Jeremy Scahill. Obama officials' spin on Benghazi attack mirrors Bin Laden raid untruths | Glenn Greenwald. Almost immediately after President Obama announced the killing of Osama bin Laden, top government officials, including then-CIA Director Leon Panetta and top terrorism adviser John Brennan, made numerous false statements about what took place. That included the claim that Bin Laden was killed after he engaged in a "firefight", that he used his wife as a human shield to protect himself, and that he was living in luxury in a $1m mansion.
None of those claims, central to the story the White House told the world, turned out to be true. Bin Laden was unarmed and nobody in the house where Bin Laden was found ever fired a single shot (a courier in an adjacent guest house was the only one to shoot, at the very beginning of the operation). Bin Laden never used his wife or anyone else as a shield.
And the house was dilapidated, showed little sign of luxury, and was worth one-quarter of what it was claimed. But no matter. As it turns out, this claim is almost certainly false. Jeremy Scahill: Why is President Obama Keeping Yemeni Journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye in Prison? This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. JUAN GONZALEZ: We’re going to turn now to Yemen. The Obama administration is coming under new scrutiny this week for its role in the imprisonment of a prominent Yemeni journalist who helped expose 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.
Speaking from a caged cell in a Yemeni courtroom, Shaye told reporters at his trial that he was arrested because he reported on the murders of children and women. AMY GOODMAN: Within a month of Abdulelah Haider Shaye’s sentencing, then-Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced he was going to pardon the journalist. This is his friend, the political cartoonist Kamal Sharaf. JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Jeremy Scahill and Ex-DIA Analyst Joshua Foust on "The Dangerous U.S. Game in Yemen" & CIA Ops in Libya. This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. JUAN GONZALEZ: We begin today’s show in Yemen, where hundreds of thousands of protesters took to the streets Wednesday demanding the immediate resignation of the U.S.
-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has ruled the country for 33 years. Protesters have rejected Saleh’s proposal that he remain president until elections are held, but that he transfer power to a caretaker government. One of Yemen’s most prominent opposition figures, Hamid al-Ahmar, has called on Saleh to step down and leave the country. HAMID AL-AHMAR: The international community, the United States and the Europeans should stand firmly with the Yemeni nation and with their wish to have change, especially after these crimes of the current regime.
And I think serious speeches, serious talks from their side would help. Scahill argues the U.S. secret war has unintentionally played a significant role in weakening Saleh’s regime. On Sunday, U.S. Jeremy Scahill: Bush administration authorized ‘sick torture tactics’ | Raw Replay. Jeremy Scahill @ The Nation. With drone strikes and kill lists, the president set a dangerous precedent. How three US citizens were killed by their own government in the space of one month in 2011. Within some military and intelligence circles, it was the CIA director's relationship with JSOC—not Paula Broadwell—that raised concerns. Luego de que sus partidarios cuestionaran la legalidad de la corte que lo condenó, Abdulelah Haider Shaye debería haber sido puesto en libertad. Pero el presidente Obama intervino. After supporters protested his “sham” trial, Abdulelah Haider Shaye would have been pardoned.
Then Obama intervened. How US counterterrorism operations ignited an Islamist uprising. How US proxy wars helped create a militant Islamist threat. Renditions, an underground prison and a new CIA base are elements of an intensifying US war, according to a Nation investigation in Mogadishu. Meet the Special Operations unit that killed Osama bin Laden. Jeremy Scahill's blog @ The Nation. At the end of the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal this weekend, the leadership of the Afghan Taliban issued a statement characterizing the alliance's adoption of a loose timeline for a 2014 end to combat operations as "good news" for Afghans and "a sign of failure for the American government. " At the summit, President Barack Obama said that 2011 will begin "a transition to full Afghan lead" in security operations, while the Taliban declared: "In the past nine years, the invaders could not establish any system of governance in Kabul and they will never be able to do so in future.
" While Obama claimed that the US and its allies are "breaking the Taliban’s momentum," the reality on the ground tells a different story. Despite increased Special Operations Forces raids and, under Gen. David Petraeus, a return to regular US-led airstrikes, the insurgency in Afghanistan is spreading and growing stronger. But it is not simply a matter of ideology versus technology. Jeremy Scahill: Well Known Journalist Rotting In Jail Because Obama Personally Requested It.
Jeremy Scahill Reveals CIA Facility, Prison in Somalia as U.S. Expands Covert Ops in Stricken Nation. AMY GOODMAN: As famine and drought grip Somalia in what’s being called the worst humanitarian disaster in the world right now, The Nation magazine has revealed the CIA is greatly expanding its covert operations inside Somalia. Following an in-depth, on-the-ground investigation inside Mogadishu, the magazine revealed the agency has set up a secret counterterrorism training base at the international airport in Somalia, where it’s training an indigenous Somali force to conduct targeted combat and capture operations against members of Al Shabab, the militant group with close ties to al-Qaeda.
The Nation has also revealed the CIA is using a secret underground prison in the basement of Somalia’s National Security Agency. While a U.S. official told The Nation that the CIA does not run the prison, he acknowledged the CIA pays the salaries of Somali agents. Some of the prisoners in the prison have been snatched on the streets of Nairobi, Kenya, and rendered to Mogadishu. JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Jeremy Scahill on Obama’s Orwellian War in Iraq: We Created the Very Threat We Claim to be Fighting.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday it will take a, quote, "hell of a long fight" for the United States and its allies to stop the advance of militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But during the same speech, Biden admitted the Islamic State poses no existential threat to the nation’s security. His comment comes as Australia becomes the latest country to join the U.S. -led fight. Prime Minister Tony Abbott said Australian planes will take part in the air campaign and that special forces would be deployed.
PRIME MINISTER TONY ABBOTT: The Americans certainly have quite a substantial special forces component on the ground already. AMY GOODMAN: Meanwhile, Turkey’s Parliament has authorized the government to order military action against the Islamic State. To talk more about the crisis in the Middle East, we’re joined by Jeremy Scahill, who first reported from inside Iraq before the 2003 U.S. invasion. Media with Jeremy Scahill. INTERVIEW: Jeremy Scahill Accuses US Government Of Executing Bin Laden - 'An Unarmed, Elderly Man' “My personal opinion is that they executed Bin Laden,” begins Jeremy Scahill, unblinkingly. “If you strip it down, what you had is an unarmed elderly man, in his bedroom, shot in the face by the most elite force in the world.
Almost everything that the White House officials told us that happened in the compound that night turned out to be a total fabrication. “I would have loved to have seen Bin Laden put on trial for his crimes. He had been indicted, in the 1990s, and was a reprehensible criminal, but I don’t believe for one second they were given orders to capture him, I think the whole point was to kill him.” He sighs. “I wasn’t like, boo hoo, Bin Laden’s dead, but I wasn’t jumping. America’s a very nationalistic country, and in episodes like that of his death, it becomes jingoism.
Scahill's investigation took him from mountains in Afghanistan to the heart of the US military Scahill is a man used to saying the unsayable. “I can't stand to see it. “The gloves come off.