High crime, cover-up, silencing journalists 2009 cont’ ─ If you’re not outraged, you’ve caved

U.S. attacks Yemen

U.S. foreign relations with Yemen exemplify an endemic character of violence committed daily against peoples of the world. 
Editing, end comment by
Carolyn Bennett

 

44th U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama’s Yemen 2009 cont'

Jeremy Scahill’s documentary “Dirty Wars”

Today on Democracy Now

Voices of witnesses, survivors Yemen

Yemenis protest
repressive
U.S.-allied Regime

Yemeni mother [translated]: … 6:00 a.m., (the children) were sleeping and I was making bread. 

When the missiles exploded, I lost consciousness.  

I didn’t know what happened to my children, my daughter, my husband. 

They all died.
 Only I survived, along with this old man and my daughter.

Yemenis protest U.S. attacks

Yemeni daughter [translated]: Missiles attacked me and my brother Ibrahim and my mother.

Their hands were cut.

Yemeni Witness Muqbal Al-Kazemi [translated]: People saw the smoke and felt the earth shake.  They had never seen anything like it. 

Yemen's children
die or
become enemies 

I ran to the area [and] found scattered bodies and injured women and children.
 Forty-six people were killed, including five pregnant women.

 If they kill innocent children and call them al-Qaeda, then we are all al-Qaeda.

 If children are terrorists, then we are all terrorists.

  

Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye reporting

After the 2009 al-Majalah bombing, Abdulelah Haider Shaye reported that the site of the bombing was littered with remnants of U.S. Tomahawk missile and cluster munitions. This contradicted claims by the government of Yemen that the bombing had been their own.

But the fact of U.S. responsibility for the 2009 bombing of Yemen and not the Yemeni air force, as reported by Shaye, though shrouded by U.S. Pentagon officials, was later confirmed by:

Maya Nasser
Syrian journalist
Killed in Syria 2012

Amnesty International, The Telegraph newspaper, and a release of secret materials by WikiLeaks.

Abdulelah Haider Shaye also reported that the bombing attack left 21 children and 14 women dead

U.S. pressures Yemeni regime: 

silence messenger Abdulelah Haider Shaye

In January 2011, the Yemeni government arrested Shaye and after 34 days of detention the government convicted and delivered a five-year prison sentence on ‘terrorism-related charges.’ Rights organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Committee to Protect Journalists, and the International Federation of Journalists called the process “a sham.”

Yemeni tribal leaders and the public were outraged and Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh prepared to release Abdulelah Haider Shaye from prison; but U.S. President Barack Obama on February 2, 2011, called Yemen’s president, raised ‘concern’ about Shaye's imminent release; and the Yemeni regime kept the journalist in prison.

J

ournalist Jeremy Scahill has reported sources in Yemen saying Saleh rescinded his pardon of Abdulelah Haider Shaye primarily because of the call from President Obama.

Yemen’s counter-terrorism funding from the United States may have motivated Saleh’s cooperation, Scahill suggested.

On July 23, 2013, Shaye was released from prison but remained under house arrest and was prohibited from reporting, writing, practicing his profession.

Yemeni Journalist
Abdulelah Haider Shaye
reporting in Yemen and elsewhere

  

Abdulelah Haider Shaye

Abdulelah Haider Shaye (or Abd al-Ilah Haydar Al-Sha’i) is a prominent Yemeni journalist well known for his reporting of the December 17, 2009 al-Majalah bombing in Yemen; his interviews with al-Qaeda leaders (His relation through marriage with radical Islamic cleric Abdul Majeed al-Zindani is said to have helped the journalist gain interview access to Al Qaeda leaders, including the late Yemeni-American Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki); and his arrest and imprisonment in 2011 for practicing journalism. 

A

ppearing today on the Democracy Now program, Jeremy Scahill issues a scathing appraisal of the U.S. President that should trouble all Americans. Democracy Now host Amy Goodman asked Scahill to comment on the White House response [‘we are concerned and disappointed by the early release of Abd-Ilah-Shai, who was sentenced by a Yemeni court to five years in prison for his involvement with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’] to Yemen’s release of the journalist.

“The White House is saying,” Scahill responded, “that they are disappointed and concerned that a Yemeni journalist has been released from a Yemeni prison.

“The White House is citing the conviction in a kangaroo court” that Abdulelah Haider Shaye “supposedly was a supporter of al-Qaeda ─

…a court that was condemned by every major international media freedom organization, every major international human rights organization as a total sham trial;

…where Shaye was kept in a cage during the course of his prosecution; and

…a court where he was convicted on trumped-up charges.

Imprisoned for
practicing journalismAbdulelah Haider Shaye 

What “Mister Constitutional-Law-Professor President” is saying, Scahill contends, is that “this Yemeni court ─ condemned by every international human rights organization in the world ─ is somehow legitimate.”

Journalist targeted to maintain cover-up of U.S. bombing (massacre, illegal war) 

Scahill reports that Abdulelah Haider Shaye “was put in prison because ─ 

He had the audacity to expose a U.S. cruise missile attack that killed three dozen women and children. 

British journalist
Marie Colvin
killed in Syria 2012

And the United States had tried to cover up (this attack). 

They (U.S.) had the Yemeni government take responsibility for the 

strikes. 

The U.S. role was not initially owned. 

They (U.S.) said that they had blown up an al-Qaeda training camp. 

The reality was that women and children were killed.

Abdulelah Haider Shaye had gone to the scene and taken photographs of what were “clearly U.S. cruise missile parts with ‘General Dynamics’ on them (‘Made in the United States’ on them); WikiLeaks cables showed that General David Petraeus, who at the time was the CENTCOM commander, had conspired with the Yemeni dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh for the United States to begin bombing Yemen in the form of  (drone strikes and cruise missile strikes) and to have the Yemeni government publicly to take responsibility for the attack.

“When Abdulelah Haider Shaye exposed this (the truth from the ground) and it became clear to the world that the Obama administration (in 2009) was starting to bomb Yemen ─

On right
Journalist
Abdulelah Haider Shaye

… Shaye was abducted by Yemen’s U.S.-backed political security forces; 

…imprisoned and beaten; and

…threatened that, if he continued to report on the U.S. bombing campaign in Yemen, he would be returned to prison

But Shaye “went straight from his beating onto the airwaves of Al Jazeera and said, ‘I was just abducted by Yemen security forces, and they threatened me.’”

Some months later, Shaye becomes the victim of a night raid; he is “snatched and disappeared for 30 days.”

He is then “brought into a court ─ specifically set up to prosecute journalists who had committed crimes against the U.S.-backed dictatorship” ─ and the court sentences Shaye to five years in prison.

Journalist
Imprisoned, tortured
Guantanamo Bay

ECHOES: 2005 U.S. military shoots Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena near Baghdad’s (Iraq) international airport; 2001, 2002-2008 arrested in Pakistan, detained, mistreated at U.S. Bagram air base (Afghanistan), tortured in U.S. Guantanamo Bay prison is Sudan born-Al Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj.

Russian journalist
Anna Politkovskaya
killed in Russia

Italian journalist
Giuliana Sgrena
shot in Iraq

Secrecy legalized, hard news gathering criminalized

S

cahill said when he has asked the White House and the U.S. State Department “for a shred of evidence that Abdulelah Haider Shaye was guilty of anything other than journalism, critical journalism, they (don’t) provide it; they just say what they often do: ‘State secrets. Trust us.’”

In Abdulelah Haider Shaye’s critical interviews notably his interview with Anwar al-Awlaki, Scahill said, this journalist “asked more critical questions of figures within the al-Qaeda organization in Yemen than (are asked by) a single member of the U.S. ‘Caviar Correspondents Association’ ─   those jokers who sit in the front row and pretend to play journalists on television.” 

The current White House, Scahill concludes, is “not on the side of press freedom around the world [but] “on the side of locking up journalists who have the audacity to actually be journalists.”

T

he potential and promises courageously whispered in America's history ─  the 1776 Declaration, the 1787 Constitution, Lincoln’s 1863 at Gettysburg, Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1948 UN Human Rights Declaration ─ are utterly failed in a disintegrated America.

 To move forward for the public good ─ which is what we must do ─ is not an easy challenge. It requires retaking a legacy squandered, rebuilding institutions destroyed. This is a tough challenge I am not sure Americans are focused enough or care enough to even consider. 

 

Sources and notes

Abdulelah Haider Shaye bio at Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulelah_Haider_Shaye

 Democracy Now today: “Yemeni Reporter Who Exposed U.S. Drone Strike Freed from Prison after Jailing at Obama’s Request,” Thursday, July 25, 2013, http://www.democracynow.org/2013/7/25/yemeni_reporter_who_exposed_us_drone

 

“Dirty Wars” documentary: “Dirty Wars follows investigative reporter Jeremy Scahill, author of the international bestseller Blackwater, into the heart of America’s covert wars, from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia and beyond,” http://dirtywars.org/the-film

http://dirtywars.org/

“Did the U.S. military target Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena in Iraq?” (By Peter Symonds,” March 7, 2005, http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/03/iraq-07m.html

“Sami al-Haj: ‘I lived inside Guantánamo as a journalist’ ─ Al-Jazeera's Sami al-Haj, the only journalist to have been detained in Guantánamo, talks about media coverage of the issue and how his life has changed, July 17, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jul/17/sami-al-haj-al-jazeera-guantanamo-bay-journalist

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