Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
First guest today is on deck, Jeremy Scahill, Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at the Nation Institute, author of the best-selling Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, and also the most comprehensive and most important article about America's war in Somalia that is yet to be written, and that is Blowback in Somalia, written last fall at The Nation Magazine, TheNation.com, but today we're talking about the brand new one, Washington's War in Yemen Backfires, brand new at TheNation.com.
Welcome back to the show, Jeremy, how are you doing?
Good to be with you, Scott.
Alright, so, it backfires, does it?
America's been waging a war of one level or another for quite a few years now in Yemen, as you report in here, and the article really starts right off with America's weapons falling right into the hands of the people that we're fighting against.
Is that just par for the course here, Keystone Cops' war on terror?
Well, you know what, beginning in 2005, 2006, President Bush started really beefing up U.S. so-called counter-terrorism assistance to Yemen.
I mean, the whole thing was a racket to begin with, and the longtime dictator of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, realized early on that he was sort of craftier and smarter than a lot of the U.S. officials he was meeting with, and he basically convinced Bush, by coming to the White House after 9-11, saying, I'm with you, not with the terrorists, that he was sort of on-side with the U.S. agenda, and the U.S. starts in 05-06 really beefing up his so-called counter-terrorism forces, which were run by his nephews and his sons, and instead of using the money, the weapons, the training that the U.S. was giving them to fight the 300 to 700 people that were identified as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, they used it as a sort of domestic repression force.
And so that went on for a number of years until, in fact, Bush, to my knowledge, only bombed Yemen once, and that was in 2002.
It was a drone strike that actually killed a U.S. citizen, although he was not the target of it.
Obama comes into office, and at the end of his first year, in September of 2009, General David Petraeus, who at the time was the CENTCOM commander, issued what's called an execute order that authorized U.S. military forces to start striking in countries off the stated battlefield of Iraq and Afghanistan.
And then two months later, in December 2009, Obama authorizes his first cruise missile strike on Yemen, and it hits this remote village called Majula in Abyan Province and ends up killing more than 40 Bedouins.
When I was in Yemen recently, Scott, I actually interviewed people who survived that strike.
One woman, seven members of her family killed, one of her daughters maimed, and I met the daughter, and then another guy who lost 17 members of his family.
So you asked about the weapons falling into the hands of the insurgents.
What happened was that last May, this group calling itself Antar al-Sharia, which means the supporters of Sharia law or partisans of Sharia, stormed into this town called Bin Jabbar, which is the provincial capital of Abyan, and the central security forces, and this is a force whose counterterrorism unit is owned entirely by the United States, bankrolled, armed, all the training.
They flee the town and leave heavy artillery in the hands of these Islamist militants called Antar al-Sharia, and then the weapons that they took over from this U.S.
-supported force were then used to shell the National Army of Yemen, the 25th Mechanized Brigade, when they tried to retake the city.
Some people, Scott, that I talked to in Yemen said, well, we think Ali Abdullah Saleh, the president of Yemen, let the militants take over Bin Jabbar as a way of saying, you know, if you overthrow me or you stop backing me, al-Qaeda is going to take over the country.
But other people are saying it's something that I think would be more disturbing for U.S. policymakers, and that is that the political message of the Islamist militants, some of whom are from al-Qaeda, actually is gaining local support because people are so sick of the U.S. kleptocracy that's been governing, U.S.
-backed kleptocracy that's been governing or not governing Yemen for so long, and the fact that the U.S. is killing so many civilians with these airstrikes that seem to rarely hit their intended target and kill a lot of civilians.
Well, and when you talk about the very end of 2009 and those drone strikes, I wanted to mention there's an Amnesty International report about those cluster bombs and those attacks, and it was the speech that Obama gave, I guess, at West Point, right, where he was talking about the surge into Afghanistan, where he ended the speech with, Somalia and Yemen, you're next.
And then he had actually been bombing them for a few weeks.
We'd been covering it at antiwar.com, and he bombed them at least two weeks into December of 2009, I think, leading right up to the attempted Christmas Day attack.
And then it was, my God, these people hate freedom to try to attack us on Christmas Day.
When this guy had come from Yemen, there was our blowback directly right there.
Within three weeks, four weeks' time, it all came true, just like anyone could have predicted.
Well, and on the issue, just to back up, because I think you made an important point there that may have been lost on people, part of how we know that it was a U.S. strike on December 17, 2009 was because local people took pictures of the missile.
And, in fact, I haven't done this story yet, Scott, but I'll share it with you.
We have video that we shot in Yemen of Lockheed Martin Tomahawk cruise missiles and General Dynamics missile parts and cluster bombs that are unexploded that remain in the sites where the U.S. bombed these areas.
You see very clearly on it General Dynamics.
The guidance system for the Tomahawk cruise missile is massive, and we took video of that also.
So we're going to be releasing all of this, and it will back up what's already been alleged, that these are U.S. missile strikes, not Yemeni strikes.
But also the WikiLeaks cables, when they were released, showed that General David Petraeus actually conspired with President Ali Abdullah Saleh and senior members of his government to lie to the Yemeni people, the Yemeni parliament, and the world, and have Yemen take credit for these bombings.
Saleh actually said to Petraeus in one of the meetings, we're going to continue to say the bombs are ours and not yours.
The Deputy Prime Minister laughed and said, I just lied to our parliament.
So we have more evidence of these U.S. missile strikes in Yemen.
And the fact is that what the U.S. has done is to make true the prophecy of senior members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.
-born cleric who was assassinated on President Obama's orders in Yemen, when they said the U.S. is going to try to turn Yemen into its next Afghanistan or Iraq.
We're feeding directly into the propaganda machine for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula by doing exactly what they said we were going to do.
Well, it's just like your piece on Somalia that I mentioned from last fall, a blowback in Somalia.
It's the war on terror writ small in each one of these countries.
And overall, we see Ayman al-Zawahiri endorsing Obama's policy in Syria right now, sending fighters to go and help.
Well, I mean, everywhere I've gone over the past year, whether it's Afghanistan or Somalia and elsewhere in East Africa or now Yemen, it's all the same story everywhere, where it's blowback.
The U.S. under both Bush and Obama, there's almost no difference in how they appear to view the world when it comes to so-called counterterrorism.
They believe in a cruise missile, drone strike-fueled war of attrition, that you can simply kill all the bad guys and that there's a finite number of them and that somehow all this is going to stop, when what we're really doing is fueling the very threat that we claim to be fighting.
We're making it real.
And one tribal leader in South Yemen, Scott, told me, you know, you guys see al-Qaeda as terrorists.
We see your drones as terrorism.
Well, and this is the tribal leader who likes to drink Johnny Walker and doesn't take no truck from these al-Qaeda guys whatsoever and says, oh, I got 30,000 fighters.
They don't tell me what to do.
He's not one of them by a long shot, but he sure prefers them to us.
Well, I mean, and their point is sort of, you know, these guys don't bug us.
They don't bother us.
They're Yemenis and we're more important than them and we can tell them to shut up.
We can tell them to go away.
We can tell them to be quiet.
Yemeni tribal leaders are so perplexed and amused with the stupidity of U.S. policy.
They all sort of say, you guys are really afraid of these people, 300 to 700?
And the tribesmen, I mean, what's amazing, Scott, is that the tribesmen see what the U.S. had to do in Iraq when they paid off all these Sunnis to stop attacking U.S. troops and they created the Awakening Council.
They're basically saying, hey, put us on your payroll and we'll make these guys go away.
We'll tell them that they can't do this anymore.
It's just a simple transaction and they don't understand why the U.S. just doesn't put them on the payroll.
Yeah, well, it's not quite that simple.
No, it's not.
I'm just saying that's how they view it.
Right, right, of course.
Now, I wanted to make one thing clear before we go out to this break.
We're talking with Jeremy Scahill from The Nation magazine, thenation.com.
His new piece is Washington's War in Yemen Backfires and when he says we, he's talking about his journalistic partner, Rick Rowley, from Big Noise Films, who was clicking the pictures there.
I just wanted to make sure and get his name mentioned.
We'll be right back with Jeremy Scahill right after this.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Man, I'm telling you, this article at thenation.com, the intrepid Jeremy Scahill, who makes a mockery out of every other reporter around pretty much every time he puts pen to paper here, Washington's War in Yemen Backfires.
At least that was predictable enough.
But now, one of the things you talk about in here, or a couple of things that you mention in here that I think are worth really highlighting, Jeremy, is that for one thing, America, the American trained and armed and financed counter-terrorism forces are nothing but another group of military forces for protecting the regime with.
When the so-called president's power is threatened, they go right into service doing things other than so-called counter-terrorism.
And then when it's not that, it's our weapons falling right into the hands of the so-called militants that they're supposed to be fighting, as we covered at the beginning of the deal.
And as you say, it's all basically a money game to them.
Who's paying who?
And then also, of course, the resentment that comes with the drone strikes.
Because as you say, especially now, since the government has fallen, or sort of the regime has changed there, from Saleh to the right-hand men or whatever, you say in this article that Obama's more or less pulled the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command out of the country, but has now doubled down, I think are your words, when it comes to the drone war.
Right.
If you remember, in September of last year, President Obama ordered the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki to become a reality.
Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, putting aside whatever opinion anyone has about Anwar al-Awlaki, whether you think he's reprehensible, whether you think he should have been put in prison forever, the reality is that he was not indicted in a U.S. court, he was not officially charged with any crime, and he was not in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But President Obama served as judge, jury, and executioner with that U.S. citizen.
This isn't to defend him at all, but it's to defend his liberties as a U.S. citizen.
Then, and in that same strike, Scott, another U.S. citizen was killed, named Samir Khan, who's from North Carolina, and he was the editor of Inspire magazine, the English-language AQAP publication, also not indicted for anything.
Then, two weeks later, Anwar al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son, who's also a U.S. citizen, is killed in a drone strike.
They say that the target in that strike was Ibrahim al-Banna, who was an al-Qaeda leader.
He wasn't killed in the strike.
He wasn't there.
So you had President Obama authorizing military operations, CIA and JSOC, that in the course of two weeks killed three U.S. citizens, none of whom had been indicted or charged officially with any crimes.
So when I was in Yemen, I spent a lot of time with the al-Awlaki family and talking to them, and Anwar al-Awlaki's father, of course, was educated in the U.S.
They understand why the U.S. went after Anwar al-Awlaki, but they said, don't you have laws in the United States?
Don't citizens have rights in the United States?
I said, why would you murder our 16-year-old grandson?
What did he do?
Look at his Facebook page.
Look at what he spent his life doing.
For three years, he didn't see his father.
What crime did a 16-year-old boy commit?
But then when I talked to other Yemenis, and I said, well, what about Anwar al-Awlaki and Abd al-Rahman al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old?
They would say, yeah, killing Anwar al-Awlaki was horrible, but why do you Americans only care about your own citizens?
What about the 44 Bedouins that were killed by Obama?
Where's our compensation for that?
Where's our compensation like the Lockerbie bombing victims got compensation from Libya?
It's because they're saying, we don't care about the U.S. citizens.
We care about your killing our citizens on a regular basis, and everyone just pays attention to Anwar al-Awlaki.
What about our civilians being killed?
It's powerful stuff.
Yeah.
You know, I read a thing in the New York Times of all places, probably the Weekend Magazine or something, about, I don't know, two years ago or so, and by the end of the thing, even this New York Times reporter is really explaining that we ought to stay out of here, man.
There's not really much we can do without making matters worse, but one of the anecdotes that he tells is of tribesmen saying to him, I don't know what America means.
I don't know that word.
And I don't know what Yemen is.
I mean, if you're telling me this is Yemen, fine, but all I know is the name of my local warlord and Muhammad.
So what are we talking about here?
This is the guy who our war on terror is to protect us from, this guy who's never heard of continents across any ocean that he's never even heard of.
The oceans are on the other side of continents from where he is.
He's got no idea.
We might as well be talking about other planets to him.
He's waging a war of terror against us?
I'm not so sure, you know?
Right, right.
I mean, people like to talk about clash of civilizations, and that's not what this is about.
People are minding their own business in the middle of nowhere Yemen, in the mountains, where they've had generations and generations of livestock that have served as their primary source of bread, and one day, huge missiles just come crashing into their village.
People have never seen anything like that before, and then they find out that most of the people that were killed, by the way, in that first strike, they're illiterate, deeply impoverished Bedouins.
So the first mention that they really hear of the United States of America is that those are the people that dropped these missiles on you.
And then they start to say, well, these guys from Al-Qaeda, they're talking about destroying America.
Yeah, I want to destroy America too, because the only thing I know about them is that they killed my uncle, my grandpa, my five kids.
And that's what you're seeing.
You're seeing it all these places.
And another thing, Scott, is that supporting all these dictatorships, whether it was Mubarak or Ben Ali or Ali Abdullah Saleh, always happens at the expense of any spending on social programs or any infrastructure in those countries.
So we wage an economic war by backing up these dictators who steal the money, public monies, and then we bomb them.
And the only money we give that means anything is counterterrorism money.
And instead of using it to fight terrorism, even in the way the U.S. defines it, they turn around and just use it to defend their own regime.
And then the Obama administration, John Brennan and others, in the midst of all of the bloodshed in Yemen, say in September, relations have never been better with Yemen on a counterterrorism level.
Really.
I mean, it's incredible.
Everyone seems to see the writing on the wall except those making the decisions.
Yeah.
Well, and as you say, it's not just this Zinjabar.
It's also Rada, another town.
And you say it's al-Qaeda, and these al-Qaeda-like Sharia law-promoting groups, they're swooping right in.
They're fixing potholes.
They're teaching kids to read.
They're providing medical resources, I guess a little bit of law and order on the streets, as harsh as it may be.
And basically, they're filling in as a very, almost in a Hezbollah kind of way, a very bottom-up kind of grassroots, do-it-yourself government, and one that the locals, who don't share the ideology, seem to see as much more reliable than anything that Saleh ever promised them, even.
Right.
And have no doubt about it.
I mean, these guys are medieval characters.
There's no question about that.
But it's sort of like debates I used to have with people about Cuba, who were sort of armchair pacifists in the U.S., who were complaining about the fact that Cuba had a violent revolution.
We don't get to determine the method of resistance that people choose to embrace in response to policy, in response to our military aggression.
And so in Yemen right now, it's Ansar al-Sharia.
And I don't think that these are defensible people on a moral level.
My point is that we don't set the terms on what resistance looks like in countries where we're attacking them.
And that's blowback, man.
That is what we're seeing now.
This is what you get when you pummel people, impoverish them, support dictators, and then bomb them to smithereens on a regular basis.
You get them turning to those that catch them when they're falling.
And who's catching them in Yemen?
Radical Islamists.
Same kind of guys who we created in the fires of the battlefields of Iraq, who are now on their way to Syria, fighting a holy war.
Yeah, I mean, we're fanning the flames all throughout that region.
We've been doing it forever.
Iran-Iraq War, Kissinger wanted them to kill each other off.
The Mujahideen War, we're supporting those guys, and then we're shocked when later they don't like us.
The other thing, we're so arrogant.
We always think we're smarter than everybody.
We always think we're the smartest people in the room.
We're not.
They have a much deeper sense of history than we do, and it shows every time one of these conflicts flares up because it's not new to them.
This is part of a much longer history.
We're a spit in the ocean of history compared to Yemen, compared to Iraq, compared to Syria.
All these countries.
Is it really a Yemeni state at this point?
I mean, from where I sit in the middle of Texas, I don't have near the courage you have to go find these things out for myself.
But, you know, I hear that you have this Houthi rebellion in the north, and you have for a long, long time this weird Shiite sect that's breaking off, and you have more socialist-leaning types in the south, which I don't know if that includes Abyon province, where you're writing about.
And then, of course, you have the revolution protest movement of mostly young liberals, I think, in the capital city and whatever.
And now the president's gone.
Is there a way to sum up the state of that state at all at this point?
No.
I mean, what happened after 1990, when Yemen was unified, is that all of these sultans and tribal sheikhs that had been expelled from the south by the socialists came back in and cut these deals with Saleh that allowed him to stay in power.
Now that he's going, you have, you know, a half a dozen Yemens within Yemen.
You know, you have the tribes that have their own systems of law and order, you have the Ansar al-Sharia movement that's sprouting up, you have Saleh's tribal people that support him, and then you have these political parties that, you know, are six one-half dozen the other, opposition versus Saleh.
They're all part of the same thing.
So no, there's no one Yemen state at all.
There's five, six Yemens.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate your time on the show.
Sorry we've got to go, but I want to beg everyone to go and check out Washington's War in Yemen Backfires, another great one by Jeremy Scahill, and with reporting by Richard Rowley from Big Noise Films as well.
Thanks again.
Awesome.
Good to be with you, Matt.
Keep up the work.
