Largely Unreported US Attacks On Yemen Preceded Christmas Day Terror Attempt

Largely unreported in the US media, the United States launched two missile attacks on Yemen on Thursday, December 17 (h/t Glenn Greenwald)

Development of the story was left to the circumspect wire services reports that were the more circumspect the closer they were to U.S. centers of power. — Thus AP spoke vaguey of an “unusually heavy assault” in which the U.S. “provided firepower and other aid,” and gave prominence to a statement from a Yemeni Embassy spokesman who “denied the U.S. launched missiles in the attack,” though this denial is not credible given ABC’s report of two U.S. cruise missile strikes in Yemen on Thursday.[1] — Reports that most of those killed in the attacks were “mostly civilians, including women and children” and denials that the target was an al-Qaida stronghold were vague and confined to unnamed “[w]itnesses.”

So under-reported was this strike that Senator Joe Lieberman was clearly unaware of it when he suggested preemptive action against Yemen more than a week later.

A Yemeni official calculated that 49 civilians were killed, including 17 women and 23 children.  And while we assert the targets are “suspected al Qaeda sites,” as Glenn Greenwald notes, which would seem to justify these attacks, it may not play that way globally.

Yet arguments about justification to the side for the moment, here we have yet another violent attack by the U.S. which — even under the best-case scenario — has killed more Muslim civilians than it did “Al Qaeda fighters,” and failed to kill the main target of the attack. When it comes to undermining Al Qaeda — both in Yemen and generally — isn’t it painfully obvious that the images of dead Muslim women and children which we constantly create — and which we again just created in Yemen — will fuel that movement better than anything else we can do?

By: Alan

Alan Colmes is the publisher of Liberaland.