According to a report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation, on February 2 of this year, President Obama called Yemeni President Abdullah to “express concern” about the potential release of journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye from prison.
Shaye is a Yemeni journalist who has done a lot of reporting on America’s War on Terror, and on Al Qaeda itself. He has interviewed Al Qaeda leaders, even some that America had been hunting.
And his reporting has embarrassed the United States.
Glenn Greenwald explains the background story:
[O]n December 17, 2009, President Obama ordered an air attack — using Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs — on the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province; the strike ended the lives of 14 women and 21 children. At the time, the Yemeni government outright lied about the attack, falsely claiming that it was Yemen’s air force which was responsible.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/abdulelah-haider-shaye-2012-3#ixzz1pCOpfRfx
On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free. Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.
More Stories
Trump Persecution Update
COVID-19 Vaccines – The Devastating Health Crisis in the UK Channel Islands and Around the World
The easiest way to show the COVID vaccines are a disaster and that the medical community is looking the other way