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