☫ Why Yemen?

Analysis Building bridges for Bin-Laden, Inc.

Obama seeks sincere 'bridging' of gaps

Yemen is a great place to clearly distinguish how the so-called War on Terror is not much more of an euphemism for the backing of terrorism to be blamed on Islamic Fundamentalism.

The Christmas Underwear Bomber

Not even a year ago, in December of 2009, the exact same incompetence that allowed hijackers to fly planes into buildings on September of 2001 in the country boasting a bigger Defense budget than the entire rest of the world combined, made sure that the young Nigerian Abdul Mutallab would find his way into the land of James Madison, who had much earlier observed,

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

It was Christmas. That is, the perfect timing for a terrorist attack that could get Muslims and Christians into fearing and hating each other more for the profit of the anti-religious zealots. Mutallab somehow managed to catch a plane from Nigeria to Schipol airport in the Netherlands, and was later found trying to ignite his explosive underwear in the Amsterdam-Detroit flight 253.

There was nothing careless about this incompetence though. Not only did the US Department of State comfortably brush off the dire warnings on Mutallab being up to no good presented by his own father in the US Embassy of Abuja days before the flight (BBC: Father alerted US about Nigerian plane bomb suspect), but he had already been awarded one of those 'very easy to get' American Visas while being a known Al-Qaeda trainee. 

Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with.

Said Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security (Detroit News: Terror suspect kept visa to avoid tipping off larger investigation).

That is to say, the reason why the general public is subjected to increasingly humiliating airport security searches around the world (Nur ein Wort) is so actual terrorists like Mutallab can board our planes with the certainty that no one else will get in their way.

Under the same excuse, every single terrorist act in the last decades might as well been left off to take place in order to avoid tipping off larger investigations. After all, those evil Muslims are supposedly trying to take over the world, so no investigation could ever be large-scale enough.

A Sequel: The Female Yemenese Mail Bomber

It doesn't even seem necessary to reinvent strategies or slogans to embark in the first American invasion and genocide of the recently-started decade, as the same 'conclusive intelligence' that pointed fingers at Iraq and its stockpiles of WMDs, now unanimously drives us to Yemen, in a series of repetitive plays of ever more ridiculous narrative.

Yemeni security forces arrested a woman suspected of sending two parcel bombs. The woman was arrested along with her mother after her mobile phone number was found on the receipt for the parcel bombs.

A Yemeni security official told AFP (Jakarta Globe: Yemen arrests woman over plane bomb plot).

It makes one wonder though, why would key related news from the previous days, informing that FBI probes on UPS packages found no explosives, would be removed (Bloomberg: FBI probes packages on UPS jets; toner unit shows no explosives, taken from Internet cache upon its deletion).

One would believe that a medical student from one of the top universities of the country would take precautions to not even leave fingerprints behind. Her father, a petroleum engineer, must be wondering how his daughter could not even think that her mom's phone number was somehow more incriminating. Unless...

A Yemen Before the Media Spotlight

For most people, who just tune in to the global affairs, Yemen might just sound like yet another exotic wasteland about to meet the wrath of the 'spreading of freedom and democracy.'

But for those who have been sharing the suffering of the Yemeni people for a longer while, the recent events and cooking of books by the grand master chefs of the hijacked American foreign policy is far from a surprise. It is rather a confirmation that the slaughtering of innocent children, men, and women in north Yemen (warning: very perturbing scenes) performed by the Saud family had all along full blessings from its allies in the White House.

Opposite to what our media would prefer us to believe, history in Yemen did not start last year in the hands of a Nigerian youth aided by the US Intelligence to attempt blowing up a transatlantic plane. People in Yemen have been enduring a Saud American-backed artificial regime forced on them before many of us had even been born. 

The fact that this regime is clearly anti-Islamic is best noted in the eloquence of the opposition leader Abd Al-Rahman Ali Al-Jifri: Sunni cleric attacks Saudi distortions of Islam. And therefore the question: If Al Qaeda is really an Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist group, why isn't it fighting against the Sana'a and Riyadh regimes, and instead focuses on the assassination of innocents, a practice strictly forbidden in the Quran?

Obama's Aid to the Yemeni Dictatorship 

While Obama pretends to be concerned about human rights in China and Iran, claiming to join the cause of so-called freedom fighters under iconic episodes of US and European interventionism, he himself has had no problem to rush into aiding the Sana'a regime's cleansing of its own people. Its main military backers in Riyadh have just been awarded a USD$60 billion deal in weapons by the 2009 Peace Nobel laureate (Xinhua: US announces 60-billion-dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia).

But comes this as such a shocker? It is not like the Western world didn't fully back Saddam Hussein in the past when attempting a holocaust of Kurds, Sunnis and Shias of Iraq and Iran with chemical weapons. And it is not like previous US administrations didn't back the criminal Talibans to gain power in Afghanistan - with all their oppression to women and cruel murderous ways included - through a massive recruitment via Riyadh.

Why Yemen? Why Now?

For the movers and shakers of Western foreign policy, securing Yemen has a tremendous geopolitical importance.

It is not just the fact that the big Shia population there and along the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia might very well pose a serious threat to traditional strongholds and breeders of false Islamic extremism (e.g. Al Qaeda, Talibans, Lashkar-e Toiba) of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, key in Western operations against its foes China and Russia as well as the demonization of Islamic Fundamentalism (a way of undermining occupied nations' resistances in the Middle East).

It also is the case that Yemen boasts one of the most strategic locations in the world: As if having the Islamic Republic of Iran in control of the strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf was not enough of a headache for Western ambitions, the fragile US-backed dictatorship of Yemen guards the Bab Al-Mandeb strait, critical for the naval traffic through the Red Sea basin.

Having such two key water passageways at stake is a certain no-no. Not just for foreign colonialists, but even for the financial interests of the Bin Laden family: Osama's own half-brother is set to build the biggest suspension bridge in the world from Yemen to Djibouti in Africa at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden (The Independent: Bin Laden brother unveils £100bn plan for world's longest bridge).

For Yemeni people it must sound far from a coincidence that Bab Al-Mandeb actually means 'The Gate of Scars.'

One can only wonder if us, the people, on whom ignorance and indifference the hijackers of the US count on, will fulfill their expectations or not. Whatever the outcome, if Obama had really looked into the Holy Quran, rather than laying his hands on it for a political act in Cairo, he would have found an aya rendering him defeated before giving any further step (3:54), 

They plotted and God planned, but God is the best of planners