Tag: Yemen

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Foreign Policies osama bil laden terrorists

The Obama Administration – Amazing In Capturing Terrorists – The List

A great read by Jake Tapper. A list of some of the terrorists killed or captured under the leadership of the Obama Administration. This is something the Republicans would not want the American people to know about. Although September 11th happened under the Bush Administration, Republicans will still try to claim some special authority when it comes to protecting the American people.

This list complements Jake Tapper;

There’s Osama bin Laden,  of course, killed in May.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Anwar al-Awlaki as of today.

Earlier this month officials confirmed that al Qaeda’s chief of Pakistan operations, Abu Hafs al-Shahri, was killed in Waziristan, Pakistan.

In August, ‘Atiyah ‘Abd al-Rahman,  the deputy leader of al Qaeda was killed.

In June, one of the group’s most dangerous commanders, Ilyas Kashmiri,  was killed in Pakistan. In Yemen that same month, AQAP senior operativesAmmar al-Wa’ili, Abu Ali al-Harithi, and Ali Saleh Farhan were killed. In Somalia, Al-Qa’ida in East Africa (AQEA) senior leader Harun Fazul was killed.

Administration officials also herald the recent U.S./Pakistani joint arrest ofYounis al-Mauritani  in Quetta.

Going back to August 2009, Tehrik e-Taliban Pakistan leader Baitullah Mahsud was killed in Pakistan.

In September of that month, Jemayah Islamiya operational plannerNoordin Muhammad Top was killed in Indonesia, and AQEA plannerSaleh Ali Saleh Nabhan was killed in Somalia.

For the rest of the list, click here.

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Foreign Policies

Another High Profile Al Qaeda Leader Killed In Yemen

Another of Al Qaeda’s highest ranking leaders was killed on Friday by the CIA. Anwar al-Awlaki, an American, born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents in 1971 became a radical preacher and used his teachings to recruit followers in the US and Britain. Investigations showed that al-Awlaki was influential in the Fort Hood shooting, where 13 people died at the hands of gunman Nidal Hasan.

CBS News reports;

Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born radical Islamic preacher who rose to the highest level of al Qaeda’s franchise in Yemen, was killed in a CIA-directed strike upon his convoy, carried out with the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command’s firepower, according to a counterterrorist official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence.

Al-Awlaki had been under observation for three weeks while they waited for the right opportunity to strike, one U.S. official said.

Already, Fox News is trying to credit George Bush and his policy of waterboarding for this capture/killing. On the so-called news  network Fox, Gretchen Carlson said that under President Obama’s administration “it seems that we don’t prosecute or ask the same questions that we might have under the Bush Administration, so would we get anything out of him anyway if we captured them?”

Fox was also instrumental in framing the lie that Osama Bin Laden’s capture was solely because of Bush. Somehow, this is not surprising.

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Barack Obama Egypt White House

Obama Ordered Secret Report on Egypt Uprising Last August

Seems the Obama Administration had their hand on the pulse of the Egypt uprising since last August. According to reporting from The New York Times, President Obama ordered a secret report  detailing areas of unrest in the Arab world, and ways to assist the people of this region to peacefully absolve the  political conflict. The report, called The Presidential Study Directive, focused on Egypt and other places, including Yemen and Bahrain.

The Times report states;

In Yemen, too, officials said Mr. Obama worried that the administration’s intense focus on counterterrorism operations against Al Qaeda was ignoring a budding political crisis, as angry young people rebelled against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an autocratic leader of the same vintage as Mr. Mubarak.

“Whether it was Yemen or other countries in the region, you saw a set of trends” — a big youth population, threadbare education systems, stagnant economies and new social network technologies like Facebook and Twitter — that was a “real prescription for trouble,” another official said.

The White House held weekly meetings with experts from the State Department, the C.I.A. and other agencies. The process was led by Dennis B. Ross, the president’s senior adviser on the Middle East; Samantha Power, a senior director at the National Security Council who handles human rights issues; and Gayle Smith, a senior director responsible for global development.

The administration kept the project secret, officials said, because it worried that if word leaked out, Arab allies would pressure the White House, something that happened in the days after protests convulsed Cairo.

Read the Times Report here.

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