Free Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye

According to American and British journalists who know him a Yemeni journalist called Abdulelah Haider Shaye who is in jail in Yemen on charges of “associating with Al Qaeda” is not an Al Qa’ida supporter, but embarrassed the US and Yemeni governments when his investigations contradicted their claims. He was pardoned by Al Saleh, the dictator of Yemen, but a phone call from President Obama expressing ‘concern’ that he was to be released has resulted in him being left in jail (1).

Jeremy Scahill of the Nation magazine and a British journalist, who both know him, say he has never supported Al Qaeda. He used his contacts in Yemen to get interviews with  ‘Al Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula’ leaders in Yemen and asked them many critical and hostile questions about how they could justify supporting terrorist attacks, as well as general ones about their aims and motives (2).

He also reported on what the Yemeni government had claimed were Yemeni airstrikes on Al Qa'ida targets. He found evidence from shell and missile fragments that these were actually US missile and drone strikes and that while the US and Yemeni governments reported each strike to have killed many Al Qa'ida members, in fact the majority of the dead were civilians, including women and children and few of those killed were Al Qaeda. In particular he found one strike that they had reported as a great success and which supposedly killed 34 Al Qa'ida men actually killed mostly women and children.

Amnesty International and an investigation by a Yemeni parliamentary committee confirmed what Haider had reported (3).

He was also reporting that the Yemeni government were exaggerating the numbers of Al Qa'ida in Yemen in order to ensure they kept the same level of US military aid funding.

He was then jailed on charges of supporting Al Qaeda by a dodgy court set up by the Yemeni dictatorship (see Human Rights Watch's 2012 report on Yemen (covering 2011)) . At one point the regime was considering releasing him. Then President Saleh (the dictator of Yemen) got a phone call from President Obama saying he was very concerned about the possible release - and so he was kept in jail (4) – (6).

Investigative journalism to try to discover the facts is not supporting terrorism. The US ambassador to Yemen, when questioned on how Haider’s imprisonment would affect reporting by other journalists in Yemen, laughed and answered that they had nothing to worry about so long as they didn’t do what Haider did (i.e embarrass the US government and it’s client dictatorship in Yemen?).

There's a petition you can sign calling for Haider’s release here.

There are links to Committee to Protect Journalists reports on the case and other actions you can take here.

Glenn Greenwald on the case here.

(1) = Al Jazeera English 26 Mar 2012 ‘The dangers of reporting the 'war on terror'’, http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2012/03/2012323201744332607.html

(2) = see (1) above

(3) = Amnesty International 07 Jun 2010 ‘Images of missile and cluster munitions point to US role in fatal attack in Yemen’, http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/yemen-images-missile-and-cluster-munitions-point-us-role-fatal-attack-2010-06-04

(4) = Human Rights Watch World Report 2012 : Yemen, http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report-2012-yemen

(5) = White House press relase 03 Feb 2011 ‘Readout of President's Call with President Saleh of Yemen’, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/02/03/readout-presidents-call-president-saleh-yemen

(6) = The Nation 13 Mar 2012 ‘Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen? ’, http://www.thenation.com/article/166757/why-president-obama-keeping-journalist-prison-yemen

Will ‘the international community’ now create a civil war in Yemen as bad as the ones they’ve created in Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Afghanistan?

After the ‘underpants bomber’’s failed attempt to bomb a flight from Amsterdam to the US the Obama administration has said it will carry out ‘retaliatory strikes’ against Al Qa’ida leaders in Yemen. Yet the Bush and Obama administrations have been carrying out missile strikes on suspected Al Qa’ida leaders since 2002 and organising and training Saudi and Yemeni government forces for attacks on suspected Al Qa’ida leaders in Yemen since 2001. The SAS are also reported to have been deployed to Yemen from 2002 on and US Special Forces have almost certainly been operating too. The results have included a lot of civilian deaths in the strikes and an increase the support for extremist groups in the region.

When the editor of a Yemeni website reported on civilian deaths in a Yemeni military airstrike in September 2009 he was arrested by plain clothes intelligence officers and has not been heard of since.

A junior British foreign office Minister interviewed on BBC news recently said ‘security co-operation’ with the government of Yemen would be stepped up in parallel with development to reduce unemployment, lack of education and poverty.

Looking at the record of the same ‘coherent, integrated strategy’ in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan though the actual results are generally to create civil war and massively increase the number of terrorist attacks. In Afghanistan before the US invasion of 2001 suicide bombings were extremely rare, the most notorious targeted Ahmad Shah Massoud, a Mujahedin leader killed by Taliban suicide bombers in June 2001. Since the invasion suicide bombings have become common and civilian casualties from all causes have risen every year. Ditto for Iraq and Pakistan since big military offensives, air strikes and ‘counter insurgency’ to ‘root out extremists’.

Far from stabilising the countries involved ‘support’ from the US and it’s allies generally leads to massive destabilisation, which is used to justify military bases being set up in the country and troops being deployed to train or operate alongside the forces of the country. The only way you could interpret what’s happened in Pakistan or Iraq as ‘greater stability’ would be if you adopted Chomsky’s interpretation of the phrase – certain governments’ code-word for ‘greater influence for us’.

Afghanistan and Pakistan provide the majority of the pipeline route favoured by the US and EU for export of the post-Soviet republics oil and gas. Iraq has the second largest known oil reserves in the world, while Yemen, though having little oil or gas, is strategically important according to the US Energy Information Agency ‘because of its location on the Bab el-Mandab, one of the world's most strategic shipping lanes, through which an estimated 3.5 million barrels of oil passed daily in 2010. Disruption to shipping in the Bab el-Mandab could prevent tankers in the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Aden from reaching the Suez Canal/Sumed pipeline complex, requiring a costly diversion around the southern tip of Africa to reach western markets.’ You can see on the map below how Somalia and Yemen guard either side of the Gulf of Aden – which would be the main alternative export route for Middle Eastern oil and gas if a conflict with Iran closed off the Straits of Hormuz between Iran and Oman.

map of the middle east showing how Yemen and Somalia guard each side of the Gulf of Aden and how the important Bab el-Mandab oil tanker export route follows Yemen's coast - this map is from infoplease

(Please note that this post originally mistakenly claimed Yemen had as high a share of proven global oil reserves as Kuwait. This was wrong and based on mis-reading a column in BP's Annual Statistical review and mistaking the United Arab Emirate's figures for Yemen's, which are only 0.3% of proven reserves globally.)

American oil giants Exxon-Mobil and Hunt Oil, the French Total Oil and British Gas have had oil and gas contracts in Yemen for many years.

The collapse of Somalia’s government in the late 1980s has led to little oil exploration, so no significant proven reserves, but what surveys have been undertaken suggest it may have large reserves in its territorial waters and several major oil companies, including Conoco, had oil exploration contracts with the dictatorship of Siad Barre before it’s overthrow and have argued that those contracts are still valid if the civil war ends.

Maybe many of the members of governments involved genuinely believe they are preventing rather than inciting terrorism – and maybe the overlap between oil and gas reserves and export routes and countries where the US intervenes against Al Qa’ida is just co-incidence, but it’s just as likely that Al Qa’ida and ‘WMDs’ have become the same worldwide excuse for intervention for other motives that ‘Soviet backed Communism’ was during the ‘Cold War’.

Could it be that more progress would be made in reducing terrorism by ending the raids and the air and missile strikes and the ‘counter-insurgency’ and instead simply defending against terrorist attacks with defensive security measures and providing a standard of living above subsistence level to most Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Iraqis?

Sources

BBC News 25 Jan 2002 ‘CIA 'killed al-Qaeda suspects' in Yemen’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/2402479.stm

BBC News Online 17 November, 2002, 14:49 GMT ‘SAS 'hunting Bin Laden in Yemen'’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/world/middle_east/2485043.stm

Reuters 23 Sep 2009 ‘Yemen media protest arrest of third journalist’,
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLM252909

Observer 29 Jan 2006 ‘Revealed: UK's role in deadly CIA drone’,

guardian.co.uk 04 Jun 2007 ‘Briton 'killed in US missile attack in Somalia'’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/jun/04/politics.foreignpolicy

ABC News ‘Obama Ordered U.S. Military Strike on Yemen Terrorists’,
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/cruise-missiles-strike-yemen/story?id=9375236&page=1

BBC News 13 Nov 2009 ‘Saudis 'renew Yemen bombing'’,

Guardian 14 Dec 2009 ‘Air strike 'kills 70 civilians' in Yemen’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8411726.stm

Los Angeles Times 13 Jan 1993 ‘The Oil Factor in Somalia’, http://articles.latimes.com/1993-01-18/news/mn-1337_1_oil-reserves
; for full version see http://www.somaliawatch.org/archivejuly/000922601.htm

B.P. Statistical Review of World Energy 2009, http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2008/STAGING/local_assets/2009_downloads/statistical_review_of_world_energy_full_report_2009.pdf

Arabian Business.com ‘Company Profile : Exxon-Mobil Chemical’,
http://www.arabianbusiness.com/index.php?option=com_companylist&view=list&companyid=16826

BBC News 21 Dec 2009 ‘Houthi rebels say 54 killed in north Yemen air strike’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8425069.stm

BBC News 24 Dec 2009 ‘Dozens killed in Yemen air strike on al-Qaeda suspects’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8429370.stm (US gave Yemeni government $70mn in military aid in 2009)

Committee to Protect Journalists 25 Sep 2009 ‘In Yemen, critical journalist disappears’,
http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/4b25fc0123.html

AP 24 Dec 2009 ‘Al-Qaida fighters killed in Yemen air strikes’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/24/yemen-strike-al-qaida

Guardian 28 Dec 2009 ‘Al-Qaida: US support for Yemen crackdown led to attack’, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/28/al-qaida-us-yemen-attack

Energy Business Review 15 Oct 2009 ‘Total's Yemen LNG Plant Starts Production’,
http://oilgaspipelines.energy-business-review.com/news/totals_yemen_lng_plant_starts_production_091015/