Drones On Yemen Campaign Designed To Create Terrorism

June 15, 2011

Over the last decade the U.S. has gotten its way with a lot of international issues, like collecting world wide flight and banking data etc, because it could somewhat justify them with 9/11 and the "global war of terror."

But that justification is withering away as after 9/11 no more serious attacks on the U.S. happened. To further justify its outrageous international behavior and to resuscitate the war new attacks are needed.

This is, to me at least, the only possibly sane line of thinking to explain why the CIA would want to beat the beehive in Yemen.

The CIA program will be a major expansion of U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Yemen. Since December 2009, U.S. strikes in Yemen have been carried out by the U.S. military with intelligence support from CIA. Now, the spy agency will carry out aggressive drone strikes itself alongside the military campaign, which has been stepped up in recent weeks after a nearly yearlong hiatus.
…
While the specific contours of the CIA program are still being decided, the current thinking is that when the CIA shifts the program from intelligence collection into a targeted killing program, it will select targets using the same broad criteria it uses in Pakistan. There, the agency selects targets by name or if their profile or "pattern of life"—analyzed through persistent surveillance—fits that of known al Qaeda or affiliated militants.

By using those broad criteria, the U.S. would likely conduct more strikes in Yemen, where the U.S. now only goes after known militants, not those who fit the right profile.

As the last sentence admits, the program is designed in a way that makes sure that innocent people will be killed. Profiling always has high false positive rate, i.e. it always catches people who fit a profile just by chance or for explainable innocent reasons.

Why design a campaign that must hit innocent people if that is not the intent? What are plans to kill civilians in a tribal society which will certainly answer with revenge if not plans to create more terrorists?

Then this:

The Central Intelligence Agency is building a secret air base in the Middle East to serve as a launching pad for strikes in Yemen using armed drones, an American official said Tuesday.

The only plausible place for a base to strike in Yemen is Saudi Arabia. Sharurah would be a likely candidate. U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia were on of reasons why 9/11 happened and were given up soon after it took place.

There is very little terrorism coming out of Yemen. A Nigerian was allegedly trained there so badly that he managed to burn his balls when trying to bring down a plane. A package bomb from Yemen was found after a tip-off from the Saudi secret service. It may well have been that then president Saleh send that bomb to collect more anti-terrorism funds.

There may be some troublesome folks living in Yemen but they do not seem to be many and are obviously incompetent and amateurish. Attacking those few while making sure that innocents will be killed will not create a more peaceful world. It will certainly incite more terrorism. As I fail to find any other reason for the announced campaign I can only assume that the inevitable consequences are intended.

Or do I miss something here?

Posted by b on June 15, 2011 at 12:40 UTC | Permalink

Comments

The US prison/justice system is extremely efficient at encouraging criminal behaviour. If one were to design a system to explicitly encourage crime, the US system would be an excellent starting point. I don’t think that the US deliberately seeks to encourage criminal behaviour. I think rather that there is a combination of incompetence, narrow self interest (money), inertia, fear of failing and going with the status quo, and extreme right-wing ideology trumping reality, and so on.
I suspect that the same thing applies here. I don’t see the US behaviour to be all that different than other historical empires.

Posted by: edwin | Jun 15 2011 14:33 utc | 1

The US has to fight/kill…or rather a certain nexus of military/security/contractors, etc., do. Specially the arms trade, which has to find use for their matériel and skills. To remain on top of the arms trade:
– One has to test things, use them.
– Provoke terrorism/insurgencies/civil wars/revolts/war to keep on selling.
The domination of the US – which permits it to kill anyone anywhere anytime and collect data on citizens worldwide as b points out – is based on this military superiority, and by now on nothing else. It is the only reason it maintains its position on the world stage, such as e.g. having a veto vote at the IMF.
The sharp uptick in drift towards control, jackboots, security, random killings, war mongering, is also pointed to domestic control, as it is clear that the US population is being impoverished and things are not going to improve without profound systemic change. The prison industry touts a 15% return on investment…

Posted by: Noirette | Jun 15 2011 15:04 utc | 2

I really wish Cheney Bush were still in power. At least when they did this there was an illusion of opposition from the so called left. We (USA and EU) are all humanitarian drone bombers now. O and the D’s are terrorist war criminals.
Thanks b, for continued excellent blogging.

Posted by: Eureka Springs | Jun 15 2011 15:42 utc | 3

dear hasty b, how about adding ‘not’ at **?
thank you for being so human!
……………
There may be some troublesome folks living in Yemen but they do ** seem to be many and are obviously incompetent and amateurish. Attacking those few while making sure that innocents will be killed will not create a more peaceful world. It will certainly incite more terrorism. As I fail to find any other reason for the announced campaign I can only assume that the inevitable consequences are intended.
Or do I miss something here?

Posted by: lambent1 | Jun 15 2011 16:09 utc | 4

I heard the editor-in-chief of Italy’s La Repubblica approvingly use the phrase “canone occidentale” (the western canon) the other day. This is the Western Canon at work then: sometimes tepidly, sometimes enthusiastically approved by the status-quo elites in Europe and the US. But collective approval it is. Collective guilt too.

Posted by: Guthman Bey | Jun 15 2011 16:15 utc | 5

@lambert1 – thanks, corrected

Posted by: b | Jun 15 2011 17:07 utc | 6

Thanks b for an excellent post. You say things in a calm way with impeccable reasoning. I sometimes let my raw emotion get the best of me. But I think what you are describing is another aspect of the Great Beast that is devouring my country. These lines in the article you quoted caught my eye:

Since December 2009, U.S. strikes in Yemen have been carried out by the U.S. military with intelligence support from CIA. Now, the spy agency will carry out aggressive drone strikes itself alongside the military campaign, which has been stepped up in recent weeks after a nearly yearlong hiatus.

The militarization of the CIA has been increasing since Obama came to power. The enmeshing and coordination of covert work and the military machine is increasing. Obama’s appointment of General Petraeus to CIA, and shifting CIA chief, Panetta, to be Defense Secretary is not a haphazard move. These decisions, and the crimes that are furthered by them, have been premeditated. It is also not a coincidence that on our domestic front the FBI has been authorized to investigate peace groups, as well as collect private information and proceed on their own general principles, without any need to justify these intrusions on the basis of probable cause.
Incredibly, and just recently, Secretary Clinton stated what is the Empire’s guiding principle; and that is, that innocent people will continue to die in wars; but the important thing is that the United States will take care to make public its expression of sorrow and regret, whenever that happens.

Posted by: Copeland | Jun 15 2011 17:24 utc | 7

the aim is to project power. If Tunisia took up scenario 6 of this article
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/06/15/africa.libya.gadhafi.rebels/index.html
and invades Libya, how do you think would Saudi Arabia feel?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/20/business/energy-environment/20saudi.html

Posted by: somebody | Jun 15 2011 19:19 utc | 8

You are right on the money, b.
But for me the question is what does America gain from this in the big picture. Such destabilizations will hurt America and its image in the world when there are clearly other powers springing up ready to take the lead. This is total madness going around in a vicious circle. And the US is quickly running out of space.

Posted by: a | Jun 15 2011 19:21 utc | 9

BTW, if anyone has not been following this. Both India and Pakistan are set to enter SCO, and Iran and Afghanistan will be following suit soon. And the entry of Pakistan and India has gotten much accelerated after the Abbotabad raid for OBL. The US is loosing it bit time. And their John Wayne style is going to speed up their sojourn into the wilderness.

Posted by: a | Jun 15 2011 19:49 utc | 10

If it were not for our “allies” in the Yemeni govt, people in Yemen would have represenation and Al Qaida would be eradicated from Yemen very quickly.

Posted by: OH | Jun 15 2011 20:52 utc | 11

Djibouti is a more likely base for drone attacks on Yemen. Easier to supply, and no problems with the Saudi rulers who appear to have some ideas of their own. The US already has a base there (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Lemonnier). Djibouti is effectively a French colony with a puppet dictator, and Sarkozy’s agreement to US plans is unlikely to be a problem.

Posted by: pmr9 | Jun 15 2011 21:17 utc | 12

I think there might be another theory for why it is striking Yemen. Put simply Desperation. As the Empire fails you see it struggling to maintain power. Therefore missile strikes in Pakistan/Afghanistan increase, attempting to stay in Iraq, new war in Libya, now bombing strikes in Yemen. It’s all a sign that the US is losing its grip on the Middle East and is suddenly fighting various conflicts in an attempt to hold on.
Also agree with what “a” said Pakistan and India joining the SCO this week with Afghanistan getting observer status (Iran already with observer status) again shows that the US is losing control. Add to that Egypt’s revolution and the pathethic attempts by the US to bribe it and it shows that region wide the US is struggling to maintain its dominance.
Of course maybe the two events are linked and that the US is hoping to shake the beehive in order to create blowback to maintain its position.

Posted by: Colm O’ Toole | Jun 15 2011 21:29 utc | 13

the cia and the u.s. military both already have drone bases just miles away from yemen in djibouti. you may recall the cia’s use of that base to kill a u.s. citizen & companions in yemen back in 2002…
from james bamford’s 2008 book, the shadow factory: the ultra secret nsa from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on america (pp. 135-6, emphases added)

For years, one of the people near the top of the NSA’s target list was Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, a native Yemeni suspected of belonging to al-Qaeda and of being one of the masterminds behind the attack on the USS Cole two years before. After listening to hours of tape recordings of his conversations, the small team assigned to locate al-Harethi was very familiar with the sound of his voice. But like most of the NSA’s targets, al-Harethi know that the United States was searching for him with an electronic dragnet, hoping to snag a brief satellite phone call and pinpoint his location. As a result he always carried with him up to half a dozen phones, each with multiple cards that could change the number. The NSA had a list of at least some of the numbers, and because he was a high-priority target, an alarm would go off if one of them was used.
On the afternoon of November 3, 2002, the alarm sounded, surprising one of the analysts on the team. “He knew this guy’s phone number and he [al-Harethi] hadn’t used it for a period of time – it was a satellite phone,” said one knowledgeable source. “Then it came up.” Using global positioning satellites, he was able to pinpoint al-Harethi in the Yemeni province of Mar’ib, a remote, sand-swept landscape controlled by well-armed tribal chiefs and largely off-limits to Yemeni police. The analyst quickly contacted a CIA team based across the Red Sea in Djibouti. From the small country on the Horn of Africa, the CIA operated a battery of unmanned Predator drones, each armed with deadly Hellfire missiles. From there, the drones could easily reach anywhere in Yemen, where at least one was already on patrol. Thus, almost immediately the CIA in Djibouti began directing the Predator toward the target.
But the NSA analyst, eavesdropping on the satellite call in near real time, was disappointed. Having listened to tape of al-Harethi’s voice many times over the years, he was convinced the person on the other end of the phone was not him. “This guy is listening and he realizes it’s not the guy,” said the source. “And all of sudden he hears like a six-second conversation and it’s the guy, he’s in the backseat and he’s giving the driver directions and it was picked up over the phone, and the analyst was that good that he heard over all the other stuff. He said, ‘That’s him.’ But because they have to have dual recognition, he called in the second guy, they played the tape, and they said, ‘It’s him.’ Forty minutes later a Hellfire missile hit that car. The Predator was already up doing surveillance. The CIA said to the Predator team, ‘Here’s the general location – from NSA – that we have the satellite phone, go find the damn car and get the guy.’ Those analysts get that good, they can recognize the voice. The CIA took credit for that because it was a CIA Predator that fired the shot that killed the guy. But the way they killed him was an NSA analyst listening.”
The black all-terrain vehicle instantly burst into a ball of flames, killing all five of the occupants and leaving little more than charred metal and a sprawling oil stain on the desert sand. Also in the car was Kamel Derwish, an American citizen who had grown up in the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna, New York, emigrated with his family to Saudi Arabia, and returned to Lackawanna in the late 1990s. He later recruited half a dozen other American Muslims to travel to Afghanistan, where they took part in an al-Qaeda training camp in 2001, months before the attack on 9/11.
It would be a milestone of sorts for the NSA – its first assassination. But it would not be the last. The agency created to passively eavesdrop on targets was now, with the CIA, actively assassinating targets.

they’ve just helped the president of djibouti extend his rule for at least six more years, the africom base there is growing leaps & bounds as u.s. military -to- african nation military relationships build across the continent, and cia ops in the hoa have become an even greater priority, so it’s not like they’d have much problem operating a campaign against yemen from there. not sure then why the talk of basing elsewhere, unless it’s a distraction that can also be used to manipulate or else they really do think they need more than one base to cover all ends.
the notion of targeting anyone based on ‘pattern of life’ is a poor cover for how little actual intel any of these agencies of empire have. this is no doubt being advanced by the nsa and/or tech firms out there pushing software that targets individuals based on patterns of behavior and other social technologies. intent to generate new candidates for target practice may also play a lesser part in the stepped-up operations, as a given once the plan is put into motion, but probably not a significant one in the final decision to use yemeni’s as lab rats.

Posted by: b real | Jun 16 2011 4:56 utc | 14

Thanks b real, saves me from posting the same..
also, I whole heartedly agree w/ Eureka Springs at #3
At least the insidious, blatant and methodical polices of murder for profit were out in the open, in other words, you could see it coming, w/Obomber, and crew, it’s hidden behind an Eminence Front…

Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jun 16 2011 7:13 utc | 15

@b real – not sure then why the talk of basing elsewhere, unless it’s a distraction that can also be used to manipulate or else they really do think they need more than one base to cover all ends.
Djibouti’s one runway is simply too busy. Too many militaries use it a resupply base for their anti-piracy forces. Even Japan is now basing there.
If one wants to do something “secret” Djibouti isn’t the best place to do so. Sharurah is a military garrison in the desert in Saudi Arabia near the Yemeni border with a seldom used but perfect military airport. It looks like a good candidate to me. But of course there are other possibilities including a completely new base build somewhere.

Posted by: b | Jun 16 2011 9:11 utc | 16

I really wish Cheney Bush were still in power. At least when they did this there was an illusion of opposition from the so called left.

Well, Eureka Springs @ 3, perhaps that’s why Bush the Younger said he would have voted for Obama if he could. Heh, heh.
Wall Streeters supported Obama because they did not trust Hillary Clinton to give them everything they wanted; Obama fit that bill, plus and having a D president,especially the first black president, would effectively neuter the Congressional Democrats.
Perhaps the thinking went beyond just ecnomics, and the the really strategic Republican thinkers (Cheney and his ilk?) decided that since the public was not going to elect anyone on the Republican ticket for president, they should get a Democrat who was as close as possible to being a Republican on the Democratic line. Anyone nominated as a Democrat in 2008 had the election in hand, it was his or hers to lose.
I didn’t support Obama based on his strangely right leanings and comments, his corporatist bent. I thought Hillary Clinton would be better, altho’ also possibly disappointing on the wars issues. However, I never dreamed in my worst nightmares that Obama would be so much like Bush III, would so greedily grasp all the accrued powers of Bush/Cheney and even extend them, would be even worse on civil liberties in many areas, would weild drones so eagerly and wantonly. Wall Street Austerians could not have asked for a better proponent!
Perhaps that’s what he was hired for…by the MOTUs who funded his early campaign in the Dem primary. Cement and extend. Make the presidency every more powerful and the Congress less so. And, as a side benefit, destroy the Democratic brand and very likely the Democratic Party.
What a mess.

Posted by: jawbone | Jun 16 2011 13:38 utc | 17

a @ 10 — By SCO, I’m assuming you mean the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Central Asian security and trade group dominated by Russia and China?
Could you explicate your thinking a bit more? Thnx.

Posted by: jawbone | Jun 16 2011 13:46 utc | 18

Yemen analyst Gregory Johnson on the announced drone killing campaign: Why Things will get worse in Yemen

I have argued against just such a strategy for the past 3-4 years, for the same reason I have been so against the GCC plan to transition away from Salih: I don’t think it can work and will, I believe, make the situation worse.
There are other reasons as well to oppose this strategy.
This is essentially the seduction of a quick and seemingly easy fix to a difficult problem.
There are, of course, reasons policy makers think the strategy will work. Drones scare AQAP – and we know from what the organization puts out that they move around a lot to avoid them.
But still I think whatever gains the US gets from the strikes – and they will likely kill some commanders – these will be overshadowed and outweighed by the long-term consequences of such a strategy. Basically, the longer and more intense such a policy of drone strikes is – the stronger AQAP will become.

He is of course right. But that is not a bug but a feature of the policy.

Posted by: b | Jun 16 2011 14:36 utc | 19

More from the Johnson piece linked above:

Late that year, after an attempt on Saudis CT head, Muhammad bin Nayyif – someone who has good ties to Western intelligence agencies – the US started carrying out air strikes against AQAP targets in Yemen. And here is where we get to our problem.
The US couldn’t hit what it was aiming at. On Dec. 17, it targeted what it believed to be an AQAP training camp, instead it killed a number of women and children, something AQAP has made much of its in propaganda statements and which has helped recruiting.
The US’ record wasn’t much better throughout the spring and in May 2010 it carried out a strike in Marib that instead of killing the AQ operative it was after, actually knocked off a Yemeni government official – the deputy governor of the province. His tribe has been causing problems since in retaliation for his death – these strikes don’t take place in a vacuum.
These errant strikes have also, I believe – based on the number of new authors showing up in Sada al-Malahim as well as the number of attacks AQAP has carried out in 2010 – increased the number of recruits joining AQAP.
The organization is stronger now than it was in late 2009 when it planned and launched the attack that almost brought down the airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day. One of the major reasons for this is the US airstrikes.

Posted by: b | Jun 16 2011 14:40 utc | 20

b, just because a certain policy produces a certain predictable effect, you can’t deduce that that effect was the reason of the policy; especially in our post-political world;
post-political means, among other things, that ends aren’t the most important thing that guides action anymore; increasingly, what guides decisions are the means employed; that is, the means are the end;
drones allow Cia to extend its budget and influence, to interfere with military operations, to blackmail other countries (but of course we are never cynical enough to imagine all the uses a destructive power may have);
Cia was looking for opportunities to use more drones, examined Saudi Arabia, then settled for Yemen
growing anti-Us sentiment is just collateral damage, like the financial crisis, the Iraqi mess, the budget deficit, etc
all this senseless and reckless behavior will persist until the Us will be strong enough to avoid the punishment that for the rest of common mortals is inevitably associated with mistakes

Posted by: claudio | Jun 16 2011 17:51 utc | 21

@claudio – you are right, but that exactly explains why creating more ‘terrorists’ is a feature. More ‘terrorists’ will in the future require more drones, more CIA actions etc. It prolongs the current line of business.

Posted by: b | Jun 16 2011 18:11 utc | 22

I wouldn’t think the base would be in Saudi Arabia. That’s a sensitive issue, even if Saudi ia allied with the US.

Posted by: alexno | Jun 16 2011 20:23 utc | 23

@jawbone #18
Yes, by SCO, I mean the Shanghai cooperation organization. It is an up-coming military/commercial alliance and a competitor to NATO in the region. SCO is having a summit these days. And it is expected the both India and Pakistan will become permanent member of this org (so far they had observer status). The US has played its cards badly in the region. Hence the countries are looking for alternative security arrangements. In the case of Pakistan, it wants to get into SCO as of yesterday for obvious reasons.
China: Pakistan’s other partner/A> is a recent article on Asia Times on Line and sheds light on this more detail than I can provide here.

Posted by: amar | Jun 16 2011 20:35 utc | 24

amar, thanks for bringing this up — now that I’m aware of it, I found some other news about the SCO. For example, one report says that Russian had won China’s backing against the US “missile shield.” So there is still opposition to that little encirclement attempt by the US….
I’ve figured the US-Pakistan relations would be going downhill as soon as Bush/Cheney began military operations over the border, then with Obama going bonkers with drone attacks…well, I figure there may be some benefits to both sides, but I can’t imagine Pakistan wanting the US in long term bases in Afghanistan.
Anyway, SCO just wasn’t on my radar screen, at all, and now it is. Again, thanks.

Posted by: jawbone | Jun 16 2011 23:30 utc | 25

I really wish Cheney Bush were still in power. At least when they did this there was an illusion of opposition from the so called left. – Eureka Springs
Also, perhaps more important, Bush-Cheney were somewhat open and transparent, they dealt from a position of strength, assuming they could e.g. legally by-pass the Geneva Conventions.
The piece below, from Foreign Policy in Focus, Has the Rendition Program Disappeared? isn’t excellent, but does give a lot of facts, and does make the point that Obama is simply killing ‘terrorists’ …
http://www.fpif.org/articles/has_the_rendition_program_disappeared
Bush-Cheney had many of the ticks of right-wing authoritarian regimes – re-write the rules, make “it” -whatever- legal, have court cases, render it solemn, justify it, and thereby get ppl on board and change the culture (at least a bit.) E.g. Water-boarding is functionally justifiable, legally admissible, in the interests of the people, and so on.
See > Yellow stars are state mandated and serve rigorous policies that create a true society and promote national renewal. It is all legal and approved…
Obama has dispensed with it .. Goodbye to all that! Efforts towards, or pretense at, some kind of collectively agreed on laws and conduct is even less important or respected than before. He is closer to the left-wing dictators.
See > Enemies of the State deserve no mercy, the Party Decides, deviants cannot reform, our enemies within and without must be annihilated, etc.
It is now plain that the opposition from the Dems was opposition to the Republicans and didn’t have anything to do with habeas corpus, the rule of law, the illegality of extra judicial killings, rendition, war, terrorism, etc. If anything, they, base Dems, want to cheer their champion for being more successful at combating terrarists than the Repugs were…that is what they shout about on the blogs..

Posted by: Noirette | Jun 17 2011 16:44 utc | 26

If you are interested in the genesis of this practice (of stimulating opponents to “justify” war and all its ancillary evils) then read Antony C Sutton’s books.
From his website (he is now dead):

“In 1968, his Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development was published by The Hoover Institute at Stanford University. Sutton showed how the Soviet state’s technological and manufacturing base, which was then engaged in supplying the North Vietnamese the armaments and supplies to kill and wound American soldiers, was built by US firms and mostly paid for by the US taxpayers. From their largest steel and iron plant, to automobile manufacturing equipment, to precision ball-bearings and computers, basically the majority of the Soviet’s large industrial enterprises had been built with the United States help or technical assistance.”

His career was largely destroyed as a result of this research, as well as his books about Wall St and FDR, and the rise of Hitler (in which he documented the transfer of US technology to the Nazis).
We prefer to believe that this is a recent development because we grow distinctly uncomfortable confronting the evidence that it is a very long-established practice, and all those “good and just” wars really weren’t.
Do yourself a favour and peek behind the curtain.

Posted by: ScuzzaMan | Jun 17 2011 21:20 utc | 27

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