All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm happy that Jason Ditz is on the line.
He's our news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
And I want to learn things about Yemen.
We got a revolution and a robot war all at the same time.
First, the revolution.
Jason, welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good, Scott.
How are you?
I'm doing great, man.
Appreciate you joining us today.
So what's the latest word about the fall on a part or not so much of the Saleh government there in Sana'a, the capital there in Yemen?
Well, it's sort of in a holding pattern right now.
There's sort of like the last several months, there's protesters in the streets.
There's the regime is insisting that it's not going to fall.
President Saleh is still in Saudi Arabia and there's questions of just how badly he was wounded.
Is he even alive anymore?
We don't really know.
And the regime insists he's coming back soon.
But exactly what soon means, we don't know.
Well, now, I think I read something that you'd written up that said that, I think first on one day, two or three days ago, what's left of the Saleh government said, we'll never negotiate with these people.
But then a day later, they had changed their mind, right?
And said that they would have a meeting with the leaders of the some armed group or another, I guess, not the peaceful protesters.
And then I read something else that said that the protesters themselves were at odds, the young versus the older group, I guess, about how to organize their so-called opposition, you know, to do the negotiating and what their protest tactics should be from here on out, that kind of thing.
Can you elaborate on any of that?
That's a long standing issue.
We've had the mostly student protesters, pro-democracy protesters that started this whole revolution in Yemen.
And about a month, month and a half in, the opposition, political opposition in parliament decided to get involved and they instantly decided that they should just take the whole thing over.
But their agenda is starkly different from the agenda of the protesters in a lot of ways.
And it's really caused a lot of internal dissension between the two groups.
And now, so during all this, are the southwest and northern parts, are they more or less just de facto autonomous zones now?
Or is what's left of the government?
They're operating more or less like the Gaza Strip right now in that the Sile government will every once in a while launch an attack on something or other, but they don't really have control over the area and they don't really have any prospect of gaining control over the area.
They're just sort of isolated zones that are operating on their own now.
I guess that part of the story isn't getting too much play.
Is it the sort of de facto secession going on?
Because at least my best understanding, the southeast and the north, they've been fighting for their independence for a little while off and on at least anyway, but it's not really a civil war in the sense they're trying or ever have been really trying to sack the capital city and take it over, right?
Right.
There's been those two active secessionist movements both for years and they've had very small conflicts with the government off and on.
Although the northern Houthi faction had a fairly major conflict with them over the last two years and took over parts of the far northern provinces and even invaded Saudi Arabia and took over some of the border territory.
But that had sort of settled down before these protest movements started up.
And now that the protest movements are going, I think both sides kind of see their opportunity to follow through with their secession.
Yeah, I think he told me a few months ago that, you know, immediately the army had to be called back home to the capital to protect the state from the immediate danger.
Oh, right.
And he can't even control the capital city, let alone all these.
And the center of Yemen has always sort of had de facto independence.
I mean, these tribal groups are nominally affiliated with the government, but they more or less operate independently and they don't really have major provincial governments like you might picture in other countries.
They're just tribal areas and the tribes more or less keep to themselves.
And that's all even more independent than it was.
And now the north and the southeast have both gone that way and the southwest has seen some pretty heavy fighting over some cities as well.
So really the part of Yemen that remains under the Yemeni government's control is a pretty small sliver of land anymore.
It's basically the capital city and a little bit of the coast if you follow south down the coast until you get to about the tip and that's about it.
Well, and all this is important to us because our government is very involved there.
They've been paying this guy Saleh the president there for I don't know how many years, a lot of money and military equipment and training for all his forces, right?
Oh, many, many years and dramatic increases in the amount of money over the past couple of years.
Ever since the Christmas Day underwear bomber, the administration's constantly increasing their aid, increasing their drone strikes.
We never really knew I think that the full scope of these drone strikes because President Saleh always made it a policy that he would just take credit for them himself when the U.S. launched a drone strike.
I mean, it didn't matter who it killed, he would take credit for it and bear the U.S. the embarrassment of having to admit that it's another drone strike that didn't kill anybody that they were trying to kill.
Yeah, but you know, the thing is about that is I remember reading what you were writing in November and December of 2009 and you were seeing right through that lie.
I think the Arab media, if not the rest of the American media, we're seeing through that lie and saying, yeah, well, they're calling them, you know, Saudi forces and Yemeni forces doing this, but it looks like the Americans and then this was going on all through November.
Then Bush, Obama gave his West Point speech where he lied that and said that the beginning of the end of the Afghan war would be July 2011 next month.
And then at the end, he said in Yemen and Somalia, you're next.
I'm a tough guy and beat his chest and yet he'd already been bombing Yemen for weeks with his robots and only stopped like a week before the Christmas Day attack.
And then I mean, this is like the perfect microcosm of the whole war on terror, isn't it?
You know, we they go.
Oh look radicals.
There's radicals in Yemen.
They start bombing Yemen using cluster bombs killing women and children and then the Yemenis apparently put this guy on the plane.
Never mind, at least for the moment who helped him change planes in the Netherlands and get on that flight for Detroit, which I think is still not a solved mystery.
But anyway, you know, according to the government, it was Yemeni Al-Qaeda dudes who put this guy on the plane to attack and try to blow up a plane over Detroit, which if it had been successful would have been absolute disaster.
And and then as you said that became the excuse for ratcheting up the whole thing as though the preceding couple of months had never even happened.
All right, and and there really wasn't there were attacks right up until there was an attack.
It's been debated whether it was late on December 23rd or early on Christmas Eve of fairly major cruise missile attack by the US, which at the time was confirmed to have assassinated one of the people that they're caught.
Oh, and we're a lucky.
Oh, it was confirmed to have assassinated and we're a lucky and 89 other Al-Qaeda members at the time and then, you know, about a week later.
It was like well, we think it only maybe killed 10 Al-Qaeda members and he wasn't one of them and there were some civilian casualties too.
And then a few months later the final report was well, it killed nothing but civilians and there were even a couple of you know, minor members of the Yemeni government were killed in the attack.
All right.
Well, we're going to have to hold it right there.
We'll be back y'all with Jason Ditz.
We're talking about the robot war in Yemen and the revolution.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm talking with Jason Ditz, managing news editor at antiwar.com, news.antiwar.com.
Now, we talked earlier in the week about the New York Times piece.
Was it Mark Mazzetti?
All about the new, new and improved just restarted again.
I guess CIA JSOC drone war.
I was just reading you some Spencer Ackerman on that topic from wired.com.
Jason has a piece from yesterday here at news.antiwar.com.
US official insists CIA drone strike escalation in Yemen far from over, says it could take months to get strikes up to speed.
What's this?
Well, we found out earlier in the week that the CIA was intending to start this program, but then not long after the Yemeni government started to admit that the program's already started and in a pretty big way.
The Defense Ministry confirmed at least 15 drone strikes in the month of June, just up to Tuesday.
And the deputy governor of the province, the Abyei province where a lot of these attacks have been taking place, said that at least 130 people have been killed in US drone strikes in June.
Now, is that the same for March, April, May too?
Well, we don't know.
I mean, are there, what indications do you have?
Because I guess I allowed myself at least to be under the impression somehow.
I don't know where I got this from, that maybe they were kind of cooling it off a little bit during the revolution to see what happened.
Well, and that may well have been the case early on, but it certainly isn't now.
I guess we really, you know, we weren't getting news out of there the way we do out of, say, South Waziristan where it's like US drone hit today, killed 10 people.
This is, well, we haven't heard any of these drone strikes, but they've confirmed at least 15.
And who knows if there are other unconfirmed reports of drone strikes and 130 people killed.
And this is just for the month of June.
We don't know at all what's happened before that.
But it certainly seems that if there was an intention to sort of hold back while the protests were going on, that intention's passed.
And now they're just launching attacks with reckless abandon.
And the scary part is, like you say, yesterday officials are saying the CIA program isn't anywhere near up to what they called up to speed.
And it's going to be months before the CIA is launching the number of attacks that they intend to launch.
So as massive as 130 people in half a month sounds, this could just be a small fraction of what we're about to see in this US air war.
It's amazing.
I can't get my head around.
What are they after other than just, you know, getting rid of cluster bombs so they can buy some more?
You know, I understand the economics and corruption of all of that.
But otherwise, I mean, come on.
I don't think even any of them would claim that there's more than what a few dozen al-Qaeda, if anything, broadly defined in that country.
How many people in Yemen have ever even heard of the United States other than they're the ones who bombed us with those cluster bombs the other day?
Well, that's very true.
And although they constantly insist that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is a massive threat, we don't really know how many sort of broadly defined there are.
Certainly, we hear reports of people like Anwar al-Awlaki supposedly being in al-Qaeda without seeing any evidence to that effect, except that he said some really mean things about Obama in a sermon once.
But...
Well, you know, Glenn Greenwald pointed out that a Reuters piece called him the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, just based on nothing, citing not even an administration official claiming so.
Well, right.
Wolf Blitzer did the same thing on CNN the day after Osama bin Laden's death.
He was talking about now they'll have to go after the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Anwar al-Awlaki.
And there's no indication other than just hearsay claims from anonymous officials that he's even a player in the organization, let alone its leader.
I mean, he's a cleric that has been critical of U.S. foreign policy.
But beyond that, we don't really know all that much about what he does.
Yeah, well, and you know, the thing of that is, too, for people not too familiar with the case, this guy's born in America.
He's an American citizen, and he's wanted for speaking.
That's it.
He's a cleric, even.
He's a religious leader, wanted for his sermons, and they're claiming the right to assassinate him on the President's say-so.
And even just to elaborate your point a little bit there, a little bit more there, Jason, they say to the Washington Post, anonymous administration officials tell the Washington Post, hiding behind no name whatsoever, that they think that he may have ties to terrorism.
They have reason to believe that he may have ties to terrorism.
That was the worst that they would dare accuse him of, anonymously, to their puppets at the Post.
And for that, it's supposed to be perfectly okay for Obama to have this guy killed.
Then they admitted that that's what they wanted to do.
Blair confirmed it before the Congress.
The father tried to sue with the help of the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the courts dismissed it all, saying that the father has no standing to sue, and that the President, of course, can kill whoever he wants anyway.
And this is amazing for a cleric who gave an unpopular sermon.
And the Yemeni government has said as much as well that they don't have any indication that he's actively involved in any terrorist group.
They attempted to charge him in what they called a terrorist attack, which was basically an oil worker shooting his boss on the grounds that the shooter knew another member of Al-Aulaqi's tribe, which is an enormous tribe of hundreds of thousands of people.
And they assumed that since he knew another member of his tribe, he probably had met him once or twice, and that they tried to extend that into him putting him up to shooting his boss, because it sounds like he and his boss didn't get along.
And they called that a terrorism thing, because his boss was from Europe somewhere.
I think he was from France.
But of course, the charge didn't stick, even in Yemeni courts.
That's pretty flimsy evidence.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, as Greenwald points out, this is firmly established protected speech under American law, that as long as you're not in a mob outside of a house saying, yeah, come on, everyone, let's burn it down, then your speech is protected.
Simple as that.
It's got to be an immediate, clear, and present danger.
And so that means that a neo-Nazi can sit here and call for the destruction of all law and liberty and right to be alive for anyone but them in America, all they want, as long as they don't actually do anything about it.
But anyway, yeah, I mean, I just, you know, look, this is America.
We got the First Amendment.
It's as simple as that.
You can say outrageous things about how the government of America should be violently attacked or even that civilian should, as long as you're not, you know, hiring someone to do it or immediately provoking a mob armed with torches or whatever, then that's protected speech.
And it has been for 80 years or something by Supreme Court decision anyway.
Well, absolutely.
There's, and it's incredible how little evidence there seems to be against al-Awlaki.
I mean, we saw that sort of flimsy attempt at a prosecution in Yemen that didn't stick.
The US government made no attempt to charge him with much of anything.
I guess one time he was convicted of having lied on a college entrance, college entrance form, claiming that he was trying to get a scholarship for foreign-born people by claiming that he was born in Yemen when he was born in New Mexico and they charged him with that.
But to jump from that to him being the leader of Al-Qaeda is absurd and we're seeing no evidence.
Well, you know what it is too.
It's just he wears a funny hat and he makes for a great picture of him talking but with no sound and scaremongers talking over him about how scared we should be on TV.
That's all.
Well, there are plenty of guys that they could use for that, but I think the real danger of al-Awlaki is his speech.
That he's charismatic, that his sermons are critical of US policy, which resonates with a lot of people, and he's got a lot of followers.
So it really is not some supposed attack.
It's his speech that is the issue.
You know, I'd do some research on that speech and see whether he talks all about, you know, miniskirts and R-rated movies and how much he hates the Bill of Rights or whether they're focused on our foreign policy.
I mean, I guess they're on YouTube, right?
Right.
I haven't really watched any of his speeches, but I know there have been times where he's, you know, said that it was legitimate to fight against US troops occupying foreign countries.
But I guess we can quibble over if that's legitimate morally or not, but certainly as speech, it's perfectly legal to say that.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, it's important, too, that that's what works for recruiting people, and that's what scares our government is that he might be effective with that message.
Not that, come on, we have to attack them because they're free, but we have to attack them in defense against their aggression.
That's his message.
And if it's especially he speaks English, that can be problematic to him.
It could, it could end up becoming a viral video and Americans start getting it en masse or something.
Maybe that's why he's the real enemy.
Right.
Yeah.
All right, Jason.
Well, we better leave it there.
We're already over time, but I appreciate your time on the show today as always.
Yeah.
Thank you for having me.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com, all the most important foreign policy issues of the day.
He writes them up.
He's got links to all your original and most important secondary sources for you there.
Don't miss it.
Should be one of your windows that you keep open there.
Why not?
News.antiwar.com, and that's the show for today.
We'll see you all tomorrow.
Wrap up this week if we can here.
