Jeremy Scahill: Obama Strikes In Yemen Constitute 'Murder'

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anatta

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Weighing in on President Obama's targeted drone strikes in the Middle East, journalist Jeremy Scahill did not mince words.

During his appearance on MSNBC's "Up With Chris Hayes" Saturday morning, Scahill repeatedly said that such attacks, when they killed innocent civilians, amounted to "murder."

Asked by Hayes why he would use such a "loaded" word to describe the strikes, Scahill responded at length.

"If someone goes into a shopping mall in pursuit of one of their enemies and opens fire on a crowd of people and guns down a bunch of innocent people in a shopping mall, they've murdered those people. When the Obama administration sets a policy where patterns of life are enough of a green light to drop missiles on people or to send in AC130s to spray them down..."

"But that wasn't the case here," interrupted retired colonel Jack Jacobs. "You're talking about a targeted person here." Scahill continued:

"If you go to the village of Al-Majalah in Yemen, where I was, and you see the unexploded clusterbombs and you have the list and photographic evidence, as I do--the women and children that represented the vast majority of the deaths in this first strike that Obama authorized on Yemen--those people were murdered by President Obama, on his orders, because there was believed to be someone from Al Qaeda in that area. There's only one person that's been identified that had any connection to Al Qaeda there. And 21 women and 14 children were killed in that strike and the U.S. tried to cover it up, and say it was a Yemeni strike, and we know from the Wikileaks cables that David Petraeus conspired with the president of Yemen to lie to the world about who did that bombing. It's murder--it's mass murder--when you say, 'We are going to bomb this area' because we believe a terrorist is there, and you know that women and children are in the area. The United States has an obligation to not bomb that area if they believe that women and children are there. I'm sorry, that's murder."
Scahill is the national security correspondent for The Nation, and the author of the book "Blackwater: The World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."

He was part of a panel discussion that centered around a lengthy New York Times article published on Tuesday, which disclosed that the Obama administration maintains a "kill list" of wanted terrorists. Obama personally signs off on the killing-by-drone of many suspects, taking into account the circumstances of a possible attack, including possible civilian casualties.

The article says that Obama tries to avoid any loss of innocent life, but that he considers any male in the area a combatant. Civilian deaths in drone attacks have become a flashpoint in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/02/jeremy-scahill-says-drone-strikes-murders_n_1565441.html
 
Thank god for guys like Scahill or we would never get the real story.

Our war policy under Obama is no different than it was under Bush and PNAC.
 
The big difference is, ....Obama will get away with whatever he does and the msm will clam up tighter than a Barnie Franks lips on a ....on a ..on a......well I'll leave it at that.........
 
Eh, in the course of genocide, what is as little mass-murder?
Trial, due process? Surely congress declared war on Yemem, so we have a perfect right to kill innocents there, right?
 
Easy to criticize, because all recent attempts at mass murder here have failed.

Underwear bomber? We laugh.

Failed bomb in the van in NYC? We laugh.

FBI thwarts massive plan to blow up subways in NYC? Yay for us.

The problem, is that AQ leaders hide amongst the civilians. Perhaps we need the civilians' help in outing these terrorist leaders?

Of course, they'll be murdered by 'their own' if they get caught.


Tough situation.
 
bravo said:
The big difference is, ....Obama will get away with whatever he does and the msm will clam up tighter than a Barnie Franks lips on a ....on a ..on a......well I'll leave it at that.........
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I think you are pissed of that he isn't the Marxist and Muslim lover that you and your kind have made him out to be.
 
Althea said:
Easy to criticize, because all recent attempts at mass murder here have failed.

Underwear bomber? We laugh.

Failed bomb in the van in NYC? We laugh.

FBI thwarts massive plan to blow up subways in NYC? Yay for us.

The problem, is that AQ leaders hide amongst the civilians. Perhaps we need the civilians' help in outing these terrorist leaders?

Of course, they'll be murdered by 'their own' if they get caught.


Tough situation.
Click to expand...
nothing "tough" about about it, there are "high value targets", we can go and get, but drones cause collateral damage.
Collateral damage causes more radicalization - the cycle continues.
The civilians ( in Yemen) in the south mostly support AQ, because they did bring some basic services to an ungovernable place.
Tis is yet another foreign civial war we're in (Afpak/Libya/Yemen/and we left Iraq fractured).

If you wanna go in an take out high value targets ( as opposed to just local AQ) use what we did with bin_Laden, an assassination team.
Get in and get out -we have Stealth tech, -we don't need to use drones except for convenience.

The fact AQ is mixed in with civilians is a reason NOT to use drones !
Anyways Yemen's new king is corrupt also, nothing is working in AfPak (guarteeeed to wind up controlled by Pashtuns -Taliban) as Karazai is not a leader but a corrupt figurehead.

not sure if iposted this, but check this out.

WHY IS PRESIDENT OBAMA KEEPING JOURNALIST ABDULELAH HAIDER SHAYE IN PRISON? One of Shaye's biggest scoops was the uncovering of the U.S. missile strike in Yemen before the release of the Wikileaks cable. As Scahill wrote: On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen's southern Abyan province, killing a number of al Qaeda militants.

As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military's arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label "Made in the USA," and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, 14 women and 21 children were killed.

Seven months later, Shaye was abducted by Yemeni intelligence agents, who warned him to stop speaking about the strike. Instead, he went on Al Jazeera to say what had happened to him. A month later, he was arrested and sent to prison in a trial that was widely seen as a sham.

"Haider worked with ABC News," Scahill said. "The Washington Post paid his expenses for him to go and do an interview with Awlaki. He was identified by the New York Times as an al-Qaeda expert. And all of a sudden then, you find him becoming the target of the Saleh regime."

Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the coordinator of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Committee to Protect Journalists, also spoke to the show on Thursday. He said that he first met Shaye in Yemen in 2010.

"Immediately I could tell that this was a very smart journalist, and a journalist who really was willing to put a lot on the line to get the tough stories," he said.

Dayem also condemned the trial that landed Shaye in prison, saying that the tribunal that convicted him was essentially a kangaroo court. "I could not find a single case that met, even remotely, fair trial standards," he said.

Scahill brought up the various organizations who have spoken in support of Shaye.

"They're on one side of it, condemning his trial as a sham, talking about who he actually was as a journalist," he said. "And on the other side of it, you have the dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh, a specialized criminal tribunal set up to go after journalists, and the White House. President Obama is the single person keeping that man in prison right now." To read the entire article go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1348354.html
 
annata said:
nothing "tough" about about it, there are "high value targets", we can go and get, but drones cause collateral damage.
Collateral damage causes more radicalization - the cycle continues.
The civilians ( in Yemen) in the south mostly support AQ, because they did bring some basic services to an ungovernable place.
Tis is yet another foreign civial war we're in (Afpak/Libya/Yemen/and we left Iraq fractured).

If you wanna go in an take out high value targets ( as opposed to just local AQ) use what we did with bin_Laden, an assassination team.
Get in and get out -we have Stealth tech, -we don't need to use drones except for convenience.

The fact AQ is mixed in with civilians is a reason NOT to use drones !
Anyways Yemen's new king is corrupt also, nothing is working in AfPak (guarteeeed to wind up controlled by Pashtuns -Taliban) as Karazai is not a leader but a corrupt figurehead.

not sure if iposted this, but check this out.

WHY IS PRESIDENT OBAMA KEEPING JOURNALIST ABDULELAH HAIDER SHAYE IN PRISON? One of Shaye's biggest scoops was the uncovering of the U.S. missile strike in Yemen before the release of the Wikileaks cable. As Scahill wrote: On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen's southern Abyan province, killing a number of al Qaeda militants.

As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military's arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label "Made in the USA," and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, 14 women and 21 children were killed.

Seven months later, Shaye was abducted by Yemeni intelligence agents, who warned him to stop speaking about the strike. Instead, he went on Al Jazeera to say what had happened to him. A month later, he was arrested and sent to prison in a trial that was widely seen as a sham.

"Haider worked with ABC News," Scahill said. "The Washington Post paid his expenses for him to go and do an interview with Awlaki. He was identified by the New York Times as an al-Qaeda expert. And all of a sudden then, you find him becoming the target of the Saleh regime."

Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the coordinator of the Middle East and North Africa Program at the Committee to Protect Journalists, also spoke to the show on Thursday. He said that he first met Shaye in Yemen in 2010.

"Immediately I could tell that this was a very smart journalist, and a journalist who really was willing to put a lot on the line to get the tough stories," he said.

Dayem also condemned the trial that landed Shaye in prison, saying that the tribunal that convicted him was essentially a kangaroo court. "I could not find a single case that met, even remotely, fair trial standards," he said.

Scahill brought up the various organizations who have spoken in support of Shaye.

"They're on one side of it, condemning his trial as a sham, talking about who he actually was as a journalist," he said. "And on the other side of it, you have the dictatorship of Ali Abdullah Saleh, a specialized criminal tribunal set up to go after journalists, and the White House. President Obama is the single person keeping that man in prison right now." To read the entire article go here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1348354.html
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If anything drones cause less collateral damage not more, sending a cruise missile or helicopters from afar are much more likely to cause more casualties. A drone has the luxury of being able to stay over a target for hours monitoring the situation prior to releasing missiles.
 
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Aoxomoxoa said:
If anything drones cause less collateral damage not more, sending a cruise missile or helicopters from afar are much more likely to cause more casualties. A drone has the luxury of being able to stay over a target for hours monitoring the situation prior to releasing missiles.
Click to expand...

Nice try.
 
Aoxomoxoa said:
If anything drones cause less collateral damage not more, sending a cruise missile or a helicopters from afar are much more likely to cause more casualties. A drone has the luxury of being able to stay over a target for hours monitoring the situation.
Click to expand...

i'd agree, you have to use black ops ( stealth), and actual assassination teams. drones/chopprs. stand off weapons are not applicable in civilian areas.
Another idea is to just stay out of these nations -we've been pretty good at catching them with LE.

Remeber we have the advantage of drones now -sort of like we did after WWII with nukes. But it's not gong to last forever, as other states get them, then we'll have no ability to stop proliferation, or decry their use, since we're using them fairly indisciminately.


here's another interesting read:
David Sanger's Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Powerhttp://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/06/04/the_obama_paradox
 
annata said:
i'd agree, you have to use black ops ( stealth), and actual assassination teams. drones/chopprs. stand off weapons are not applicable in civilian areas.
Another idea is to just stay out of these nations -we've been pretty good at catching them with LE.

Remeber we have the advantage of drones now -sort of like we did after WWII with nukes. But it's not gong to last forever, as other states get them, then we'll have no ability to stop proliferation, or decry their use, since we're using them fairly indisciminately.


here's another interesting read:
David Sanger's Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Powerhttp://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/06/04/the_obama_paradox
Click to expand...

Yes, exactly, thankyou.
 
Althea said:
Obama is keeping him in jail?
Click to expand...
The Obama administration is facing scrutiny for its role in the imprisonment of a Yemeni journalist who exposed how the United States was behind a 2009 bombing in Yemen that killed 14 women and 21 children. In January 2011, a Yemeni state security court gave the journalist, Abdulelah Haider Shaye, a five-year jail sentence on terrorism-related charges following a disputed trial that was condemned by several human rights and press freedom groups. Within a month of Shaye’s sentencing, then-Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced he was going to pardon the journalist. But Saleh changed his mind after a phone call from President Obamahttp://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/15/jeremy_scahill_why_is_president_obama
 
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