This title comes from Jeremy Scahill, a correspondent for The Nation and one of the absolute best American reporters in the Middle East, in the tradition of Anthony Shadid. His article tells the story of another journalist, 34-year-old Abdulelah Haider Shaye, and of President Obama's personal intervention to keep him in prison. The story is worth reading in its entirety for anyone who wants to understand how US policy so often backfires in this region.
Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?
Shaye is one of the most daring voices in Yemen, following the story wherever it leads and publishing reports damaging to major players, including Al Qaeda, President Saleh, and the United States. He has directly interviewed a number of Al Qaeda leaders. Because of this, the US has declared Shaye an associate of Al Qaeda, and seeks to silence his voice. His real crime appears to be publishing information damaging to the US. Particularly, Shaye proved in 2009 what many had long suspected, that US drones were directly attacking Al Qaeda and other militants in Yemen, and were killing a large number of Yemeni civilians in doing so, at a time when both the US and the Yemen government were deny such Us operations:
While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”
Following this revelation, Shaye and co-worker Kamal Sharaf were repeatedly arrested. After months in prison, Shaye was eventually sentences to five years in prison in a process that invokes the fears many Americans have about military tribunals:
Human Rights Watch said the specialized court where Shaye was tried “failed to meet international standards of due process,” while his lawyers argue that the little “evidence” that was presented against him relied overwhelmingly on fabricated documents.
Many leaders in Yemen pushed of a pardon for Shaye, and seemed on the verge of obtaining one until President Obama personally intervened:
“We were waiting for the release of the pardon—it was printed out and prepared in a file for the president to sign and announce the next day.” Word of the impending pardon leaked in the Yemeni press.
“That same day,” Barman says, “the president [Saleh] received a phone call from Obama expressing US concerns over the release of Abdulelah Haider [Shaye].” Saleh rescinded the pardon.
In February of this year,
Shaye launched a hunger strike to protest his continued imprisonment.
This harassment and arrest of an independent journalist for reporting the truth is, of course, antithetical to everything Obama and the US as a whole stand for. They also further erode the US standing in the region and its claim to speak for "freedom," "democracy," and the like. Ironically, the US also damaged its own intelligence efforts, cutting off a source of information it relied on:
As the US ratcheted up its efforts to assassinate the radical cleric Anwar Awlaki, among the charges leveled against him was that he praised the actions of the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan. A key source for those statements was an interview with Awlaki conducted by Shaye broadcast on Al Jazeera in December 2009. Far from coming off as sympathetic, Shaye’s interview was objective and seemed aimed at actually getting answers. Among the questions he asked Awlaki: How can you agree with what Nidal did as he betrayed his American nation? Why did you bless the acts of Nidal Hasan? Do you have any connection with the incident directly? Shaye also confronted Awlaki with inconsistencies from Awlaki’s previous interviews. If anything, Shaye’s interviews with Awlaki provided the US intelligence community and the politicians and pro-assassination punditry with ammunition to support their campaign to kill Awlaki. (Awlaki was killed in a US drone strike on September 30, 2011.)
Thus, it appears that President Obama is personally intervening to keep a journalist in prison in order to prevent damaging information from coming to light. As the excellent
Empty Wheel blog notes:
Shaye is as close as we’ve come to an independent observer cataloging the civilian deaths in a drone strike. And two months after evidence confirmed his story, Obama intervened personally to make sure Shaye would remain in prison.
When The Bureau for Independent Journalism went to investigate civilian drone casualties months and sometimes years after the attacks, an anonymous Administration official insinuated that such independent oversight equated to sympathy with Al Qaeda.
A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”
We now know that not only has the government been claiming the reporter who has most directly proved civilian casualties from a drone strike is an Al Qaeda propagandist, but that Obama intervened personally to make sure he’d stay in prison.