What happened on December 17, 2009?
We know some of the facts:
Amnesty International has released images of a US-manufactured cruise missile that carried cluster munitions, apparently taken following an attack on an alleged al-Qa’ida training camp in Yemen that killed 41 local residents, including 14 women and 21 children.
This was the Obama's first missile strike in Yemen, the first that's known about anyway. Yemen initially claimed responsibility for the attack, but we know now that the missile was launched from an American warship or submarine.
It still stands out among the thousands of Terror War missile strikes for a few reasons:
-- the number of civilians and children who died. It wiped out entire families.
-- the use of a cluster bomb - the sort of weapon that Barack Obama, as a Senator, had voted to ban, and that the Obama administration blasted Gaddafi for using.
-- the coverup: a cable published by Wikileaks shows that President Saleh told Gen. David Petreaus that he would take responsibility for the attack to conceal U.S. involvement.
-- the role of Abdulelah Haider Shaye, a journalist who revealed that this brutal attack was the handiwork of the Untied States. He was convicted in a sham trial on bogus terrorism charges. Abdullah Saleh, former president of Yemen, announced that he would pardon Shaye but, as Jeremy Scahill has documented, changed his mind after a phone call from President Obama.
Scahill and Rick Rowley have produced a brief film about the attack. In it, a witness says most of those killed were the elderly, children, and women, including five pregnant women. Only three were young men, he says. The film is hard to watch -- there are photos of dead children -- but please don't skip past. It's only a couple of minutes. Among those interviewed is a darling little girl, perhaps five or six years old. "Missiles attacked me," she says.
.
Now the ACLU and the Center for Constitution Rights have filed a FOIA request seeking more info about the attack.
Our FOIA request seeks information about the legal and factual basis for the al-Majalah strike, whether the government knew that civilians, including women and children, were present, and what steps it has taken to investigate the attack or compensate injured survivors and victims' family members. We also ask for information concerning the U.S. government's efforts to conceal its responsibility for the strike. The answers are crucial if the public is to evaluate whether the government's targeted killing program is both legal and wise.
As the ACLU says, this is about more than one attack; it's about the U.S.targeted killing program. In a separate action, the ACLU is suing the Obama administration to try to get basic info about it. Government agencies are "
saying the targeted killing program is so secret that they can’t even acknowledge that it exists." Yet administration officials, including the President, refer to targeted killing to defend the Prez or
hype his tuffonterra cred.
Most of the targeted killing is done with missiles fired from drones. Now the CIA under Petreaus is seeking to expand its capacity to kill with drones inside Yemen. Chew on this for a little bit.
The CIA is seeking authority to expand its covert drone campaign in Yemen by launching strikes against terrorism suspects even when it does not know the identities of those who could be killed, U.S. officials said.
People could be targeted because of "patterns of behavior." What could go wrong? If you find this unsettling or horrific, that the CIA wants to be able to kill people without knowing who they are, please note that it already has authority to do just that in Pakistan. These attacks based on guesses are known by the rather poetic name of
signature strikes.
these so-called “signature strikes” that “allow the agency to hit targets based solely on intelligence indicating patterns of suspicious behavior” are already robustly used in Pakistan — having been started by George Bush in 2008 and aggressively escalated by Barack Obama.
Michael Hastings has a good piece about the wider implication of the U.S. drone war, which is doing nothing less than
change the country and the world.
the implications of drones go far beyond a single combat unit or civilian agency. On a broader scale, the remote-control nature of unmanned missions enables politicians to wage war while claiming we're not at war – as the United States is currently doing in Pakistan. What's more, the Pentagon and the CIA can now launch military strikes or order assassinations without putting a single boot on the ground – and without worrying about a public backlash over U.S. soldiers coming home in body bags. The immediacy and secrecy of drones make it easier than ever for leaders to unleash America's military might – and harder than ever to evaluate the consequences of such clandestine attacks.
"Drones have really become the counterterrorism weapon of choice for the Obama administration," says Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown law professor who helped establish a new Pentagon office devoted to legal and humanitarian policy. "What I don't think has happened enough is taking a big step back and asking, 'Are we creating more terrorists than we're killing? Are we fostering militarism and extremism in the very places we're trying to attack it?'
Well, of course we are. The administration would claim that its escalating dirty war in Yemen is a response to the rise of AQ; in fact, the war is
fueling its rise.
That, in a nutshell, is how many Yemenis see the US role in their country. The United States “should have never made counterterrorism a source of profit for the regime, because that increased terrorism,” asserts Iryani. “Their agenda was to keep terrorism alive, because it was their cash cow.” The US bombings, he said, were “a bad mistake. Military action often backfires by killing civilians, by the violation of sovereignty. That offends a lot of Yemenis.” For the United States, the most serious question that lingers over Yemen after Ali Abdullah Saleh is: Did US counterterrorism policy strengthen the very threat it sought to eliminate? “It was a major fiasco,” Iryani says of the past decade of US counterterrorism policy in Yemen. “I think if we had been left alone, we would have less terrorists in Yemen than we do now.”
So why does the United States have such a self-destructive counter-terrorism policy? Primarily because it
shifts wealth upward, transferring it from the American people (and in some cases, people around the world) to powerful interests: defense contractors chief among them. It's class war disguised as defense policy.
If Americans don't care much about the piling up of dead Muslims, and evidence strongly suggests most don't, perhaps they would come to oppose our insane insecurity policy if they understood that it is endangering them while it enriches the rich.