(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
…not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their bones
Barack Obama’s mantra on Libya is that “Muammar Gaddafi must go”. Pentagon supremo Robert Gates, asked about the Yemeni Gaddafi, President Ali Abdullah Saleh, answered, with a straight face, that Washington had no opinion, because it does not interfere in internal affairs of other countries.
The evidence points otherwise. The first African-American president – a Nobel Peace Prize laureate – now also holds the dubious distinction of being the only American president to launch a war on an African nation. He has also launched his re-election campaign, which is bound to gobble up a cool US$1 billion.
Meanwhile, Saleh kept killing his own people, and injuring hundreds – like in the southwestern city of Taizz this Monday. Obama had to do something, so he has “quietly shifted positions”, in the quaint words of the New York Times; the new mantra is “Saleh must go”. Contorted rhetoric suggests Washington now wants Saleh to go because it has come to the conclusion that his days in power are gone, even though for over two months, killing spree included, he enjoyed full US backing.
WikiLeaks widely exposed dirty deals between Washington and Saleh – including General David Petraeus lying to Yemenis about who was killing Yemeni civilians during the “war on terror”. But unlike demonized terrorist/rehab/thug Gaddafi, Saleh is one of “our bastards”. He’s cunning enough to smash Zeydis, southern Yemenis, journalists and peaceful student protesters instead of smashing his golden egg, AQAP.
Now that Obama hinted he must go, bets can be made on a scenario of the CIA using AQAP against Saleh. Target: to balkanize Yemen. This is where the legacy of Said al-Shihri comes in – a Saudi freed from Guantanamo sent to Yemen by the Bush administration, and killed on February 12; as well as the influence of American-born Anwar Awlaki, a classic CIA double agent.
The CIA is already instrumentalizing al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in Libya; with or without Gaddafi in power as part of a balkanized Libya, AQIM is already a destabilizing factor in the big picture. The modus operandi is the same: the CIA/Pentagon use the al-Qaeda specter to justify the endless war on terror, be it in northern Africa or in the Arabic Peninsula.
[snip]
The vicious 2011 Arab counter-revolution keeps working its mysterious ways. Turkey and the BRIC countries are perplexed that the US is now arming the AQIM-infested “rebels” – and may be showering them with juicy bits of the $32 billion in frozen Libyan government assets, plus a share in upcoming oil sales.
Talk about a hot Club Med. Under the Bush administration, al-Qaeda was used as the perfect excuse for bombing and pre-emptive wars. Now, under Obama, al-Qaeda – as in AQIM and AQAP – is being used in the balkanization of selected nations, facilitating the breakdown along tribal, sectarian and criminal lines.
The ghost of Osama bin Laden continues to pull a Cheshire cat. The al-Qaeda franchise is booming like never before. It may even be back in the game in its original status – as a CIA guerrilla army. There’s no war like an endless war.
Read all of it here: Billion-Dollar Obama Rocks Yemen, Pepe Escobar, April 05…
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on the Bay Bridge, in order to keep HazMat responsive to the 21st century. Call it “a drill.” Sure, a full-on HazMat response in rush-hour traffic on a commuter bottleneck could interfere with business as usual, but the inconvenience would be a small price to pay to keep our first responders up to snuff. All I care about is American prosperity and lives.
Of course, I kid you. Just like Jello Biafra kids you. We all kid for the sake of sanity, kids.
…she is contemplating something Lady Macbethian this way cometh!