Looks Like Yemen Is Not Going Away Anytime Soon—Unless We Bomb It, Ha Ha!
by Juli Weiner 8:45 am January 5, 2010
- The US Embassy in Yemen is open again, following two days of evidence suggesting that al-Qaeda was going to blow it up and the Yemeni government suggesting the opposite of this. [AP]
- Last week’s suicide bomber, the one who killed seven CIA people in Afghanistan, was actually a Jordanian double-agent. [Washington Post]
- Meet Ali Abdullah Saleh, the proto-despised President of Yemen. [New York Times]
- Thousands of names were switched to the no-fly list from the hedge-y best-to-keep-away-from-planes list. [Wall Street Journal]
- The corporate adult fascists at Nokia are suing local punk start-up Apple for iPhone-related copyright infringement. [Reuters]
- Rejoining the Yemen branch of al-Qaeda is a popular life-after-Guantanamo option. [Times Online]
Rebecca Schoenkopf (424)
Kirsten Boyd Johnson (927)
Sulagna Misra (4)
Kris E. Benson (11)
Liz Colville (170)
John Schoenkopf (7)
Jim Newell (5640)
Josh Fruhlinger (646)
Erik Jay (27)
Blair Burke (181)
{ 20 comments }
The key is the menu of activities Al Quaeda in Yemen offers former Guantanamo inmates. Being chained up and having menacing dogs bark at you, sitting in a three foot cage for hours, loud music for forty hours straight–you’ll feel right at home!
You know, if I were running a devious wheels-within-wheels intelligence operation, I would definitely plant the story that it was a Jordanian double agent who killed seven CIA operatives as opposed to, say, a base medical officer.
Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Yemen… Heh heh… Now how’s the rest of that go? Nurse! Where’s my pills? It’s time for my pills!
Seems like standard operation procedure that when you get your market share eaten by a rival, in this case the over controlling uber secretive and paranoid group of hippies from Apple, then you unleash the ultimate weapon in the tech wars, the lawyers.
What’s the big deal? Under “Designed in California” just append, “Tech Filched From Finland”. Move along.
And “corporate adult fascists at Apple are suing Finnish punk start-up Nokia” I don’t know, go ask the techie Freedom Foundation and Liberty Law blogs and tell it on the mountain kid.
[re=488997]ManchuCandidate[/re]:
The step after the lawyers is to secretly recruit dozens of 14-15 yr old boys and offer them lifetime supplies of Mountain Dew and junk food if they can create software to vex the iPhone and it’s users.
In addition to hashish, Yemen has some of the world’s best pistacchio nuts. I say, “No Blood for Pistacchios”!
[re=488993]slavojzizek[/re]: You must take baby steps: flash a bit of pectoralis in a therapy session. [a voice of controlled lability] “Thank you…kind man.”
I know it’s a glass-houses thing for a follower of congressional inside baseball to call something boring, but I can’t imagine ever in a million years caring about the state of Apple’s and Nokia’s patents
Wow that story of the Jordanian double-agent was food for thought. Thoughts of where I can score my next escapist high.
[re=488995]memzilla[/re]: I don’t know. In either case, the CIA got duped. Then dead. I think the double agent thing would be worse, because the guy is there specifically to pass classified information on to other countries. If it’s a just your garden variety fanatic/terrorist, he’s just there for the 72 virgins.
[re=489022]hockeymom[/re]: It’s definitely worse. Note the Jordanian “handler” who was killed along with the American officers was related to the Jordanian “royal family.” It’s been Zwahiri’s mission since before the assassination of Sadat to bring down all the royal houses in the middle east, which he views as being tainted by western influence. I had thought that Zwahiri was probably dead, but if it went down as described in the Post article, which is a big “if,” the bombing sure bears many of his hallmarks. It’s also very possible that the “suicider” was exposed by the extremists and threatened with the deaths of family members. He doesn’t seem to fit the profile of suicide bomber very well.
That said, if it’s true that body searches and metal detectors or whatever were bypassed because he was “trusted,” then the CIA is in extremely bad shape. In which case an attack like this was all but inevitable.
HOT BOTTLED WATER FOR YEMENI CHILDREN
Now, to be fair, if I were one of the three non-terrorists in Yemen, and the US government kidnapped me and held me and tortured me for a decade anyway, only to release me because it ended up I probably didn’t do anything after all, and this was all just an innocent misunderstanding and no hard feelings about that whole, “decade of never-ending torment” thing, right?
Yeah, I might have a bone to pick with America, too.
“Hmmm, let’s see. Dodging drone missiles in the Hobbsian paradise that is Yemen? Or splashing in the crystal blue waves of the Bahamas? Whatever should I do?”
yemen better than bahamas, because one is closer to The Prophet in those sands of arabia.
[re=489002]Larry Fine[/re]: Hashish? What are you on dude, why have that when all the Kool Kids are into Khat?
Yemen is in the Bible, which ought to please the Fighting Fundies. The Queen of Sheba was from Yemen.
Otherwise, it is the world’s major producer of frankincense and myrrh.
Yemen is in the Bible, which ought to please the Fighting Fundies. The Queen of Sheba was from Yemen.
Otherwise, it is the world’s major producer of frankincense and myrrh.[re=489137]user-of-owls[/re]:
Comments on this entry are closed.