CounterPunch
by Patrick Cockburn
01/11/10
Al-Qa’ida in Yemen is small, its active members numbering only 200-300 lightly armed militants in a country of 22 million people who are estimated to own no less than 60 million weapons. Al-Qa’ida has room to operate because central government authority barely extends outside the cities and because it can ally itself with the many opponents of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been in office since the 1970s. The power of al-Qa’ida is not its military expertise or sinister training camps in the mountains of Yemen. Its strength is rather its ability to lure the US and Britain into commitments in dangerous countries like Yemen, Afghanistan and Iraq, where the state is weak and its rule contested. It can do this because in the wake of 9/11 the US instinctively over-reacts to the most amateur and unsuccessful attack on the homeland...
https://counterpunch.org/patrick01112010.html
The empire discovers Yemen
AntiWar.Com
by Philip Giraldi
01/14/10
Yemen’s sudden emergence makes you wonder a bit about the $70 billion annual intelligence budget. I realize that they are somewhat preoccupied in dodging suicide bombers while wiping out Afghan wedding parties with hellfire missiles, but didn’t they know Yemen was there? It admittedly is a bit hard to find on a map, tucked away as it is on a corner of the Arabian Peninsula, but surely there were some smart guys in Washington who knew that al-Qaeda in Yemen was doing a lot of searching in websites advertising underwear. Now that Yemen has been discovered it changes the way we should think about the security of the United States. Al-Qaeda, which only a couple of weeks ago was slinking around in caves, is suddenly possessed of infinite guile and resourcefulness. How else would those fiends incarnate have come up with an underwear suicide bomber?
https://tinyurl.com/yhbtqx2
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
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Yemen cleric warns against US occupation
Yemen's most influential Islamic cleric has warned that the United States-backed fight against so-called al-Qaeda could lead to "foreign occupation" of the country.
https://www.alalam.ir/english/detail.aspx?id=93905
From Information Clearing House
https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Yemen
https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Afghanistan
https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=empire
https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=al-Qaeda
https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=9/11
https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Patrick+Cockburn
https://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Philip+Giraldi
