company of snakes.
Snake #1 – Field Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh – Dictator of Yemen for the past 30 years
"President" Saleh
Mr. Saleh (I can’t bring myself to call him “president”) has ruled Yemen since it’s unification in 1990 and he ruled North Yemen since 1979 when he apparently overthrew the president in one of his many coups. The first presidential “election” in Yemen was held 9 years later and, surprize, Mr. Saleh won the election with 91% of the vote. He immediately started changing the laws of Yemen, kept himself in power for a longer term and created a “111-member, presidentially appointed council of advisors with legislative power” which basically overruled the Yemeni Parliament rubber-stamping whatever Mr. Saleh and his cronies wanted. Then in 2006, after saying he wasn’t going to run again for the office, Mr. Salah changed his mind at the last-minute and “won” the “election”… this time with a slightly more believable 77% of the votes.
Mr. Saleh knows that his grip on the reigns of power in Yemen is slipping. He has known it for quite sometime. Between the rebels fighting in the north and the separatist movement in the south, Saleh’s corrupt government is in dire shape. His creditors at the World Bank and the IMF, as well as his global investors also know it. Years of oppression and vast economic inequality in his country have left many of Yemen’s 23 million citizens angry and ready for “CHANGE”.
This does not make for a stable business environment for their new $8 billion dollar LNG project and steps must be taken to insure the long-term viability of the returns on their investments.
Enter… the underwear bomber.
Even a cursory examination of the geography of Yemen shows the real threat facing the Saleh governement and their assorted investors.
LNG and OIL Map of Yemen 2009
As you can see from the map, several import highways and transport routes run right through the disputed territories north of the capital where the rebels are currently waging their own rebellion. The LNG pipeline runs from the south of the capital up to the north-eastern area where the only LNG refineries are, then down to the south.
Were the south to actually win their independence from Mr. Saleh’s Yemen, virtually all of the oil and LNG production and transportation facilities would no longer be under his control.
Effectively, were Mr. Saleh to lose both of these skirmishes, he would be president of a land-locked, oil and LNG producing state with virtually no means to transport what little natural resources he still controlled. He would be at the mercy of whatever government formed in the south, and so would his investors.
So they can’t allow that to happen. Yet the people of this nation, the United States, are getting sick and tired of waging endless wars for banks and oil-men while we desperately struggle to find a job to pay for our new mandated insurance policies. So how do we get involved without telling the US citizens what we are really doing there?
Well, a Nigerian banker, with direct financial ties to the nation of Yemen, goes to the State Department and then to the CIA and all of a sudden his son goes and lights himself on fire on a plane over Detroit. That little bonfire of the panties then serves as President Obama’s primary justification for engaging the American war machine and all it’s CIA/drone/mercenary powers.
One might think, if one were inclined too think, that perhaps the CIA had something to do with the planning of the “panty bomb”. I mean, after all, without a real detonator, the PETN in Umar’s pants would only provide a pleasant sparkly light show on Christmas Day, and any bomb maker certainly knows that. You couple that with a preplanned Danish film-maker who is ready to leap into action to put out the fire and keep the real passengers from beating the patsy to death, and you got yourself a first-rate false-flag operation with no death-toll, no horrible crash, and all the justification in the world to run down to Yemen and start drone-bombing those darn peasants. You whisk off the panty-bomber never to be seen again, plant all the right stories for the FBI to tell the media he “confessed” too, and you disappear the hapless Danish film-maker after he does one or two interviews, just in case he gets a little greedy.
Simple; clean; and relatively humanitarian… as far as false-flag operations go. All you have to do is connect the CIA to the panty bomber (done via Daddy Warbucks visit and follow-up phone calls) and then to someone heavily invested in Yemen.
Enter…
Snake #2 - Ray Lee Hunt - Texas Oil Man, Long Time Friend of the Bush Family, and CIA asset
CIA Asset Ray Hunt
Snake number two got his start in Yemen. Actually, he got his start at birth, being born into the Hunt Oil family fortune but then he moved on to create his own master of the universe pool of wealth in 1984 when he found and developed oil in Yemen. He built a refinery and laid a pipeline in Yemen which increased his wealth from an estimated $200 million to about $4 or 5 billion or so.
Ray Hunt is certainly one of those quiet powers running behind the scenes in DC. Not only was he a life-long friend of the Bush family but he also sat on the board of directors of Cheney’s Halliburton company, yet another no-bid beneficiary of the war on terror.
With respect to government service, in October 2001 and again in January 2006, Hunt was appointed by President George W. Bush to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in Washington, D.C. Hunt was also appointed to the board of directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in 1998 and served as its chairman for four years until rotating off of the board on December 31, 2006. Additionally, he is currently a member of the National Petroleum Council (an industry advisory organization to the Secretary of Energy) and served as its chairman from June 1991 to July 1994. Hunt Oil website
While serving on the Presidents Foreign Intelligence advisory Board in 2007, Ray Hunt was able to parley that insider connection to a mega-deal in northern Iraq for control of the Kurdish oil fields. Now he finds that not only is his oil refinery and pipeline in danger in Yemen, but also his new 17% investment in the YLNG deal. Eight billion dollars invested and the potential of $30 to $40 billion in returns in the next few years alone. And all that investment sits in the southern part of a nation in turmoil which looks more and more each day like it might completely implode.
Texas’ Hunt Oil Co. and Kurdistan’s regional government said they have signed a production-sharing contract for petroleum exploration in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq, the first such deal since the Kurds passed their own oil and gas law in August.
A Hunt subsidiary, Hunt Oil Co. of the Kurdistan Region, will begin geological survey and seismic work by the end of 2007 and hopes to drill an exploration well in 2008, the parties said in a news release Saturday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. CBS 2007
It’s not suprising that Hunt just happened to squeak out a pretty deal for this new Kurdish oil cash-cow under the Bush administration… after all, George H. W. Bush actually presided over the refinery inauguration of Hunt’s Yemeni plant in 1986 while he was vice president.
———-
Hunt (17.22%)
Hunt Oil is one of the world’s largest privately held independent oil and gas companies, with a strong domestic and international presence. Hunt’s 1984 oil and gas discovery in Yemen has generated over 1 billion barrels of oil exports to date. The hydrocarbon reserves discovered by Hunt contain sufficient quantities of natural gas to underpin the Yemen LNG project. Some US$2 billion have been invested in drilling wells and developing infrastructure to produce, process and export the reserves. Most of the infrastructure will also be utilised for the LNG project, with only relatively modest investments necessary to produce and deliver the gas for liquefaction. Yemen LNG Pipeline website
Two major investments in troubled regions for a politically well-connected billionaire oil man. What are the odds, huh? What are the odds that just as Yemen is losing control over their impoverished population, along comes the underwear bomber to provide just the right political cover for our escalation in Yemen… and without so much as hurting a hair on anyone’s head? Perfect timing you might say.
Hunt’s connections to the CIA go back a little ways. The Nov. 2006 flights to Camp Peary landing strip, a CIA base, are only part of the connection. The other is Poppy Bush himself. George H. W. Bush ran the CIA for several years so it is certainly reasonable to assume a connection there.
Of Dictators and Oil Men
So off we go to continue the Global War on Terror in yet another Middle Eastern country.
President Obama has announced that they are currently trying to pin-point the exact al Qaeda connections in Yemen who made the “sparkler bomb” while other unnamed officials are reporting that they and the Yemeni government (read as the Dictator) are carefully picking out “al Qaeda” targets to launch retaliatory attacks against using US cruise missiles and various drones. And all this they would have us believe, is because of the fizzly underpants of a lonely college kid.
No ladies and gentlemen, this is a much more complicated and dangerous snake pit we are about to jump into. It’s not “al Qaeda” that we are fighting over there, it’s the general population in the north and the south. The general population who wants to rid themselves of one of the worst snakes in modern history; their president.
And our president waves his silly Nobel Peace Prize and pledges to attack “the terrorists” half a world away for “freedom and democracy and all things Obama” in the world. Our president lies through his teeth and fails to remember that lovely speech he gave in Egypt just a little while ago. He launches off yet another war for dictators, bankers, and oil men while hoping against all hope that it takes a decade or two for the general population of this country to find out what is really behind it all.
The Yemen Connection ...Part 2..
You are not being told the full story about what is happening in Yemen. Like always, the truth is a little more difficult to ascertain than simply turning on Fox News or CNN while you prep the kids for dinner. Yemen is not on the verge of becoming a haven for terrorists to launch attacks against the U.S. as the war-mongering Joe Lieberman and his faction of corporatist shills would have you believe. The truth of the story is much easier to understand, once you do a little leg-work. Let’s begin with the basics.
“Let’s begin with level flight”
In December of 2009, President Obama gave the order for U.S. warplanes to attack targets in Northern Yemen in order to stop an “imminent attack against a US asset“. That was a rather refreshingly honest public statement about the attacks released right after they happened by someone who has probably been fired for it. Can’t have people attacking our assets, now can we?
The most credible accounting of those attacks puts the casualties somewhere in the upper 70s range, with 17 women and 23 children killed. Many more injured. Then we find out that President Obama was really attempting to assassinate a Muslim cleric who supposedly had some communications with the alledged Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Hasan. But that story didn’t hold up too well either in that people started wondering about the justification of attempted political assassinations for the slaughter of women and children.
Let’s see; killing kids to protect our “assets” or to whack-out a Muslim holy-man… Hmmm. Those stories aren’t so good. They don’t follow the ”Party” talking point of “CHANGE”. So along comes the “underwear sparkler” and everyone stops talking about what is really happening in Yemen, to focus on a lonely young man and his soiled panties. Yeah, that’ll work.
Only in America…
All of a sudden, President Obama is justified for attacking Yemen, though it doesn’t really follow any logical time-line, and the Obama administration is given a measure of polical cover to step up our military involvement in that country in order to fight “the terrorists”.
Dec. 16th – Shiite rebels on Wednesday accused the US air force of bombing villages in northern Yemen amid their conflict with government forces and neighbouring Saudi Arabia.
“The American air force committed massacres … and used all types of military weapons to destroy villages and houses and schools and public facilities and to kill civilians,” the rebels said in a statement.
“Direct American intervention began early last week, and bombing of various areas of north Yemen continues until now,” it said.
The rebels, also known as Huthis, have been fighting the Yemeni government on and off since 2004. In August, government forces launched an all-out offensive codenamed “Operation Scorched Earth” aimed at wiping out the revolt.
… US Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley, at a press briefing in Washington, categorically denied his country was militarily involved in the conflict in northern Yemen.
“Those kinds of reports keep cropping up. We do not have a military role in this conflict,” he said on Tuesday. Maktoob News
Does the Gulf of Tonkin incident come to mind? It should.
This whole thing is so transparent, a blind man could see it. What we have in Yemen is a corrupt, brutal, neoliberal government (in bed with the IMF, the World Bank, and the Islamic Development Bank) who are on the brink of losing control of their country and so another false-flag operation is created to generate public outrage in the US and subsequently, support for further military actions in that country to prop-up the corrupt government.
Upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama said “This award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity,”. At about the same time, the UN was begging the Obama administration for a mere $23 million dollars to help supply humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of Yemeni refugees created by the new wave of violence created in Aug of this year under what is called “Operation Scorched Earth“. The Obama administration refused. However, they have committed to providing over $120 million dollars to the corrupt government of Yemen in additional military aid.
Sept 17, 2009 - More than 80 people have been killed in an air raid on a camp for displaced people in northern Yemen, reports say.
According to witnesses, many of those killed in the raid – which took place near the border with Saudi Arabia – were women, children and old people.
Government forces have been trying to contain a growing insurgency in the area by rebels known as Houthis.
… Tens of thousands of Yemenis have fled the fighting in the north, cramming into makeshift camps, schools and barns, as aid groups struggle to get supplies to them.
The UN said that the plight of civilians has reached “alarming levels” and that there has so far been no response to its appeal to raise US $23.5m to help the displaced. BBC
“Justice and Dignity”
What’s happening in Yemen isn’t hard to understand. Once again, we have an impoverished nation being taken advantage of by the IMF and the World Bank who are forcing their draconian neoliberal economic “reforms’ on the country which are devastating to the vast majority of the population while enriching an elite, corrupt few. As has often been the case in other countries where these plans have been enacted, the general population takes about all they can, then revolution starts brewing in the air so the military dictatorships installed by supporters of the IMF and the World Bank have to step up their oppression to stamp out the efforts of those who seek social and economic justice in the nation. Often times in the past, the CIA or other US assets have been used to lend support to these dictators as they quell social unrest in the most brutal of ways.
In the northern parts of Yemen, the Zaidi rebels known as the “Huthis”, have been involved in a 5 year struggle to gain more control of localized government in their region. They accuse the government of Yemen as being corrupt and puppets of US and international banks, namely the IMF and World Bank, among others. It was in this region and against these people that US warplanes, under orders from President Obama himself, attacked early last month, killing a reported 23 children. Operation Scorched Earth is a drastic military crackdown, launched by the Yemen government in August of this year, that strove to completely wipe out all of the Huthis resistance in the north. The have been aided not only by the US, but also the military of Saudi Arabia who at first denied being involved in this conflict, but now they admit they have been attacking the Huthis from the north. Turns out that the Saudi based Islamic Development Bank is also deeply invested in Yemen, which also has ties to the “underwear bombers” father… as luck just happens to have it.
Two world powers and the corrupt government of Yemen launching massive military campaigns against a forming revolutionary movement in the north of Yemen called the Huthis. All of this is quite recent and there is a reason for that.
You see, the Huthis uprising in the north is not the whole of the problem for the corrupt government of Yemen. In fact, that might not be the biggest threat against their control. In the south of the nation, there is a massive separatist movement taking place fueled by record poverty and social discord caused by those same economic “reforms”. Yemen had been two nations for a long time and the people of the south remember how much better life was under their previously socialist government.
A separatist movement in southern Yemen has gained political momentum and grown more violent recently, with a series of demonstrations and armed confrontations that have left at least eight people dead and dozens injured in the past week. May 2009 New York Times
Since Operation Scorched Earth started, demonstrations and public outrage over the treatment of the refugees in the north have grown increasingly hostile toward the ruling government. The separatist movement is gaining strength and their plight is gaining attention all around the world. Of course, in the land of the make-believe laureate President, our media hasn’t hardly mentioned it.
Jan 1, 2010 – “Our fighters have the necessary experience (of war) … but we are concerned about our innocent civilians … our women and children,” Houthi said in the tape, urging global condemnation of what he said were killings of many civilians in the war.
In southern Yemen, hundreds of supporters of the opposition Southern Movement marched on Thursday to demand the release of those arrested in earlier protests, residents and websites said.
Both the Shi’ite rebels and the southern separatists complain of social and economic discrimination, which the government denies. Maktoob News
It would seem that our reputation precedes us in the Muslim world.
With the new justification of stopping “the terrorists” firmly established by a corrupt bankers son and his “sparkler underwear”, the leader of the rebellion in the north seems to be ready to cut a deal before his people suffer under the same dirty boot that has trampled so many other Muslim men, women, and children over the past 9 years. Rather than submit his people to that, it would appear the Huthis leadership is ready to submit.
But like the Taliban before them, who attempted to hand bin Laden over to the Bush administration right after 9/11 but were rebuked, the Huthis may not be allowed to get their people off the hook that easily.
As I have detailed in an earlier writing, the World Bank, IMF and Islamic Development Bank have deep financial ties to the current regime in Yemen. Since June of this year alone, they (and a few others) have sunk over 5 billion dollars into propping up the government in various loans and investments. That money stands to be lost if there were a regime change in Yemen. Especially if a socialist or populist leadership were to take the helm. Not only would they lose that money, but they would also lose all the future revenues those investments will generate. Billions upon billions of dollars, gone up in smoke if the current regime can’t squash the popular uprising of millions of its own citizens who are demanding nothing more than fair and equitable treatment from their own government.
But they don’t want to just crush the uprising; they need assurances that the unstable puppet government they have in place there will continue to control them as well as stop the separatist movement in the south. That’s going to take a little more work than a few bombing raids on refugee camps. For that, the promise of future stability, the international bankers and corporate elites are going to want to see a deepening of US involvement, on the ground or with teams of “advisors” in key locations throughout Yemen. The last thing they want to see is this massive popular instability quelled briefly just to raise its ugly head again in a few years. To that end, we now have al Qaeda in Yemen to supply the necessary justification for yet another US occupation. President Obama has already sworn to provide every resource the US can muster to clamp down on “the terrorists” in Yemen.
So the leader of a 5 year revolution in the north of Yemen has basically thrown his hands up and offered to work out a deal rather than allowing the US military to come in and “Afpak” the people he has been fighting for. And all it took was one obviously staged “underwear sparkler” event from the son of a corrupt banker. That’s all it took for the US media to do its part and play up the attack as if it were 9/11 itself. Facing the reality of a gullible and intellectually lazy US population combined with the military, industrial, congressional, financial complex here in America, the people’s revolution in northern Yemen is forced to back down like the fizzling dud fire-cracker in someone’s “underwear bomb”.
Surrender will never be enough
It just isn’t the insurgents they need to crush the life out of, but the very idea that people can be insurgents, that they can make a stand and take up for their brothers living under the boot of oppression; that too must die.
The notion that people are born with individual human rights which are granted to them by God at birth; that quaint, outdated myth must also be destroyed.
It is the very ideas of civil society, of social justice, of equality and freedom … they must be waterboarded out of the national conciousness.
The banks, after all, need assurances for their long-term investments. Not to mention they also make money off the debt of war as well, the endless war, the 100 year war, the long war. The endless debt.
So thus, the American war machine is poised to ride into yet another Muslim country with a Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the helm
“Let’s begin with level flight”
In December of 2009, President Obama gave the order for U.S. warplanes to attack targets in Northern Yemen in order to stop an “imminent attack against a US asset“. That was a rather refreshingly honest public statement about the attacks released right after they happened by someone who has probably been fired for it. Can’t have people attacking our assets, now can we?
The most credible accounting of those attacks puts the casualties somewhere in the upper 70s range, with 17 women and 23 children killed. Many more injured. Then we find out that President Obama was really attempting to assassinate a Muslim cleric who supposedly had some communications with the alledged Ft. Hood shooter, Maj. Hasan. But that story didn’t hold up too well either in that people started wondering about the justification of attempted political assassinations for the slaughter of women and children.
Let’s see; killing kids to protect our “assets” or to whack-out a Muslim holy-man… Hmmm. Those stories aren’t so good. They don’t follow the ”Party” talking point of “CHANGE”. So along comes the “underwear sparkler” and everyone stops talking about what is really happening in Yemen, to focus on a lonely young man and his soiled panties. Yeah, that’ll work.
Only in America…
All of a sudden, President Obama is justified for attacking Yemen, though it doesn’t really follow any logical time-line, and the Obama administration is given a measure of polical cover to step up our military involvement in that country in order to fight “the terrorists”.
Dec. 16th – Shiite rebels on Wednesday accused the US air force of bombing villages in northern Yemen amid their conflict with government forces and neighbouring Saudi Arabia.
“The American air force committed massacres … and used all types of military weapons to destroy villages and houses and schools and public facilities and to kill civilians,” the rebels said in a statement.
“Direct American intervention began early last week, and bombing of various areas of north Yemen continues until now,” it said.
The rebels, also known as Huthis, have been fighting the Yemeni government on and off since 2004. In August, government forces launched an all-out offensive codenamed “Operation Scorched Earth” aimed at wiping out the revolt.
… US Assistant Secretary of State Philip Crowley, at a press briefing in Washington, categorically denied his country was militarily involved in the conflict in northern Yemen.
“Those kinds of reports keep cropping up. We do not have a military role in this conflict,” he said on Tuesday. Maktoob News
Does the Gulf of Tonkin incident come to mind? It should.
This whole thing is so transparent, a blind man could see it. What we have in Yemen is a corrupt, brutal, neoliberal government (in bed with the IMF, the World Bank, and the Islamic Development Bank) who are on the brink of losing control of their country and so another false-flag operation is created to generate public outrage in the US and subsequently, support for further military actions in that country to prop-up the corrupt government.
Upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama said “This award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity,”. At about the same time, the UN was begging the Obama administration for a mere $23 million dollars to help supply humanitarian aid to tens of thousands of Yemeni refugees created by the new wave of violence created in Aug of this year under what is called “Operation Scorched Earth“. The Obama administration refused. However, they have committed to providing over $120 million dollars to the corrupt government of Yemen in additional military aid.
Sept 17, 2009 - More than 80 people have been killed in an air raid on a camp for displaced people in northern Yemen, reports say.
According to witnesses, many of those killed in the raid – which took place near the border with Saudi Arabia – were women, children and old people.
Government forces have been trying to contain a growing insurgency in the area by rebels known as Houthis.
… Tens of thousands of Yemenis have fled the fighting in the north, cramming into makeshift camps, schools and barns, as aid groups struggle to get supplies to them.
The UN said that the plight of civilians has reached “alarming levels” and that there has so far been no response to its appeal to raise US $23.5m to help the displaced. BBC
“Justice and Dignity”
What’s happening in Yemen isn’t hard to understand. Once again, we have an impoverished nation being taken advantage of by the IMF and the World Bank who are forcing their draconian neoliberal economic “reforms’ on the country which are devastating to the vast majority of the population while enriching an elite, corrupt few. As has often been the case in other countries where these plans have been enacted, the general population takes about all they can, then revolution starts brewing in the air so the military dictatorships installed by supporters of the IMF and the World Bank have to step up their oppression to stamp out the efforts of those who seek social and economic justice in the nation. Often times in the past, the CIA or other US assets have been used to lend support to these dictators as they quell social unrest in the most brutal of ways.
In the northern parts of Yemen, the Zaidi rebels known as the “Huthis”, have been involved in a 5 year struggle to gain more control of localized government in their region. They accuse the government of Yemen as being corrupt and puppets of US and international banks, namely the IMF and World Bank, among others. It was in this region and against these people that US warplanes, under orders from President Obama himself, attacked early last month, killing a reported 23 children. Operation Scorched Earth is a drastic military crackdown, launched by the Yemen government in August of this year, that strove to completely wipe out all of the Huthis resistance in the north. The have been aided not only by the US, but also the military of Saudi Arabia who at first denied being involved in this conflict, but now they admit they have been attacking the Huthis from the north. Turns out that the Saudi based Islamic Development Bank is also deeply invested in Yemen, which also has ties to the “underwear bombers” father… as luck just happens to have it.
Two world powers and the corrupt government of Yemen launching massive military campaigns against a forming revolutionary movement in the north of Yemen called the Huthis. All of this is quite recent and there is a reason for that.
You see, the Huthis uprising in the north is not the whole of the problem for the corrupt government of Yemen. In fact, that might not be the biggest threat against their control. In the south of the nation, there is a massive separatist movement taking place fueled by record poverty and social discord caused by those same economic “reforms”. Yemen had been two nations for a long time and the people of the south remember how much better life was under their previously socialist government.
A separatist movement in southern Yemen has gained political momentum and grown more violent recently, with a series of demonstrations and armed confrontations that have left at least eight people dead and dozens injured in the past week. May 2009 New York Times
Since Operation Scorched Earth started, demonstrations and public outrage over the treatment of the refugees in the north have grown increasingly hostile toward the ruling government. The separatist movement is gaining strength and their plight is gaining attention all around the world. Of course, in the land of the make-believe laureate President, our media hasn’t hardly mentioned it.
Jan 1, 2010 – “Our fighters have the necessary experience (of war) … but we are concerned about our innocent civilians … our women and children,” Houthi said in the tape, urging global condemnation of what he said were killings of many civilians in the war.
In southern Yemen, hundreds of supporters of the opposition Southern Movement marched on Thursday to demand the release of those arrested in earlier protests, residents and websites said.
Both the Shi’ite rebels and the southern separatists complain of social and economic discrimination, which the government denies. Maktoob News
It would seem that our reputation precedes us in the Muslim world.
With the new justification of stopping “the terrorists” firmly established by a corrupt bankers son and his “sparkler underwear”, the leader of the rebellion in the north seems to be ready to cut a deal before his people suffer under the same dirty boot that has trampled so many other Muslim men, women, and children over the past 9 years. Rather than submit his people to that, it would appear the Huthis leadership is ready to submit.
But like the Taliban before them, who attempted to hand bin Laden over to the Bush administration right after 9/11 but were rebuked, the Huthis may not be allowed to get their people off the hook that easily.
As I have detailed in an earlier writing, the World Bank, IMF and Islamic Development Bank have deep financial ties to the current regime in Yemen. Since June of this year alone, they (and a few others) have sunk over 5 billion dollars into propping up the government in various loans and investments. That money stands to be lost if there were a regime change in Yemen. Especially if a socialist or populist leadership were to take the helm. Not only would they lose that money, but they would also lose all the future revenues those investments will generate. Billions upon billions of dollars, gone up in smoke if the current regime can’t squash the popular uprising of millions of its own citizens who are demanding nothing more than fair and equitable treatment from their own government.
But they don’t want to just crush the uprising; they need assurances that the unstable puppet government they have in place there will continue to control them as well as stop the separatist movement in the south. That’s going to take a little more work than a few bombing raids on refugee camps. For that, the promise of future stability, the international bankers and corporate elites are going to want to see a deepening of US involvement, on the ground or with teams of “advisors” in key locations throughout Yemen. The last thing they want to see is this massive popular instability quelled briefly just to raise its ugly head again in a few years. To that end, we now have al Qaeda in Yemen to supply the necessary justification for yet another US occupation. President Obama has already sworn to provide every resource the US can muster to clamp down on “the terrorists” in Yemen.
So the leader of a 5 year revolution in the north of Yemen has basically thrown his hands up and offered to work out a deal rather than allowing the US military to come in and “Afpak” the people he has been fighting for. And all it took was one obviously staged “underwear sparkler” event from the son of a corrupt banker. That’s all it took for the US media to do its part and play up the attack as if it were 9/11 itself. Facing the reality of a gullible and intellectually lazy US population combined with the military, industrial, congressional, financial complex here in America, the people’s revolution in northern Yemen is forced to back down like the fizzling dud fire-cracker in someone’s “underwear bomb”.
Surrender will never be enough
It just isn’t the insurgents they need to crush the life out of, but the very idea that people can be insurgents, that they can make a stand and take up for their brothers living under the boot of oppression; that too must die.
The notion that people are born with individual human rights which are granted to them by God at birth; that quaint, outdated myth must also be destroyed.
It is the very ideas of civil society, of social justice, of equality and freedom … they must be waterboarded out of the national conciousness.
The banks, after all, need assurances for their long-term investments. Not to mention they also make money off the debt of war as well, the endless war, the 100 year war, the long war. The endless debt.
So thus, the American war machine is poised to ride into yet another Muslim country with a Nobel Peace Prize laureate at the helm
The Yemen Connection....part 1
Why are we attacking the people of Yemen? Because some kid is alleged to have sewn a big fire-cracker into his underwear then sat on it in a plane over Detroit? Nope. Not even close. If you want to know what this is all about, follow Daddy’s money all the way to the IMF and Jaiz Bank.
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t brave soldiers used to throw themselves on grenades back in the day to absorb the shock and therefore save their fellow soldiers. Isn’t there a saying about “throwing yourself on a grenade” to that end? So the big “terrorist” plot here is to get a small amount of PETN onboard a plane and then SIT ON IT, thus absorbing the relatively small explosion… with his ass and his 150lb body?
That’s the “plan” that requires, as President Obama blusters, “every element of national power” to fight? I don’t think so. You gotta look a little closer than a singed pair of tightie-whities if you want to know why President Obama is going to kill more people in Yemen. I have. Take a look.
The other day I wrote about President Obama’s attempt to assassinate a witness in Yemen as well as the IMF and World Bank connections related to that nation as the probable reason the US feels compelled to invade. The premise was, that with all the free-market “reforms” being forced on the people of Yemen by these privately owned international banking institutions, the poor of that nation were rising up against the corrupt government and it looks like without our help, there will be a regime change. I wrote about the involvement of the Kuwait Energy company and their connections with the World Bank as it relates to the multiple ongoing oil and LNG pipelines running throughout the country. Basically, I estimated based on information from the websites and publications from the World Bank, IMF, and Kuwait Energy websites that there was about a quarter of a billion dollars at stake and that it was that money that was the reason President Obama chose to attack the people of Yemen.
Once again, Obama and his adminstration are serving the banks interests first.
Well, hold onto your hats folks… I was wrong. Yes, you heard that right. Scott Creighton (willyloman) is admitting he was wrong. My research was incomplete and I missed the mark by quite a bit.
Instead of having a quarter of a billion dollars of foreign investment on the line… it’s more like 5 billion dollars.
Yemen’s foreign debt has increased from $8.9 million to $5.9 billion since July 2009, according to the report on banking and currency developments issued by the Yemen Central Bank.
The IFC’s institutions topped Yemen creditors, with Yemen owing them about $3 billion, including $2.2 billion for the International Development Foundation.
The rest of the debt was for the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, the International Fund for Agriculture Development IFAD, the Islamic Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the OPEC and the EU.
Yemen’s debt for the Paris Club Members came second by about $1.8 billion, with $1.3 billion in Russian loans.
Many outstanding loans come from Japanese, U.S., French, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Dutch and German sources.
The country’s debt for other creditors came in the third place with Yemen owing Saudi, Kuwaiti, Chinese, Algerian, Korean, Polish and Iraqi funds about $836 million. The debt for unidentified sources reached $195.7 million by July. YOB Sept. 2009
Since July of 2009, money has been pouring into Yemen fast and furious; money that may never be recovered were there to be a revolution and subsequent regime change in that nation. President Obama can’t allow that to happen. But how is he going to go to the American people and tell them that foreign investors and international banks are worried about their billions in investments in the “reforms” of Yemen’s socioeconomic system? That wouldn’t be an easy sell to a post TARP Bill nation now would it?
Be Afraid!
Enter Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his ridiculous “underwear bomb”.
Now, all this time after the terrorist attack on Flight 253 (and I will call it that because whether it was done by one “lone gunman” or the state, it’s still an attempt to effect change through the use of fear so it is terrorism) what do we really know about Abdulmutallab? Well, we have been told by an agency that has lied to us many, many times that he has “confessed” to the attack because he was “radicalized” and that he received help from terrorists in Yemen. All too convenient of a story isn’t it? Billions on the line in Yemen, Obama tries to assassinated a guy there killing scores of innocent people instead, and ALL OF A SUDDEN we have this guy coming out of the woodwork with his silly “underwear bomb”.
After scouring though all his emails (I told you they keep every single comment and email forever) the only “radical” thing the media can say about him… is he’s lonely. Imaging that; a lonely student.
Well, what isn’t the MSM and President Obama telling you about Abdulmutallab that is relevant to the story? Let me fill in some blanks.
1. The Underwear Bomber’s IMF and World Bank indebted Father
Abdulmutallab’s father is indeed a banker just as the MSM has said. The interesting thing is, he’s not JUST a banker, he is THE banker in Nigeria. According to a recent Times story, Abdulmutallab’s father, Umaru Mutallab is one of the wealthiest men in Africa; that says a lot in a continent as corrupt as Africa.
In Nigeria, the nation Umaru Mutallab lives in, according to the World Bank, 53% of the population lives on less than $1 per day. Abject poverty is rampant in Nigeria and so are human rights violations. Kinda has to be that way to keep the super wealthy in control of the population.
On February 25, police killed approximately 50 persons, burned nearly 100 homes, and destroyed more than 150 market stalls in Ogaminana, just outside Okene, Adavi local government area, Kogi State.
On November 27, in Jos, ethno-religious violence erupted during the vote tabulation for the Jos North Local Government Area elections resulting in the deaths of approximately 300 persons. Credible reports indicate the police and military used lethal force during attempts to quell the violence, killing approximately 100 civilians.
Police officers were not held accountable for excessive or deadly force or for the deaths of persons in custody. Police generally operated with impunity in the apprehension, illegal detention, and sometimes execution of criminal suspects. 2008 US State Deptment Report on Human Rights Violations in Nigeria
How did Abdulmutallab’s father become so wealthy in the first place? Umaru Mutallab was the Nigerian Minister of Economic Development in 1975. He then spent a decade as the Managing Director and CEO of United Bank for Africa. For the last ten years, Umaru has been the chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria.
So, Abdulmutallab’s father was instrumental through his government position in facilitating the World Bank and IMF’s entrance into the Nigerian economic system. He then goes on to head up several banks making himself filthy rich while the vast majority of Nigeria is impoverished to unprecedented degrees all the time and kept in check by ruthless police and military oppression.
That’s the “underwear bomber’s” “banker” father; a corrupt Nigerian banker with excessive connections to the IMF and the World Bank and who OWES everything he has to them.
So far what we know about Daddy Warbucks is this; he went to the State Department (U.S. Embassy) and then he went to the CIA offices in Nigeria supposedly to “warn” them about his “radicalized” son. Yet, no emails or web comments appear to make Abdulmutallab look very radical. So why was Daddy Warbucks with his deep IMF and World Bank connections really meeting with the State Department (US Embassy) and CIA? Why is it that after the supposed “warnings” Abdulmutallab was STILL able to get on that flight with all the warning signs and red flags? Hmm?
When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father in Nigeria reported concern over his son’s “radicalization” to the U.S. Embassy there last month (Nov. 19th), intelligence officials in the United States deemed the information insufficient to pursue. Washington Post
Abdulmutallab’s father Alhaji Uma Abdulmutallab, a prominent banker, was said to have had one face-to-face meeting with a CIA official in Nigeria (just 5 weeks ago) and several contacts by telephone. Telegraph
2. The Underwear Bombers Mother
Abdulmutallab’s mother isn’t talked about much. Ever wonder why that is? Well, I’ll tell you; it’s because she is from Yemen. That’s right. Yes, Abdulmutallab went to Yemen. But is it possible he went to visit his mother or other relatives there and NOT “al-Qaeda” operatives? It’s hard to figure out, because everything about his mother is being scrubbed up on the net. Very little is being said about her and who she is. But this much I know, she is from Yemen and may live there, or may not. I will continue looking into it.
Now, here is what we have learned;
•Yemen increased its national debt to the tune of 5 billion dollars from July to September of this year (they may have borrowed more since Sept). The IMF, World Bank, and Paris Club members are on the hook for that money if the revolution in Yemen is successful.
•A World Bank and IMF indebted super wealthy “free-market” reformer in Nigeria goes to the State Department and then to the CIA in Nigeria to talk about his son.
•That same son, for reasons unknown decides “out of the blue” to sit on a small amount of explosives in a plane in Detroit. The CIA somehow misses the warning signs.
•The FBI announces immediately that the son “confessed’ that it was all Yemen’s fault.
•After the attack, all the banking controlled congressmen and the Obama administration announce we will attack “the terrorists” in Yemen and thus help “stabilize” the current corrupt government of that nation.
Now, one more thing… this one is funny actually that no one else caught it.
Daddy Warbucks, Umaru Mutallab (remember, one of the wealthiest men in Africa, banker extraordinaire) played a major role in introducing Islamic banking into Nigeria. Islamic Banking is represented and organized globally by what is called the Islamic Development Bank which is deeply involved with Nigeria now (thanks in part to Umaru Mutallab) mainly through a bank called Jaiz Bank.
Umaru Mutallab sits on the board of Jaiz Bank and is in fact it’s chairman.
This year, however, should see the launch of Nigeria’s first Islamic bank. A holding company called Jaiz International, has been set up in the country to launch what will eventually be called Jaiz Bank International. It is being supported in its endeavours by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), which is helping to ensure that the launch of Jaiz is a success and that the bank complies with international banking regulations and Nigerian laws. All Business 2007
Well look at that. Jaiz Bank, headed up by the “underwear bombers’ father is in fact supported financially by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB).
Now remember what I first put up in this article, the IDB is also heavily invested in the neoliberal reforms of Yemen’s economy which are at this very moment, under serious risk of the ongoing revolution in that country.
Daddy Warbucks, whose banking ties are under threat of serious set-backs, goes to the State Department and then the CIA and all of a sudden his lonely, college drop-out, populist son, ends up getting on a flight and setting his nuts on fire and the good-old U.S. of A can now come running in to the rescue to save all those precious investments in Yemen that are directly tied to, you guessed it, the underwear bomber’s daddy. A small world, ain’t it?
I hope that clears things up a little bit.
Either that or they just “hate us for our freedom”.
Correct me if I am wrong, but didn’t brave soldiers used to throw themselves on grenades back in the day to absorb the shock and therefore save their fellow soldiers. Isn’t there a saying about “throwing yourself on a grenade” to that end? So the big “terrorist” plot here is to get a small amount of PETN onboard a plane and then SIT ON IT, thus absorbing the relatively small explosion… with his ass and his 150lb body?
That’s the “plan” that requires, as President Obama blusters, “every element of national power” to fight? I don’t think so. You gotta look a little closer than a singed pair of tightie-whities if you want to know why President Obama is going to kill more people in Yemen. I have. Take a look.
The other day I wrote about President Obama’s attempt to assassinate a witness in Yemen as well as the IMF and World Bank connections related to that nation as the probable reason the US feels compelled to invade. The premise was, that with all the free-market “reforms” being forced on the people of Yemen by these privately owned international banking institutions, the poor of that nation were rising up against the corrupt government and it looks like without our help, there will be a regime change. I wrote about the involvement of the Kuwait Energy company and their connections with the World Bank as it relates to the multiple ongoing oil and LNG pipelines running throughout the country. Basically, I estimated based on information from the websites and publications from the World Bank, IMF, and Kuwait Energy websites that there was about a quarter of a billion dollars at stake and that it was that money that was the reason President Obama chose to attack the people of Yemen.
Once again, Obama and his adminstration are serving the banks interests first.
Well, hold onto your hats folks… I was wrong. Yes, you heard that right. Scott Creighton (willyloman) is admitting he was wrong. My research was incomplete and I missed the mark by quite a bit.
Instead of having a quarter of a billion dollars of foreign investment on the line… it’s more like 5 billion dollars.
Yemen’s foreign debt has increased from $8.9 million to $5.9 billion since July 2009, according to the report on banking and currency developments issued by the Yemen Central Bank.
The IFC’s institutions topped Yemen creditors, with Yemen owing them about $3 billion, including $2.2 billion for the International Development Foundation.
The rest of the debt was for the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, the International Fund for Agriculture Development IFAD, the Islamic Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the OPEC and the EU.
Yemen’s debt for the Paris Club Members came second by about $1.8 billion, with $1.3 billion in Russian loans.
Many outstanding loans come from Japanese, U.S., French, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Dutch and German sources.
The country’s debt for other creditors came in the third place with Yemen owing Saudi, Kuwaiti, Chinese, Algerian, Korean, Polish and Iraqi funds about $836 million. The debt for unidentified sources reached $195.7 million by July. YOB Sept. 2009
Since July of 2009, money has been pouring into Yemen fast and furious; money that may never be recovered were there to be a revolution and subsequent regime change in that nation. President Obama can’t allow that to happen. But how is he going to go to the American people and tell them that foreign investors and international banks are worried about their billions in investments in the “reforms” of Yemen’s socioeconomic system? That wouldn’t be an easy sell to a post TARP Bill nation now would it?
Be Afraid!
Enter Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his ridiculous “underwear bomb”.
Now, all this time after the terrorist attack on Flight 253 (and I will call it that because whether it was done by one “lone gunman” or the state, it’s still an attempt to effect change through the use of fear so it is terrorism) what do we really know about Abdulmutallab? Well, we have been told by an agency that has lied to us many, many times that he has “confessed” to the attack because he was “radicalized” and that he received help from terrorists in Yemen. All too convenient of a story isn’t it? Billions on the line in Yemen, Obama tries to assassinated a guy there killing scores of innocent people instead, and ALL OF A SUDDEN we have this guy coming out of the woodwork with his silly “underwear bomb”.
After scouring though all his emails (I told you they keep every single comment and email forever) the only “radical” thing the media can say about him… is he’s lonely. Imaging that; a lonely student.
Well, what isn’t the MSM and President Obama telling you about Abdulmutallab that is relevant to the story? Let me fill in some blanks.
1. The Underwear Bomber’s IMF and World Bank indebted Father
Abdulmutallab’s father is indeed a banker just as the MSM has said. The interesting thing is, he’s not JUST a banker, he is THE banker in Nigeria. According to a recent Times story, Abdulmutallab’s father, Umaru Mutallab is one of the wealthiest men in Africa; that says a lot in a continent as corrupt as Africa.
In Nigeria, the nation Umaru Mutallab lives in, according to the World Bank, 53% of the population lives on less than $1 per day. Abject poverty is rampant in Nigeria and so are human rights violations. Kinda has to be that way to keep the super wealthy in control of the population.
On February 25, police killed approximately 50 persons, burned nearly 100 homes, and destroyed more than 150 market stalls in Ogaminana, just outside Okene, Adavi local government area, Kogi State.
On November 27, in Jos, ethno-religious violence erupted during the vote tabulation for the Jos North Local Government Area elections resulting in the deaths of approximately 300 persons. Credible reports indicate the police and military used lethal force during attempts to quell the violence, killing approximately 100 civilians.
Police officers were not held accountable for excessive or deadly force or for the deaths of persons in custody. Police generally operated with impunity in the apprehension, illegal detention, and sometimes execution of criminal suspects. 2008 US State Deptment Report on Human Rights Violations in Nigeria
How did Abdulmutallab’s father become so wealthy in the first place? Umaru Mutallab was the Nigerian Minister of Economic Development in 1975. He then spent a decade as the Managing Director and CEO of United Bank for Africa. For the last ten years, Umaru has been the chairman of the First Bank of Nigeria.
So, Abdulmutallab’s father was instrumental through his government position in facilitating the World Bank and IMF’s entrance into the Nigerian economic system. He then goes on to head up several banks making himself filthy rich while the vast majority of Nigeria is impoverished to unprecedented degrees all the time and kept in check by ruthless police and military oppression.
That’s the “underwear bomber’s” “banker” father; a corrupt Nigerian banker with excessive connections to the IMF and the World Bank and who OWES everything he has to them.
So far what we know about Daddy Warbucks is this; he went to the State Department (U.S. Embassy) and then he went to the CIA offices in Nigeria supposedly to “warn” them about his “radicalized” son. Yet, no emails or web comments appear to make Abdulmutallab look very radical. So why was Daddy Warbucks with his deep IMF and World Bank connections really meeting with the State Department (US Embassy) and CIA? Why is it that after the supposed “warnings” Abdulmutallab was STILL able to get on that flight with all the warning signs and red flags? Hmm?
When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s father in Nigeria reported concern over his son’s “radicalization” to the U.S. Embassy there last month (Nov. 19th), intelligence officials in the United States deemed the information insufficient to pursue. Washington Post
Abdulmutallab’s father Alhaji Uma Abdulmutallab, a prominent banker, was said to have had one face-to-face meeting with a CIA official in Nigeria (just 5 weeks ago) and several contacts by telephone. Telegraph
2. The Underwear Bombers Mother
Abdulmutallab’s mother isn’t talked about much. Ever wonder why that is? Well, I’ll tell you; it’s because she is from Yemen. That’s right. Yes, Abdulmutallab went to Yemen. But is it possible he went to visit his mother or other relatives there and NOT “al-Qaeda” operatives? It’s hard to figure out, because everything about his mother is being scrubbed up on the net. Very little is being said about her and who she is. But this much I know, she is from Yemen and may live there, or may not. I will continue looking into it.
Now, here is what we have learned;
•Yemen increased its national debt to the tune of 5 billion dollars from July to September of this year (they may have borrowed more since Sept). The IMF, World Bank, and Paris Club members are on the hook for that money if the revolution in Yemen is successful.
•A World Bank and IMF indebted super wealthy “free-market” reformer in Nigeria goes to the State Department and then to the CIA in Nigeria to talk about his son.
•That same son, for reasons unknown decides “out of the blue” to sit on a small amount of explosives in a plane in Detroit. The CIA somehow misses the warning signs.
•The FBI announces immediately that the son “confessed’ that it was all Yemen’s fault.
•After the attack, all the banking controlled congressmen and the Obama administration announce we will attack “the terrorists” in Yemen and thus help “stabilize” the current corrupt government of that nation.
Now, one more thing… this one is funny actually that no one else caught it.
Daddy Warbucks, Umaru Mutallab (remember, one of the wealthiest men in Africa, banker extraordinaire) played a major role in introducing Islamic banking into Nigeria. Islamic Banking is represented and organized globally by what is called the Islamic Development Bank which is deeply involved with Nigeria now (thanks in part to Umaru Mutallab) mainly through a bank called Jaiz Bank.
Umaru Mutallab sits on the board of Jaiz Bank and is in fact it’s chairman.
This year, however, should see the launch of Nigeria’s first Islamic bank. A holding company called Jaiz International, has been set up in the country to launch what will eventually be called Jaiz Bank International. It is being supported in its endeavours by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), which is helping to ensure that the launch of Jaiz is a success and that the bank complies with international banking regulations and Nigerian laws. All Business 2007
Well look at that. Jaiz Bank, headed up by the “underwear bombers’ father is in fact supported financially by the Islamic Development Bank (IDB).
Now remember what I first put up in this article, the IDB is also heavily invested in the neoliberal reforms of Yemen’s economy which are at this very moment, under serious risk of the ongoing revolution in that country.
Daddy Warbucks, whose banking ties are under threat of serious set-backs, goes to the State Department and then the CIA and all of a sudden his lonely, college drop-out, populist son, ends up getting on a flight and setting his nuts on fire and the good-old U.S. of A can now come running in to the rescue to save all those precious investments in Yemen that are directly tied to, you guessed it, the underwear bomber’s daddy. A small world, ain’t it?
I hope that clears things up a little bit.
Either that or they just “hate us for our freedom”.
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