Obama to escalate slaughter in Yemen

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Obama to escalate slaughter in Yemen
28 August 2010

With the opening of a new front in Yemen for the CIA’s drone “targeted killing”
program, the Obama administration is steadily escalating the role played by both
the covert agency and secretive US military Special Operations forces as a
global Murder Incorporated.

“The White House, in an effort to turn up the heat against Al Qaida’s branch in
Yemen, is considering adding the CIA’s armed Predator drones to the fight,”
reported the Associated Press on Thursday, citing senior Washington officials.

“The US military’s Special Operation Forces and the CIA have been positioning
surveillance equipment, drones and personnel in Yemen, Djibouti, Kenya and
Ethiopia” in preparation for the stepped-up killing spree, the Wall Street
Journal reported Wednesday.

The Washington Post quoted intelligence officials as saying that the CIA now
views Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as a “more urgent” threat than the Qaeda
organization in Pakistan.

Yemen, like Afghanistan and Iraq before it, is being targeted not to eradicate
terrorism—the killing of civilians with cruise missiles and drone attacks will
only produce more recruits for terrorist attacks—but because of its strategic
location, bordering Saudi Arabia, the number-one oil exporter, and the vital Bab
al-Mandab strait, through which three million barrels of oil pass daily.

“They’re not feeling the same kind of heat—not yet, anyway—as their friends in
the tribal areas of Pakistan,” one official told Reuters Wednesday. “Everyone
involved on our side understands that has to change.”

The “kind of heat” inflicted upon the population of Pakistan’s Federally
Administered Tribal Areas is well known. According to Pakistani officials quoted
in the country’s media, at least 700 civilians were killed by drone attacks in
2009. According to an estimate by a Washington think tank sympathetic to the
Obama administration, at least a third of those killed in drone attacks in
Pakistan are civilians. This year, drone flights have increased ten-fold, with
missile strikes increasing from one a week to at least one a day.

Even Pakistan’s devastating floods have not brought an end to these robotic
assassinations. The latest reported attack came Monday in North Waziristan,
leaving 20 dead, including four women and three children.

Now, in the name of combating terrorism, Washington is proposing to inflict this
same kind of state terror on a desperately poor country that is already torn by
regional, religious, ethnic and tribal conflicts. A secessionist movement in the
south of Yemen, which had been a separate country until uniting with the north
in 1990, has simmered for the last 16 years.

Supporters of the assassinated dissident Shi’a cleric Hussain Badr al-Din
al-Huthi have battled the predominantly Sunni government for the past six years
in the northern Sa’ada and Amran provinces.

And the entire population is mired in extreme poverty and deprivation, with
fully one quarter of the 24 million Yemenis suffering chronic hunger and nearly
half living on less than $2 a day. According to a 2008 World Bank report, fully
43 percent of children under five are malnourished.

To this already desperate situation, the Obama administration is proposing to
contribute slaughter from the air by Hellfire missiles and assassination on the
ground by special operations death squads.

The regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, having aligned itself with
Washington, has utilized the US “global war on terror” as a justification for a
brutal crackdown on all of its opponents.

“An extremely worrying trend has developed where the Yemeni authorities, under
pressure from the USA and others to fight al-Qa’ida, and Saudi Arabia to deal
with the Huthis, have been citing national security as a pretext to deal with
opposition and stifle all criticism,” Malcolm Smart, Amnesty International’s
director for the Middle East and North Africa program, said this week in
releasing a new report from the human rights group documenting abuses in Yemen.

The Amnesty report provides harrowing details concerning the saturation bombing
of residential areas, the gunning down of peaceful demonstrators, and the
imprisonment, torture and disappearance of the government’s political opponents,
including lawyers, journalists and human rights advocates.

The government of Yemen publicly rejected this week’s assessment from
Washington, charging that it and the Western media “exaggerate the size of
al-Qaeda and the danger that it poses to Yemen’s stability and security,” and
insisting that “fighting terrorism in Yemen remains the responsibility of Yemeni
security authorities.”

In reality, however, hundreds of US military and intelligence operatives are
already deployed in Yemen, and the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh has
repeatedly given a green light for US attacks on Yemeni soil. The statement
repudiating any US escalation was no doubt issued for domestic consumption. The
American military attacks have provoked widespread outrage, while intensifying
opposition to the Yemeni government.

A CIA drone war will add to the war crimes already committed by the US military
in Yemen on Obama’s command. In the worst of these, at least 41 people, 21 of
them children and 14 of them women, were slaughtered last December 17 when their
homes in the southern district of Abyan were struck by US cruise missiles
carrying cluster bombs—a weapon banned by international treaties.

Last June, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial executions,
Philip Alston, charged the US government with arrogating to itself “an
ever-expanding entitlement for itself to target individuals across the globe”
and a “strongly asserted but ill-defined license to kill without accountability.”

This “license to kill” has also been claimed in relation to US citizens. Among
those targeted in Yemen is the American Islamic cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Last
April, US officials revealed that the Obama administration had authorized the
“targeted killing” of al-Awlaki, whose family is Yemeni. This marks the first
time that a US government has admitted seeking the assassination of one of its
own citizens.

Al-Awlaki’s family and civil liberties lawyers have attempted to secure a
restraining order against this extra-judicial execution and gross abuse of
power, insisting that if the New Mexico-born man is guilty of any crime, he
should be charged and tried in a US court.

The Obama administration sought to stifle any lawsuit, however, claiming that
because the government has deemed al-Awlaki a terrorist, it would be a criminal
offense to seek a court order barring his assassination by the CIA or the US
military. Earlier this month, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center
for Constitutional Rights were finally allowed to proceed with the action only
after obtaining a special license from the US Treasury Department.

The Obama administration is escalating and spreading criminal wars abroad while
continuing where Bush left off in erecting the scaffolding for a police state
dictatorship at home. No section of the political establishment or the corporate
media seriously opposes these measures, because they are driven by the interests
of the financial aristocracy that both major parties and the government represent.

The preparations for a new war in Yemen must be taken as a serious warning to
working people in the US. The unchecked growth of American militarism, coupled
with the shredding of basic democratic rights and mounting attacks on jobs,
wages and social conditions, threatens to unleash a catastrophe. No answer can
be found within the present capitalist setup. Only the development of an
independent and politically conscious movement of the working class fighting for
socialism can provide an alternative.

Bill Van Auken

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/aug2010/pers-a28.shtml

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