Blood thursty warloads

Jeremy Scahill talking:

The first time that the U.S. did a targeted strike that killed a U.S. citizen in Yemen that we know of was under Bush in November of 2002. In December of 2009, President Obama authorizes a series of missile strikes, not just drone strikes. The most deadly one that we know of was December 17th, 2009, cruise missile attack on the Yemeni village of al-Majalah, and it killed 46 people, three dozen of whom were women and children, which is stunning and horrifying. And we have video footage in our film of the aftermath of that strike, interviews with the survivors of when the missile hit. But it was in pursuit of one person that they said was an al-Qaeda operative, and they wiped out an entire Bedouin village. And we went there, and the cruise missile parts are still strewn across the desert. They’re there to this day just rusting out there.

Forty-six people were killed, and I think 35 or 36 of them were women and children. And I was leaked the official parliamentary investigation in Yemen with the names and ages of all of the dead. And I have it—I have it stained in my head, the images that I’ve seen of the videos that people I met there had taken on the scene. You know, one tribal leader, Sheikh Saleh bin Fareed, who’s the head of the Awlak tribe in Yemen, he went there right after the attack. And he said to me, “If someone had weak heart, they would collapse, because you saw meat, and you couldn’t tell if it was goat meat or human meat. And you saw limbs of children.” And he, himself—and he’s this older man—actually found body parts and helped to bury—try to bury people with dignity. And he’s this incredibly wealthy man who went there himself and is the main reason why there still is agitation for justice for the victims of the Majalah bombing, that—because these tribal leaders have said, “We will not forget what you did to this village of nobodies, one of the poorest tribes in all of Yemen.”

Who knows why the U.S. bombed it? It could have been that the Yemeni government was under pressure from Obama’s administration, and they said, “No one will care about these people. Let’s just say this is an al-Qaeda camp, because it’s in the middle of nowhere. No one is going to care about them, and no one’s going to go there to investigate.” But when we went there, we saw it. The cluster bombs, these are flying land mines, they’re banned. And yet the United States continues to use them, and they shred people into meat. I saw it in Yugoslavia in the ’90s, and I’ve seen it again now in Yemen.

They used a Tomahawk cruise missile, and they used cluster bombs. And the cluster bombs are—they are like flying land mines. And they drop in these parachutes, and they explode, and they can shred people. I mean, it’s their—they’re probably the most horrifying weapon I have ever seen the aftermath of in a war zone.

So, this is the first strike that President Obama authorizes, and it’s unclear who the real target even was. They claimed it was this one man and that he was killed. When I talked to people in Yemen, they said, “That guy is old—that guy is—yeah, he was a mujahideen in Afghanistan, but he had nothing to do with the leadership.” Mujahideen, who the U.S. worked with.

Yemenis went to Afghanistan in the ’80s in huge numbers. And, you know, they have a very serious fighting spirit, and there were a lot of Yemenis that had gone there and fought on the same side as the United States. But the point I’m getting at here is that—so, the Obama administration starts to intensify this bombing in Yemen. They bomb al-Majalah. And then, seven days later, they—but remember that the Yemeni government claimed responsibility for the strike, and Obama’s administration released a statement praising Yemen for this attack. Yemen doesn’t have cruise missiles. Yemen doesn’t have cluster bombs.

So, but for, you know, some brave local journalists going there and photographing it initially, we probably would—never would have been able to prove that it was a U.S. strike. And we could talk about him later, but Obama, President Obama, is directly responsible for the first Yemeni journalist to report on this story, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, continuing to be in prison. He was arrested after he exposed the Majalah bombing, and he remains in prison to this day. In fact, the last line in my book is to say that he’s still in prison, and he should be set free. This was a journalist that had worked with major U.S. media outlets, broke this huge story that the U.S. had bombed Yemen for the first time in seven years, using cluster bombs, and then he ends up in prison on trumped-up terrorism charges, put on trial in a court that was set up specifically to prosecute journalists, and then when he was going to be pardoned, President Obama called Ali Abdullah Saleh and said, “We don’t want him released,” and he remains in prison to this day. So, he was the first journalist to do that. He’s in prison.

Seven days after that bombing, the Yemeni government puts out a press release saying they’ve conducted these air strikes in Shabwa and Abyan province and that among the dead is Wuhayshi and Shihri, the two heads of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and Anwar al-Awlaki. So the first time that we know of that the U.S. intended to kill Anwar al-Awlaki was in December of 2009. This is before we understood that he had actually been officially put on the kill list. We didn’t find out about that until two months later. So, this first strike, Yemeni government takes responsibility, but in fact it was a U.S. strike. Then Awlaki knows that they’re trying to get him. Drones start appearing all throughout Yemen. There hadn’t been drone strikes in Yemen since 2002. So drones start appearing over Shabwa and over Abyan, and people start seeing them, and there’s an intensification of these attacks.

we’ve talked a lot about U.S. citizens, but I also feel it’s necessary to point out that the vast majority of the people being killed in these operations are not in fact U.S. citizens, they’re Pakistanis, they’re Yemenis, they’re Somalis and, you know, others. I mean, I think it’s ironic that you have a president that is a constitutional law expert and that you have, you know, this attorney general who was very well respected in the field of law coming forward to put together the defense of the—a defense of the stripping of the most basic rights in our Constitution. I mean, the idea that you can simply have one branch of government unilaterally and in secret declare that an American citizen should be executed or assassinated without having to present any evidence whatsoever, to me, is a—we should view that with great sobriety about the implications for our country. The idea that you don’t give people the chance to respond to charges against them or to see the evidence against them should be shocking to all Americans.

When Anwar Awlaki’s father tried to file a lawsuit before his son was killed, before Anwar Awlaki was killed, challenging the government’s right to assassinate him, CIA Director Leon Panetta, Defense Secretary Gates, DNI—Director of National Intelligence James Clapper all submitted briefs to the court saying that if the evidence was to be made public, it would threaten the security of the United States, and they hid behind the state secrets privilege. So their response to a U.S. citizen’s petition to understand why they were put on the kill list was to say, “We have evidence, but it’s too secret to—it’s too sensitive to be made public.” And that’s essentially what it’s come down to.

And, you know, I’m a believer in societies being defined by how they treat the least of their people or their most reprehensible members of their society. Anwar Awlaki said things that I find utterly despicable and disgraceful, and I think that there probably would have been grounds to charge him with some form of a—with some kind of a crime. His lawyers have never contended he’s an innocent man or he’s this noble figure that should be held up. He called for the killing of cartoonists who had drawn the Prophet Muhammad, listed specific names of people. He did things that are offensive to me and should be offensive to all humans. But that’s not—but that, itself, is not a death penalty case. You know, you have to look at how you treat people that you despise and what access do you give them and what rights do you give them in a society. That defines who you are, just like when a president is in power who you support, or maybe you voted for, or you think is a great guy, your principles are tested by where you stand when they’re doing things or implementing policies that you would have opposed if the other guy had won. And so, you know, we have a crisis of conscience right now in our country also, where people are—it’s like, you know, partisan lemmings just going off the cliff. If McCain had won that election, there’s no way that you’d see polls—70 percent of liberals supporting drone strikes. No way. Obama has sold liberals a bill of goods and has convinced them that this is a smarter, cleaner way to wage wars. And it’s just not.

– source democracynow.org

Jeremy Scahill, National Security Correspondent for The Nation magazine, Democracy Now! correspondent and author of the new book, Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield. He produced the award-winning documentary film with the same name with Richard Rowley. He is also the author of the bestseller, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.