Yemen 2-22-12

22, February 2012     YEMEN

It is an outrage that the Obama administration continues to defy international law by violating the sovereign air space of foreign countries. A disproportionate number of civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan and more recently in Yemen are being killed giving rise to mounting anger towards the US. The so called ‘war on terror’ has become ‘a war of terror’ on innocent civilians.
Shrewd and corrupt leaders from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and now Yemen are capitalizing on our obsessive compulsive behavior of launching endless wars by enriching themselves at the expensive of US taxpayers. 

Jeremy Scahill, the national security correspondent for The Nation reports in a cover story, that the US jihad in Yemen has given rise to an Islamist uprising and pushed the country to the brink of starvation. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, more than half of Yemen’s 12 million children are chronically malnourished. Unemployment in the country has reached 35 percent. 
Scahill writes that Saleh is “a master chess player, and has milked counterterrorism as his cash cow.” 
He constantly exaggerates the threat of al-Qaeda to ensure an uninterrupted supply of US weapons which he uses to neutralize his political opponents. 

So why are we hosting this brutal dictator at the Ritz-Carlton? One of the protestors outside the hotel was, the Yemeni Nobel Peace Prize winner, Tawakkul Karman, who demanded that President Saleh be tried in the International Criminal Court for war crimes.