Oregon State University Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights hosted a panel discussion with independent journalists Rania Khalek, Abby Martin (The Empire Files), and Mnar Muhawesh (MintPress News) to discuss Syria, Palestine, and Yemen in a way the mainstream media refuses to cover.
Perspectives on Palestine, Syria, and Yemen – Abby Martin, Mnar Muhawesh, Rania Khalek
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@AbbyMartin | @MnarMuh | @RaniaKhalek
Saudi Arabia, one of the region’s most sectarian and intensely brutal regimes, happens to be one of the United State’s greatest allies. The history hidden behind the Saudi kingdom’s steel curtain reveals the existence of a world power that is both restrictive and unflinching in its violence, and thanks to help from the UK, the notorious human rights abuser now heads the United Nations Human Rights Council.
The oil giant not only subjects local Shia Muslims to hostile policies, it also extends systematic, merciless abuse to migrants who already face countless obstacles while attempting to work in the region. Yemen, one of the most food insecure countries in the world, is also being subjected to the kingdom’s wrath. As countless Yemenis starve under relentless Saudi bombing, the US is militarily backing the war, having just approved $1.3 billion more in arms to the monarchy.
Fearful of losing its grip on power in the region, the Saudi kingdom, which is part of the larger, archaic band of Gulf monarchies, actively hunts down and executes dissidents who are part of a local Arab Spring—but it is clear that Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, despite how much violence it unleashes, is doomed to fail.
In this episode of The Empire Files, Abby Martin exposes Saudi Arabia—not only its rampant brutality, but the resistance that exists despite the kingdom’s relentless attempts to crush it.
Saudi Arabia’s Hidden Revolution & Crushing of Resistance
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FOLLOW // @EmpireFiles and @AbbyMartin
WATCH // YouTube.com/EmpireFiles
On this edition of Media Roots Radio, Abby and Robbie Martin catch up on current events and dissect the corporatocracy, its control over information and policy, espionage and infiltration of global activism, private mercenaries and corporations’ role in war profiteering over the decades and the historical revisionism being done by the political and media establishment. They also discuss the bombshell revelations of the CIA cover-up regarding Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
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NY TIMES– The Obama administration has intensified the American covert war in Yemen,
exploiting a growing power vacuum in the country to strike at militant
suspects with armed drones and fighter jets, according to American
officials.
The acceleration of the American campaign in recent weeks comes amid a violent conflict in Yemen that has left the government in Sana, a United States ally, struggling to cling to power. Yemeni troops that had been battling militants linked to Al Qaeda in the south have been pulled back to the capital, and American officials see the strikes as one of the few options to keep the militants from consolidating power.
On Friday, American jets killed Abu Ali al-Harithi, a midlevel Qaeda operative, and several other militant suspects in a strike in southern Yemen. According to witnesses, four civilians were also killed in the airstrike. Weeks earlier, drone aircraft fired missiles aimed at Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric who the United States government has tried to kill for more than a year. Mr. Awlaki survived.
The recent operations come after a nearly year-long pause in American airstrikes, which were halted amid concerns that poor intelligence had led to bungled missions and civilian deaths that were undercutting the goals of the secret campaign.
Read full article on US Intensifying a Secret Campaign of Yemen Airstrikes.
©2011 NY Times
Photo by flickr user NicStage-F15
SALON– That Barack Obama has continued the essence of the Bush/Cheney Terrorism architecture was once a provocative proposition but is now so self-evident that few dispute it (watch here as arch-neoconservative David Frum — Richard Perle’s co-author for the supreme 2004 neocon treatise — waxes admiringly about Obama’s Terrorism and foreign policies in the Muslim world and specifically its “continuity” with Bush/Cheney). But one policy where Obama has gone further than Bush/Cheney in terms of unfettered executive authority and radical war powers is the attempt to target American citizens for assassination without a whiff of due process. As The New York Times put it last April:
It is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing, officials said. A former senior legal official in the administration of George W. Bush said he did not know of any American who was approved for targeted killing under the former president. . . .
That Obama was compiling a hit list of American citizens was first revealed in January of last year when The Washington Post’s Dana Priest mentioned in passing at the end of a long article that at least four American citizens had been approved for assassinations; several months later, the Obama administration anonymously confirmed to both the NYT and the Post that American-born, U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was one of the Americans on the hit list.
Yesterday, riding a wave of adulation and military-reverence, the Obama administration tried to end the life of this American citizen — never charged with, let alone convicted of, any crime — with a drone strike in Yemen, but missed and killed two other people instead:
A missile strike from an American military drone in a remote region of Yemen on Thursday was aimed at killing Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical American-born cleric believed to be hiding in the country, American officials said Friday.
The attack does not appear to have killed Mr. Awlaki, the officials said, but may have killed operatives of Al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.
The other people killed “may have” been Al Qaeda operatives. Or they “may not have” been. Who cares? They’re mere collateral damage on the glorious road to ending the life of this American citizen without due process (and pointing out that the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution expressly guarantees that “no person shall be deprived of life without due process of law” — and provides no exception for war — is the sort of tedious legalism that shouldn’t interfere with the excitement of drone strikes).
There are certain civil liberties debates where, even though I hold strong opinions, I can at least understand the reasoning and impulses of those who disagree; the killing of bin Laden was one such instance. But the notion that the President has the power to order American citizens assassinated without an iota of due process — far from any battlefield, not during combat — is an idea so utterly foreign to me, so far beyond the bounds of what is reasonable, that it’s hard to convey in words or treat with civility.
Read more about U.S. Tries to Assassinate U.S. Citizen Anwar al-Awlaki
© 2011 Salon
Photo by Flickr user varintsai
