Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and if you want a good laugh, or you want to fly into a rage, one or the other, I'm not sure, take a gamble on it.
Go look up on YouTube, it's titled, Ed Schultz getting pounded into the ground on Libya by Jeremy Scahill.
It will make your day one way or the other, I promise you that.
The subject there, of course, being Libya, and now I'm happy to welcome Jeremy back to the show.
He is the author of Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army.
He's a frequent contributor to The Nation magazine and correspondent for Democracy Now.
He's a Puffin Fellow at The Nation Institute, won numerous awards, of course, for his investigative journalism, and has a great new piece here at The Nation, it's thenation.com, The Dangerous U.S. Game in Yemen.
Welcome back to the show, Jeremy, how are you?
Good to be back with you, Scott.
Very happy to have you here, and I guess I kind of want to start at the end first, if it's okay.
Sure.
If it goes without saying, which, you know, it was in the Post and the Times, you know, to some degree at least, that there is such a thing as the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command in Yemen.
America does have a war on terrorism going on there to one degree or another, and I wonder what they're doing in reaction to the revolution going on in the streets there, and it looks like perhaps here pretty soon Ali Abdullah Saleh will be overthrown, and I wonder whether they've called off their operations temporarily, are they still running around hunting al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, so-called, or do you know?
Yeah, I mean, I think that for the time being what the United States is doing, and when I say the United States I mean the Obama administration, CIA, JSOC, I think they're just sort of waiting to see what's going to happen.
It is possible that Ali Abdullah Saleh will weather this storm for a number of months more, or he could be overthrown tomorrow, or he could be negotiated out of power by the powerful tribes inside of Yemen, but I know from talking to people in both the intelligence community and in the special ops community that the U.S. is extremely nervous about what comes after Saleh, and I would imagine that the U.S. forces that are in Yemen right now are going to try to keep a very, very low profile.
In fact, the stakes are so high that there are discussions about moving the center or the hub of U.S. covert operations in Yemen out of Yemen and into Djibouti, where there is this ever-expanding U.S. base at Camp Lemonnier, which really under the Bush administration in the early years was created to be a base of covert operations in North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula.
So I think the Obama administration, to sort of just talk about it in very mainstream terms, doesn't really have a good play here because they're backing Saleh, who's a ruthless thug that everyone wants gone.
At the same time, I think they're afraid that if they go all out and call for his removal, that they're going to get somebody far less pliant than him.
So I think they've painted themselves into a corner by relying so heavily on this one guy.
Well, now, this one guy has got troubles.
If you take America, the CIA, and the terror war out of the equation, he still has a Shiite minority rebellion in the north and a socialist rebellion in the south of the country, right, or the east of it.
Yeah, I mean, what's ironic about that is that Saleh himself is a Zaydi Shiite, you know, the north of Yemen, the Houthi tribe has been regularly trying to bring down his government and fight against him.
And what Saleh has been doing is taking sides with really extremist Wahhabi factions from Saudi Arabia and allowing the Saudis to go in and try to just exterminate the Shiite minority inside of Yemen.
And so the Houthis rightly see him as a puppet for the U.S. and the Saudis.
But really what's happening there is that the U.S. and the Saudis are creating a situation that could draw in Iran to defend the Shiite population there.
Now, Saleh often uses the myth of Iranian involvement in his country to try to get money from the U.S., but the dangerous game the U.S. is playing in the north of Yemen could well draw in the Iranians because this is Shiites being exterminated and it gets covered a lot on Iranian state television.
I mean, they're watching it very closely.
The other thing is that Yemen is the most impoverished country in the Arab world.
It is actually going to run out of water at some point in the next 20 years, which will be an incredible crisis.
They've almost completely depleted their oil resources, and much of the country is on drugs, chewing pot.
The tribes are very powerful there.
The rural areas of the country are indeed a ripe ground for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula to operate.
You have the U.S. running around bumping people off, bombing a lot of civilians in the pursuit of these 500 or 600 al-Qaeda guys, and you have a real cocktail for disaster.
And if Saleh falls, there's no guarantee that who's going to come after him is going to be anything vaguely resembling democratic or is going to play ball with the U.S.
So whichever way you cut it, this isn't going to be good for the Obama administration.
All right, now talk to me a little bit about this al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
I want to go back through some of the history and talk about the big al-Qaeda cell there in the 1990s.
I guess Osama bin Laden's switchboard was there.
James Bamford, there's footage of James Bamford on PBS.
Hi, behind me, I'm reporting live from Yemen.
Not live.
Behind me is the house where they took the phone calls where the hijacker's father-in-law lived and all that.
Now, so there's something to it, but then again, there's an Obama administration narrative about al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and then there's something approximating the truth, and I was hoping you could help me get toward that, describing who these guys really are.
Well, I mean, we're really talking about sort of the power of nightmares here.
Americans, as one special forces colonel told me, are afraid of anything that can affect us personally and think that epic danger is the threat of bringing down an aircraft.
And bringing down an aircraft is indeed a scary prospect, but these guys don't represent anything even vaguely resembling an existential threat to the United States.
I mean, not even remotely close.
So is there a threat that emanates from them?
Sure.
They almost brought down those cargo planes.
The undie bomber was there.
But really, their victory comes in the form of this really scared reaction from the United States.
All right, now hold it right there, everybody.
It's Jeremy Scahill in The Nation, the dangerous U.S. game in Yemen, and we'll be right back after this with more.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
On the line is Jeremy Scahill, investigative reporter and correspondent for Democracy Now!
, as well as, of course, for The Nation, the new one at thenation.com, is the dangerous U.S. game in Yemen, an in-depth study of American intervention in Yemen over the past decade or so.
And I was hoping, Jeremy, in this next segment we could more or less split it between what can you tell us about the American covert war in Yemen and then maybe from there the role that that has played in their domestic politics, and perhaps what role it's played in stoking this rebellion against Saleh's dictatorship there.
Right.
I mean, just one closing point on the issue of al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
I think that there's a lot of exaggeration that goes on, particularly about the role of Anwar al-Awlaki.
I've had several people in the intelligence and military community say that the Obama administration has just greatly exaggerated his role within al-Qaeda, and they basically are just inflating him because fear sells.
And I think that there's a counterterrorism industry that benefits from this.
As Colonel Pat Lang, one of the people I interviewed for my article, said that it's a whole industry with think tankers and book writers and journalists and others, and they have a vested interest in keeping these conflicts going because they remain relevant.
So I think we have to be real skeptical about that.
With that said, I do think that there are some opposed, they're just not existential threats, and we're using a sledgehammer for something that could be handled with a really tiny scalpel.
On the broader issue of the U.S. war in Yemen, the Bush administration really launched this beginning in November of 2001 when they cut a deal with Saleh, and they basically said to him, like, you know, if you don't let us run around and do as we please in your country, you're going to go down.
And so he allowed the United States to start acting in a covert way in the country, and they first bombed Yemen in November of 2002, killed six people, including a U.S. citizen from Buffalo, New York.
And that was really when Condoleezza Rice and others said the world is a battlefield, and we can strike wherever we want, and we can kill our own citizens, and there's no constitutional questions raised by that.
Well, legal scholars would disagree with that.
But what we've seen the Obama administration do is really double down on the Bush administration policy, send in more JSOC guys, conduct cruise missile attacks on suspected al-Qaeda sites, and end up killing, you know, 21 kids in one of the operations, killing a tribal leader in another operation.
And so what they've done is by killing people that are important to Yemeni tribes by killing civilians, they've really inflamed tensions in the country and really reinforced the idea that Ali Abdullah Saleh is just their puppet.
And also, you know, I don't believe in nation-building at all.
I think the United States has no business meddling in the affairs of other countries.
But what the U.S. has done in Yemen is to reward Ali Abdullah Saleh for talking their language on terrorism.
They give him a lot of money, but then give no money for any kind of civilian development.
So the Saudis give $2 billion a year, the Americans give $170 million a year to Saleh, and he trains this force that's supposed to be fighting al-Qaeda, and instead he turns around and steals part of the money and then uses the rest of it to train units that go and kill his domestic opponents.
People know that in Yemen, and they're fed up with it.
And that's a big part of why this insurrection has happened, is corruption, but also the fact that he uses these elite units to crush his domestic opponents while allowing al-Qaeda to strike when it's convenient for him because they're the gift that keeps on giving for him.
Because he knows he can just go cry al-Qaeda to the Americans and Saudis and they give him money.
So that's a really destructive, destabilizing relationship that the United States has developed with him, and Saleh plays all sides of the equation.
He plays the Saudis, he plays the Americans, he plays al-Qaeda.
Well, you know, I thought it was a curious narrative that came out of the WikiLeaks that the big cover-up was that the Americans were doing the drone strikes with the cluster bombs, and for, I guess, domestic political reasons, he figured it would be much better to take the credit for doing it himself.
Well, I mean, I think part of it is that at this point, after ten years of him allowing the United States to bump people off in Yemen, I think a lot of Yemenis just expect that he's going to lie to them.
But what happened is that we saw on the WikiLeaks cables that Saleh, actually, and his deputy prime minister, Eleni, are having a good laugh with General David Petraeus talking about how they just lied to their parliament and they lied to the people and said, we'll continue to say the bombs are ours and not yours.
But the munitions that were used were these human-shredding cluster bombs that were not launched from drones, actually, Scott.
They were launched from submarines.
Part of the reason they didn't have weaponized drones is because of the Obama administration love affair with covert war in Pakistan.
So, I mean, this stuff is just spreading.
Well, I knew there was a reason we needed a giant fleet of nuclear submarines still.
Well, I mean, yeah, those Tomahawk cruise missiles are, I mean, they're just devastating.
I've seen what they can do on the ground.
They turn human beings into shredded meat.
You know, they look like hamburger meat.
And they're really devastating.
And so when those kinds of missiles slam into a Bedouin encampment, they can do a lot of damage, and they did.
And people see it.
And Amnesty International and Al Jazeera got footage of showing they were U.S. munitions.
So, you know, what the Obama administration has done, and I think a lot of liberals are just grand hypocrites on this, is to take some of the worst policies of the Bush era and stamp them with the stamp of bipartisanship.
I mean, you saw Ed Schultz last night on that show I was on with him just going off on a rant and, you know, trying to imply that I was some sort of unpatriotic American for criticizing the president and demanding to know if Obama is my president.
You know, I mean, the cruise missile liberals and the neocons, you know, they've found another war they can get behind in Libya.
And, you know, if this was Bush, a lot of these liberals would be, you know, cryin' war criminal, and instead they're backing it 100%.
And, you know, next time a Republican's in office, they'll go back to having a conscience.
Yep.
Well, and, you know, what was really remarkable about that clip was the arguments he used were direct quotes, basically, of the war party circa 2004.
In this country, you know, the Bush years, the height of the fever, you know, redstate.com and whatever.
You know, the other thing that's really important for people that actually care about the history of this stuff, when Bill Clinton wanted to bomb Serbia over the Kosovo issue in 1999, he couldn't get a UN Security Council resolution because Russia and China vetoed it.
And so what he did is he went to NATO and said, let's create an alliance outside of the UN and let's bomb Yugoslavia using NATO instead of the UN.
So don't give me any of this mess about how we were restricted by the UN, we had to go into Libya, Obama's just following the will of the international community.
That's nonsense.
The Clintons were classic subverters of anything having to do with international law.
They refused to sign into law the International Criminal Court.
They refused to recognize the UN Security Council when it was inconvenient to Israel's interests or the U.S. interests.
So don't give me this nonsense about how this is how Democrats wage war.
Democrats wage war in the exact same way that the Bush administration wages war.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's been very interesting to me since the end of the Cold War to see the different thresholds and so-called precedents and the different claims of, well, our interests are threatened and Saddam Hussein's not allowed to invade Kuwait because that's against the UN Charter and whatever.
And then by the time of Kosovo, it was, well, we're intervening in a civil war, but it might as well be a war between two states and Kosovo really should be autonomous.
At least then they had a pretend series of mass graves of 100,000 men, women and children being slaughtered, which never did exist, I suppose, but at least they had a tangible excuse for that.
But then now in this Libya thing, it's intervening in a civil war, which I believe is against what the UN Charter says, although I guess that doesn't matter.
And it's all to prevent a massacre that could happen.
And that's even in the direct language of the administration.
Yeah, I mean, I, like many people, have long wanted to see Muammar Gaddafi gone.
He's a thug, and I really hope that there is a widespread popular uprising against his regime.
But what we're seeing here is the U.S. intervening on behalf of 1,000 rebels.
That's really what it is.
If you read John Lee Anderson's devastating piece in The New Yorker this week, you'll read about who these guys are.
And the fact is that we have intervened in a civil war.
There is no end game to this.
If the U.S. decides to supply weapons to the, quote-unquote, rebels in Libya, that means that U.S. trainers are going to have to be deployed.
It means that there's going to be a substantial number of U.S. boots.
It's going to increase the cost, and it raises the specter of Americans being killed inside of Libya, a la Somalia in the early 90s.
So, I mean, they're playing with fire with this policy here.
And we don't study history.
We don't study history.
That's a big part of why these knee-jerk policies continue to be the policies of the day.
Hell, we don't even remember the history of, you know, just the last few years.
Right.
Yeah, history just began the day before yesterday, and on it will go.
All right, well, thanks very much.
I always appreciate your time.
I urge everyone to go check out The Dangerous U.S. Game in Yemen.
It's a really great piece.
It's at thenation.com.
Thanks, Jeremy.
All right, thanks, Scott.
