Armies of Liberation

Yay, an English version, pretty much what I thought it said but less headache inducing:

Yemen Post The Yemen-based Abaad Centre for Studies and Researches has cautioned that some factions seek to collapse Yemeni cities militarily under the pretext of Al-Qaeda as happened in Radda and Abyan provinces scenarios.
“This scenario may be carried out in Ibb, Dhala’a, Lahj, and, Hadhramout and other cities would be controlled under the pretext of fighting Al-Qaeda as it is expected to happen in Dhamar, Taiz, and Hodeidah.
In a periodic report, Abaad pointed out that Al-Qaeda has no systematic structure and its goals are foggy, affirming that it lacks strategic visions.
“Therefore, Al-Qaeda was penetrated by local and international bodies, and only those bodies take advantages of Al-Qaeda,” added the centre. “Even some figures benefited from Al-Qaeda as that clearly appeared during its control and withdrawal of Al-Amria in Rada when Tariq Al-Dhahab could get his brother out of the custody.”
“There are figures affiliated to Al-Qaeda, some were in Abyan and others who escaped jails, are currently existed in Sana’a, and some Al-Qaeda fugitives live with the displaced people inside schools in Aden.”
The report ruled out that Al-Qaeda has the ability to take over any town, if it does not receive direct and indirect logistic support by some sides that are in connection to the power transfer process.
“Al-Dhahab withdrew from Radda after he failed to recruit enough numbers to completely control the city as well as he got his main demand, release of his bother” the report added.
The periodic report revealed that Al-Dhahab was not the real leader of Al-Qaeda in Radda.
It further cited that Al-Qaeda senior leaders, Nasser Al-Wohaish, the leader of Al-Qaeda, and Ebrahim Darwish, another Al-Qaeda leader were at Alzahir district of Baidha governorate when Radda was taken over.
“Decisions were taken by Al-Qaeda Shura council consisted of 20 persons who are selected of 60 persons, the real division of Al-Qaeda which is called ” Almuhajreen” which includes a Saudi and Pakistani nationals. Their duties were not external protection. Some Bedouins, tribesmen and other escapees joined Al-Qaeda in its fighting with the aim of getting money and others were contained as a result of Al-Dhahab’s charisma in the area. (Read on …)

Yemenis are fleeing (not joining) al Qaeda where ever they appear. However the vast majority of civilians lack the funds to rent an apartment or to buy food once they leave their farms and possessions behind to be looted by AQAP. But if they stay, they are subject to both al Qaeda dictatorship and US drones. The US may label those who don’t flee as collateral damage or as providing material support (as the Bedouins were in the Dec 2009 US strike in Abyan that killed 43 women and children when General Patraeus implied they were acceptable deaths because they selling vegetable to AQAP, despite the fact the villagers had appealed twice to local authorities to expel the group.)

Certainly AQAP bears the responsibility for sheltering in populated areas in the first place but people in the al Qaeda occupied territories of Yemen want to know where the refugee camps are. Seriously, where are they supposed to go? And it is a US problem when an al Qaeda presence means the potential of US drone strikes. The 120,000 who fled Zinjibar last May are still in the schools of Aden. I know Yemenis’ rights are very low on Obama’s priority list, but there must be a part of the plan to increase US drone use that will deal with the public panic and mass displacement that will occur as US drones follow AQ from province to province threatening people’s lives and homes. Over 15,000 fled Raada within days of Tariq al Dhahab’s (and al Wahishi’s) appearance. They were escaping both the al Qaeda fanaticism and the threat of US drones.

While the Obama administration may try to maintain the myth in the US that they know exactly who they are hitting, and its always a precise targeting, the non-lethal impact on civilians must be considered as well. The US is playing right into al Qaedas hands with nearly every policy from the re-imposition of a dictatorship through the GCC deal to Saleh’s visit to increased drones. The US is focused on vulnerable land when it should be focused on vulnerable people.

Basically, the US is going to bomb Yemen in order to pull off an uncontested election that nobody wants (except the US, the GPC and Islah elites) in the interest of “stability.” If the expired parliament gave Saleh immunity, it can appoint Hadi. The bogus show election isn’t worth more Yemeni lives or the displacement of tens of thousands, and it certainly wont confer legitimacy when there’s only one candidate that was selected by the US. The most politically disenfranchised are going to boycott anyway: civil minded protesters, southerners and Houthis.

The National: Yemen will increasingly rely on US drone strikes to target Islamist militants threatening to disrupt a transfer of power this month, Yemeni government officials said.

The president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is meant to hand over power to his vice president, Abdurabu Mansur Hadi, on February 22.

The run up to the transfer is being overshadowed by growing protests, including within the military, which have grounded Yemen’s air force across much of the country.

Two aides in Mr Hadi’s office said they expected a rise in drone attacks against Al Qaeda militants.

The strikes will be intensified only if necessary, to ensure that militant groups do not expand in vulnerable areas, said one of the aides. Both asked to remain anonymous. (Read on …)

Its a monthly report on state violence and other HR violations including by AQAP that is always precise in terms of names, dates, photos and locations, and it usually is issued within a month or two of the end date, except for those months with large massacres. The recently issued report for December 2011 lists three dead, as opposed to earlier months and years when many dozens were killed and hundreds were wounded in state violence against southern protesters and activists. The fatality totals in the southern protests (2007-2011) far exceeds the number killed by the state since the broader rev began in 2011, a distasteful metric of murder. (The UN SC forgave 33 years of atrocities in Yemen in the interests of “stability,” providing little incentive for Assad to stop his butchery.) In the following, I pulled out some AQAP violations of human rights for a future project but the entire report is available here at archive.org.

SOHR report Dec 2011

On Monday, December ,5 Sheikh Tawfiq Ali Mansour Juneidi ,nicknamed
“Hawas “the leader of the People’s Committees in the town of Lauder of
Abyan province ,died as a result of wounds sustained by a blast of an
explosive package targeted him on Friday, December ,2 and which also
caused the death of his colleague ,Ali Nasser Houshan .The Web site” ,Taj
South Arabia “reported that the People’s Committees protect the district
from the al-Qaeda operatives ,since it is believe that the al-Qaeda is behind
this assassination….

“Al Qaeda “operatives on the evening of Monday, December , ambushed
two vehicles to target a number of people from Almayaser Tribe from the
Farajs when they were passing in” Ekd “area between the districts of Lauder
and Wadiea .Aden News Agency said that the ambush caused injuries
among three people ,they are :Ahmed Hussein Ashal ,Hussein Ali Ashal and
Ahmed Mohammed al-Ghairi. (Read on …)

The al Qaeda operatives that occupied Raada have all departed, to the great jubilation of the town. Tribal mediation resulted in the immediate release of three al Qaeda detainees, including Nabil al Dhahab, a promise to install more conservative leaders that implement Sharia law and a promise to release the rest of the listed al Qaeda detainees (12 more) later, when the media spotlight fades. The town celebrated the fanatics departure with gunfire in the air and gathering on the streets. The agreement followed heavy clashes between tribal fighters and the violent al Qaeda cult known as “Ansar al Sharia.” The seven tribes surrounding al Baydah joined together against al Qaeda and the tribal delegation was comprised of 35 notable dignitaries.

Sheikh Khalid al Dhahab said in a later newspaper interview: “the remnants of the Saleh regime facilitated the gunmen to enter the city Radaa and the idea of formation and the establishment of the “solution and the contract” and the requirement by the “supporters of sharia law” to change the heads of districts and directors of offices services in the city of Radaa is to legitimize the rule of al-Qaeda through the establishment of Islamic emirate in Radaa, and remnants of the Saleh regime seek to make Radaa Islamic emirate.”

al Tagheer, link

Like there’s not enough headaches, al Qaeda is mandating (by violence) what type of health care people can have. I don’t know anything about the type of traditional medicine practiced in al Baydah, or even what a witch doctor is, although some traditional and herbal remedies have been shown to have medicinal value in other parts of the world. However people have the right to choose who they talk to about their illnesses without some wild eyed fanatic subjecting them to physical punishment. Then there’s more blah blah about the regime loyalists facilitating the al Qaeda take over and other article below the fold about the failure of negotiations.

Yemen Post: Three tribesmen were killed and several others were wounded on Saturday as Al-Qaeda militants attacked the house of a well-known witch-doctor in Rada’a of Baidha governorate. (Read on …)

Update: Tariq al Dhahab responds as al Masdar.

YPost: Tribal chieftains in the southeast province of Al-Baytha, some 260km southeast of the Yemeni capital of Sana’a, gave on Wednesday 24 hours for al-Qaeda militants to leave their town of Rada.

Earlier the day, local tribal dignitaries accused outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh of conniving with the terrorists and letting Rada falls into their control, as the army looked on militants with simple weapons take control of an entire town.

The militants took control of al-Baytaha’s main town of Rada on Monday, with the army looking on. (Read on …)

And other oddities:

The latest news on Gitmo detainee Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, in US custody since 2002, is that the Military Commission can not confirmthat he will be released if found not guilty. Its not in the Military Commission’s jurisdiction to make those kind of pledges. Considering Nashiri was water boarded, its questionable if any of his statements will be allowed at trial, but prosecutors are confident that there is enough other evidence for a conviction.

Al Nashiri is charged with aiding the al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in Aden port in 2000. The bombing killed 17 US service members and severely wounded dozens more. Al Nashiri selected the targets, the timing and coordinated the operatives. However, unexplored for a decade is the level of complicity by top Yemeni government officials and the failure of US intelligence to get a warning to the ship.

Prior to the attack on the USS Cole, Yemen’s then Interior Minister Hussain Arab issued al Nashiri a travel pass that enabled him to pass Yemen’s many internal checkpoints without search or question in the months preceding the terror attack. Al Nashiri also had a weapons permit issued by the Interior Ministry. These official documents were presented in Yemeni court during the 2005 trials of other conspirators.

In an interesting coincidence, Yemeni President Saleh ordered several top officials, including Interior Minister Arab, to travel from the capital Sana’a to Aden the night before the USS Cole was bombed there.

Saleh denied that Yemen was notified of the impending arrival of the warship. According to Centcom commander, General Zinni, in Congressional testimony, US naval officials followed the standard procedures for refueling including a two week advance notification to the host port.

It was also around two weeks prior to the attack that the military data mining group Able Danger and separately DOD analyst Kie Fallis picked up intel streams about an impending attack. Both made several attempts to obtain authorization to issue official warnings to no avail.

Kie Fallis quit the day of the Cole bombing. Able Danger’s Anthony Shaffer’s information never made it into the 9/11 report, although he tried. DOD later revoked Shaffer’s health insurance and forced him out over a “stolen” pen that he reported taking as a souvenir as a teen.

The NSA had the “Yemen hub” (a phone line in Yemen used by al Qaeda operatives for calls to and from bin Laden and others) under heavy surveillance for over a year prior to the Cole bombing, and for about a year after. There was a satellite trained on the house in Sanaa 24/7. Oddly, the NSA never learned of or reported on the USS Cole plot.

The CIA withheld information from the FBI about an al Qaeda summit, a high level meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, at which both the Cole and 9/11 were discussed. (See former federal investigator Ali Soufan’s excellent book, The Black Banners for more.)

Yemeni officials failed to cooperate with Soufan and other FBI agents in Yemen investigating the bombing. Some like the head of Yemen’s Political Security Organization in Aden, Hussain al Ansi, engaged in active misdirection and stonewalling.

Ten terrorists awaiting trial for the Cole attack escaped Yemeni prison in 2002 and after surrendering, their trials resulted in sentences of five to ten years. Most of escaped prison again in 2006. By 2008, all those convicted in the attack had their sentences commuted and were free. Al Nashiri, in US custody, was sentenced to death in Yemen in absencia in 2005.

The Jurist reports the Yemeni government sheltered (and lied for) al Nashiri after the bombing. The Congressional Research Service details the Cole bombers’ releases and notes that, according to the Washington Post, Al Nashiri had spent several months before his capture under “high-level protection” by the Yemeni government.

After the USS Cole attack, Interior Minister Arab was transferred, appointed by Yemeni President Saleh to the Shura Council. Arab resigned and joined the Pro-Revolutionary Military Council in March 2011.

Previous: (2007) The USS Cole Bombing in Yemen: What We Know Today

Related: Defense argues US was not at war in 2000, thus the Military Commission does not have jurisdiction.

The western media black-out continues:

Clearly for FOX News, news worthiness depends on who is doing the killing; one person killed by al Qaeda vastly outweighs the hundred killed by the Yemeni government in the last week. For a day, CNN ran the headline: Yemeni women burn veils, wow, interesting, at least they mentioned “Yemen,” as the state was simultaneously pounding residences in Taiz with artillery and shelling villages in Arhab with missiles.

And neither one can find for five seconds for this from today, (if its not working try this direct link.)

Fox News: Car Bomb Kills Anti-Terror Chief in South Yemen.

VS.

- Airstrikes on Arhab leave 120 civilians killed, 340 wounded

- Nationwide slaughter since UN SC council resolution 2014

- One million demand regime change

- Yemen Post: Several Million of Yemeni gathered nationwide in the streets of Yemen yesterday, demanding the fall of the regime and Ali Abdullah Saleh’s trial as they say the president is continuing to murder his people.

Protesters had spell out “butcher” across their chest in red ink in denunciation of president Saleh’s many crimes. “He’s using snipers to gun down women and children, Sana’a and Taiz are under shelling attacks everyday…Saleh is killing Yemeni and the World stands silent…We will not,” said Mohamed Hassan Said a defected officer.

In Sana’a, the capital, a funeral march was organized to bury the bodies of the victims of the revolution amongst whom was 4 year-old little Waffa. While carrying the coffins the crowd was chorusing anti-regime slogan, asking the international community to bear witness of the crimes committed against peaceful Yemeni people. (Read on …)