Department of Homeland Security Is The U.S. Secret Police

February 29, 2012

InfoWars

By Paul Joseph Watson

The Department of Homeland Security feared that the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations would turn violent during their height last year, according to a leaked document obtained by Rolling Stone Magazine.

Whether you support the goals of Occupy Wall Street or not, this is yet another example of how the federal agency, which was created under the auspices of protecting the United States from terrorist attacks, is primarily concerned with keeping tabs on citizens who express their First Amendment rights.

“The five-page report – contained in 5 million newly leaked documents examined by Rolling Stone in an investigative partnership with WikiLeaks – goes on to sum up the history of Occupy Wall Street and assess its “impact” on everything from financial services to government facilities,” writes Michael Hastings.

The document also details how much of DHS’ information was obtained through monitoring Twitter feeds from OWS activists, underscoring once again the fact that the federal agency is spying on social media as part of a chilling effect on free speech, belying claims made earlier this month by DHS representatives that the agency is only concerned with messages relating to natural disasters.

Homeland Security’s fear that the demonstrations could lead to violence is summarized in the final paragraph of the document.

“The growing support for the OWS movement has expanded the protests’ impact and increased the potential for violence. While the peaceful nature of the protests has served so far to mitigate their impact, larger numbers and support from groups such as Anonymous substantially increase the risk for potential incidents and enhance the potential security risk to critical infrastructure (CI).”

Not only did Homeland Security monitor the development of Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, many of the raids on OWS camps across the country were “coordinated with help from Homeland Security,” according to a Justice Department official.

In addition, the Federal Protective Service, a component of the DHS that is tasked with providing security for government buildings, arrested photographers at Portland’s Terry Shrunk Plaza during an ‘Occupy’ event, illustrating how the FPS is now operating as Homeland Security’s secret police unit. Since 2006, the FPS has been used to spy on dozens of peaceful advocacy groups and monitor scores of lawful protests and political rallies in the name of national security. In 2004, the FPS arrested a veteran for the crime of complaining to his local VA office in Des Moines.

As part of its broadening mandate to crack down on free speech, the DHS is also targeting activists from the other side of the political spectrum.

Click here for the full report from InfoWars.

U.S. Could Target Journalists For Killing

January 9th, 2012

Huffington Post

By Philip Elliott

Republican presidential contender Ron Paul on Wednesday suggested that the United States could assassinate journalists the same way it targeted Americans with ties to al Qaeda.

The Texas congressman again criticized President Barack Obama for approving last week’s drone strikes in Yemen against a U.S. citizen who was tracked and executed based on secret intelligence that linked him to two failed terrorist attacks against the U.S.

An American-born propagandist also died in the bombing. Escalating his criticism, Paul told a National Press Club luncheon that if citizens do not protest the deaths, the country will start adding reporters to its list of threats that must be taken out.

“Can you imagine being put on a list because you’re a threat? What’s going to happen when they come to the media? What if the media becomes a threat? … This is the way this works. It’s incrementalism,” Paul said.

“It’s slipping and sliding, let me tell you.”

Click here for the full story from the Huffington Post.

WikiLeaks: 7 Shocking Gitmo Revelations

April 25th, 2011

The Raw Story

By: Kase Wickman

A massive leak of more than 700 military documents, attributed to infamous transparency group WikiLeaks, was released Sunday night. Much of the new information deals with detainees held in Guantanamo Bay, records that begin immediately after the September 11 terrorist attacks and range to 2009, including documents relating to 172 prisoners still held at the controversial detention facility.

Here are seven shocking revelations about Guantanamo Bay and the practices there.

One hundred twenty-seven “high risk” prisoners remain at Guantanamo Bay, but almost as many “high risk” prisoners have been released to other countries or freed, despite being described as “likely to pose a threat.” Of the 600 detainees known to have been transferred out of the prison since 2002, 160 fell under the “high risk” categorization, according to NPR. At least two dozen transferred “high risk” prisoners have been linked to terrorist activity since their Gitmo exit, including two Saudis who became leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

“There’s a group there that we all agree never gets let out, and then there’s the rest,” Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) said of Guantanamo detainees at a recent congressional hearing. “As you close on that number of folks who should not ever be let go, then you run the risk of letting somebody go who shouldn’t be.”

Officials aren’t sure what they’re doing. In 704 leaked documents assessing detainees, the word “possibly” appears 387 times, “unknown” 188 times and “deceptive” 85 times. Two conflicting committees from the Department of Defense worked at the facility and clashed frequently over how to classify prisoners’ threat levels and the quality of information they shared.

While some “high risk” prisoners have returned to terrorism, still others have become U.S. allies. A former Gitmo detainee whose files identify him as “a probable member of al-Qaeda,” Abu Sufian Ibrahim Ahmed Hamuda bin Qumu, is now a key figure on the rebel side of the Libyan revolution, a leader of a rebel brigade in the northern part of the country. When Qumu was captured in Pakistan shortly after 9/11, he was considered an enemy of the United States. Now, he and the U.S. have a goal in common: unseat Gaddafi.

Instead of getting closer to catching Osama bin Laden, the documents show that the focus has broadened from catching key al-Qaeda operatives, noting information about other foreign operations. One captive was sent to Gitmo so officials could glean any information he had on the Bahraini court, and another was interrogated about any knowledge he had of Uzbekistan’s secret service.

Officials took note of every possible piece of evidence, in hopes of building mosaics of information — even evidence as trivial as origami art. McClatchy reports:

Guards plucked off ships at sea to walk the cellblocks note who has hoarded food as contraband, who makes noise during the Star Spangled Banner, who sings creepy songs like “La, La, La, La Taliban” and who is re-enacting the 9/11 attacks with origami art.

Officials noted that information from some unstable prisoners may be faulty or untrue, but used it anyway. Yasim Mohammed Basardah, a detainee who gave information about 60 other prisoners, was noted as being unreliable, and his file stressed that information he shared should be independently verified. However, he was also given a “high” intelligence value, and his threat level was lowered from high to medium in exchange for his cooperation. He was resettled in Europe in 2010. According to the documents, eight prisoners have revealed information about 235 others.

Suspects were nabbed and shipped to Gitmo because they wore cheap watches. A specific model of watch — a Casio style released in the 1980s — was suspected to be used as a timer by al-Qaeda operatives. People in Afghanistan were seized and sent to the detention facility because they were wearing the watches, but most have been quietly released because of a lack of evidence.

Click here for the full report from The Raw Story

CIA Officers Made Grave Mistakes, Then Got Promoted

February 9th, 2011

AOL News

By: Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo

In December 2003, security forces boarded a bus in Macedonia and snatched a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri. For the next five months, el-Masri was a ghost. Only a select group of CIA officers knew he had been whisked to a secret prison for interrogation in Afghanistan.

But he was the wrong guy.

A hard-charging CIA analyst had pushed the agency into one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism. Yet despite recommendations by an internal review, the analyst was never punished. In fact, she has risen to one of the premier jobs in the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, helping lead President Barack Obama’s efforts to disrupt al-Qaida.

In the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, officers who committed serious mistakes that left people wrongly imprisoned or even dead have received only minor admonishments or no punishment at all, an Associated Press investigation has revealed. The botched el-Masri case is but one example of a CIA accountability process that even some within the agency say is unpredictable and inconsistent.

Though Obama has sought to put the CIA’s interrogation program behind him, the result of a decade of haphazard accountability is that many officers who made significant missteps are now the senior managers fighting the president’s spy wars.

The AP investigation of the CIA’s actions revealed a disciplinary system that takes years to make decisions, hands down reprimands inconsistently and is viewed inside the agency as prone to favoritism and manipulation. When people are disciplined, the punishment seems to roll downhill, sparing senior managers even when they were directly involved in operations that go awry.

Two officers involved in the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan, for instance, received no discipline and have advanced into Middle East leadership positions. Other officers were punished after participating in a mock execution in Poland and playing a role in the death of a prisoner in Iraq. Those officers retired, then rejoined the intelligence community as contractors.

Some lawmakers were so concerned about the lack of accountability that last year they created a new inspector general position with broad authority to investigate missteps in the CIA or anywhere else in the intelligence community.

Click here for the full report from AOL News

Homeland Security Chairman to TSA: ‘Reconsider’ Pat-Downs

November 22nd, 2010

The Hill

By: Kevin Bogardus

House Democrats have asked the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to “reconsider” agency screeners’ new invasive pat-downs of airline passengers.

In a letter Friday to TSA Administrator John Pistole, Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Shelia Jackson Lee (D-Texas) said the agency should rethink the new screening procedures in light of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, typically the busiest travel time of the year.

“While we agree that security measures should be enhanced in the wake of recent attempted terrorist attacks on the aviation system, we are concerned about new enhanced pat down screening protocols and urge you to reconsider the utilization of these protocols. With Thanksgiving Day marking the beginning of the busiest travel season of the year, this request is timely,” Thompson and Jackson Lee write in their letter.

The new pat-down screenings have faced a public uproar as airline passengers have complained about their invasiveness. Combined with new body scanners at security checkpoints that capture naked body images, the TSA has found itself under increased public scrutiny.

The lawmakers say members “expressed concern” about the pat-down procedures when they were briefed on them in September. They ask Pistole for a number of documents, such as a privacy impact assessment, regarding the new pat-down procedures and say TSA screeners need more training, citing an inspector general report detailing weaknesses in the agency’s training program.

Thompson and Jackson Lee criticize the agency in their letter. They say TSA should have done a better job of informing the public about the new screening procedures while also making sure to better protect their civil rights.

“Before implementing this new more invasive pat down procedure, as a preliminary matter, TSA should have had a conversation with the American public about the need for these changes. Even before that conversation, TSA should have endeavored to ensure that these changes did not run afoul of privacy and civil liberties,” they write.

Click here for the full report from The Hill

UN Official Wants to See End to Airport Scanners

March 10, 2010

Prison Planet

A senior official in the United Nations has warned that the growing use of full body scanners at airports breaches individual rights.

Martin Scheinin, the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur, said the scanners are more of a political response to terrorist attacks than a carefully designed security measure.

He added that the technology which intrudes excessively into individual privacy is also ineffective in preventing terrorism.

Not only are they “ineffective in detecting a genuine terrorist threat” but they also create “a false feeling of security and allow the real terrorists to adapt their tactics to the technology in use.”

Scheinin also told journalists that although the scanners violate human rights generally, there are “particular sensitivities in respect of women, certain religions and certain cultural backgrounds.”

The top official, who has been in charge of monitoring the impact of anti-terror measures on individual freedoms for the last five years, suggested that other existing detection technologies which do not harm privacy should be used instead.

Scheinin’s comments come just days after the US Transportation Security Administration announced that eleven more airports will begin using the technology soon.

The full-body scanners, otherwise known as the “virtual strip searching,” see through clothing to produce images of the whole body.

The plan to use the device at airports was introduced after the failed Christmas Day bombing of a US-bound airliner by a young Nigerian man.

Click here for the full report.

ACLU Official Says It Is Not Realistic to Screen ALL Air Passengers

January 12,2010

CNS News

By Matt Cover

Former FBI agent Mike German, now a terrorism expert with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said that using the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB) of 400,000-plus names to screen airline passengers was not realistic, and added that it was “fundamentally ridiculous” to think the list was not flawed.

German, speaking Monday at a Capitol Hill conference sponsored by the Arab American Institute to examine President Obama’s new airline screening policies, said the terrorist watch-listing system was “broken.”

“One of the most disappointing things about the whole review of this situation was this idea that the terrorist watch-listing system is not, itself, broken, which is fundamentally ridiculous,” said German.

“There are, as you say, 400,000 names on these, Terrorist Screening Center names, actually the number the [Justice Department] IG [Inspector General] put in his last report was 1.1 million identities,” German said. “I know that there is a distinction between names and identities and actual people, but we’re still talking about 1.1 million identities on this Terrorist Screening Center list and the number on the no-fly list is a small subset of that.”

According to Timothy J. Healy, director of the Justice Department’s Terrorist Screening Center, “the terrorist watch list is made up of approximately 400,000 people, ranging from suicide bombers to financiers. A small portion of the list is exported to TSA [the Transportation Security Administration] to create the No Fly list. In order to be placed on a No Fly list, a known or suspected terrorist must present a threat to civil aviation or national security.”

“Consequently, the No Fly list is a very small subset of the terrorist watch list,” Healy told the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Dec. 9. “It contains approximately 3,400 people. Of those, approximately 170 are U.S. citizens,”

Thus, the 3,400 people on the No Fly list represent less than 1 percent, or 0.85 percent, of the 400,000 people on the full “Terrorist Watchlist.”

Healy testified in the committee a little more than two weeks before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab boarded a plane from Amsterdam to Detroit and tried to detonate explosives he had smuggled aboard in his underwear.

In his testimony, Healy had stressed the smallness of the “No Fly” list, a theme that had also been sounded a year before by then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

German said on Monday that the terrorist watchlist system has been broken “for years,” pointing out that names were added to the list incorrectly while others were kept on the list after investigators had cleared them of any involvement with terrorists.

A law enforcement officer stands guard near Northwest Airlines Flight 253, parked at Detroit Metropolitan Airport in Romulus, Mich., on Sunday, Dec. 27, 2009. (AP Photo/Carlos Osorio)
“You don’t have to look to the ACLU to say that this system is broken, and it’s not that it just broke this time,” he said. “The IG at the Department of Justice has been looking at this for years and he has one report after another that says that this is fundamentally flawed.”

“There were people who were put on the list appropriately because they were under investigation, but when the investigation cleared them, they weren’t taken off the list,” said German. “There were people who were known terrorists, there were people who he [the IG] identified as known terrorists who were not on the list.”

German described the watchlist system as one of “tremendous false positives,” a fact that makes using the entire list as a tool to keep terrorists off of airplanes problematic.

“The whole listing process is broken and needs a fundamental overhaul,” said German. “We’re creating a system of tremendous false positives. We’ve created a system that creates hundreds, and probably hundreds of thousands, of false positives every day.”

The former counter-terrorism instructor offered that for the list to be effective officials need to “re-do” it to include only people the FBI and other national security agencies are not currently investigating.

“Putting 1.1 million people on a no-fly list when the evidence for putting them on there is in question, I think, isn’t the answer – it’s completely re-doing that list so that it only focuses on known terrorists,” he said. “There shouldn’t be anybody on that list who the FBI is not currently, and the other agencies, currently hunting down.”

German said that this method would not deny anyone their “right to fly” who is not under suspicion of being a terrorist.

“There shouldn’t be somebody sitting on the list who we’re saying is a terrorist – and perhaps denying their right to fly – and nobody’s actually looking for them,” he said.

After the briefing, German noted that the list has included well-known figures such as singer Cat Stevens and the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), using those famous errors to make the point that trying to keep all 400,000 names on the TSDB list from entering the country would be impossible.

“If you look today at how many completely innocent people that’s impacted, people who have a name that looks like [a terror suspect’s], when you’re talking about 1.1 million names, I mean, how many names are there?” said German.

“At some point, when being one letter off or two letters off or having the first name, middle name, last name transposed in some order, you’re having an exponentially large impact on people who are totally innocent,” he said. “For every investigator who’s asked to go out and check on one of those false positives — we’re building up this system of false positives and that is actually undermining the effectiveness of our state and local law enforcement and federal law enforcement.”

U.S. Discovered Alleged Extremist Links of Suspect While En Route

January 7,2009

Los Angeles Times

By Sebastian Rotella

Reporting from Washington – U.S. border security officials learned of the alleged extremist links of the suspect in the Christmas Day jetliner bombing attempt as he was airborne from Amsterdam to Detroit and had decided to question him when he landed, officials disclosed Wednesday.

The new information shows that border enforcement officials discovered the suspected extremist ties involving the Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in a database despite intelligence failures that have been criticized by President Obama.

“The people in Detroit were prepared to look at him in secondary inspection,” a senior law enforcement official said. “The decision had been made. The [database] had picked up the State Department concern about this guy — that this guy may have been involved with extremist elements in Yemen.”

If the intelligence had been detected sooner, it could have resulted in the interrogation and search of Abdulmutallab at the airport in Amsterdam, according to senior law enforcement officials, all of whom requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.

“They could have made the decision on whether to stop him from getting on the plane,” the senior law enforcement official said.

But an administration official said late Wednesday that the information would not have resulted in further scrutiny before the suspect departed. Abdulmutallab was in a database containing half a million names of people with suspected extremist links but who are not considered threats. Therefore, border security officials would have sought only to question him upon arrival in the U.S., the administration official said.

Nonetheless, the disclosure shows the complexity of the intelligence and passenger screening systems that are the subject of comprehensive reviews that the administration will release today.

The threshold for requiring a foreign visitor to undergo special scrutiny upon arrival in the U.S. is considerably lower than criteria for stopping a passenger’s departure overseas, according to current and former law enforcement officials. That is why border security agencies rely heavily on terrorism watch lists of suspects seen as urgent threats, officials said.

“The public isn’t aware how many people are allowed to travel through the U.S., who are linked, who intersect with bad guys or alleged bad guys,” a national security official said. “It makes sense from an intelligence perspective. If they are not considered dangerous, it provides intelligence on where they go, who they meet with.”

Moreover, the window for identifying a passenger overseas as a potential threat is limited, a senior homeland security official said.

U.S. border enforcement officials have access to passenger data based on lists of those who have made flight reservations. But the in-depth vetting only begins once a comprehensive list, known as a flight manifest, has been generated, just a few hours before takeoff, the homeland security official said.

Customs and Border Protection personnel based at the National Targeting Center in Washington came across the intelligence about Abdulmutallab — which was based on a tip from the suspect’s father to U.S. Embassy officials in Nigeria — during an in-depth review of the manifest after the plane was en route to Detroit, the other law enforcement officials said.

The administration’s review of screening procedures now underway includes an effort to make more information accessible to inspectors further in advance of flights, the senior law enforcement official said. The sheer number of passengers who must be screened and the potential slowdown for air travel posed by more scrutiny remains an impediment, however, officials said.

In contrast, once foreign visitors arrive in the U.S., border inspectors armed with additional screening data can refer them to secondary inspection, which involves more extensive questioning and searches, for reasons including suspected immigration problems or criminal activity.

Customs and Border Protection spokesmen declined to comment because the investigation is still open.

Abdulmutallab, after flying in from Nigeria, boarded the nine-hour flight to Detroit at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, one of nine airports around the world where foreign governments permit the presence of U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials in an advisory capacity.

The U.S. border officials work with foreign counterparts and Washington-based American officials to compare passenger lists to law enforcement and intelligence databases. The Americans can ask foreign law enforcement officials to conduct interrogations and searches of passengers who are not U.S. citizens or residents and, in rare instances, question passengers themselves, officials said.

Reservation lists that are generated a few days before flights allow some preliminary screening, officials said. But that information is limited by privacy laws, especially in Europe, and by the vagaries of reporting by airlines, so passenger manifests created with passport information once the flight is closed are a much stronger tool.

Homeland security officials declined to discuss what information reached the U.S. border officials in Amsterdam on Christmas Day or the actions of those officials related to Northwest Airlines Flight 253.

But they asserted that the likelihood of Abdulmutallab being intercepted in Amsterdam was low because he was not on the no-fly list, which contains about 4,000 names, or a separate terrorism watch “selectee” list that contains fewer than 20,000 names. Instead, the Nigerian was on the larger database.

Click Here to read the full report

The Real Purpose of Body Scanners

January 7,2009

Prison Planet

By Steve Watson

The clamor to ramp up airport security with invasive naked body imaging scanners has nothing to do with ensuring the safety of travelers. Rather it is part of an ongoing incremental push to break the will of the people and encourage mass subservience and meek obedience.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the body scanner push is that people are willingly accepting it. As Bloomberg news reports today, “Passenger acceptance of airport body scanners has increased following the failed terrorist attack,” with 92% of passengers at Manchester airport in northern England now agreeing to pass through the machines in a voluntary trial, compared with 75 percent before the incident.

The same report indicates that Around 90% of Muslims and Orthodox Jews were opting to use the scanners even prior to the Detroit incident rather than risking physical contact via pat downs and strip searches.

Travelers in Canada have indicated acceptance of the scanners, saying that they would “do anything for safety” and describing them as “a necessary evil”.

Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds of Germans favour airports using full-body scanners, despite claims that they are an invasion of personal privacy, a new poll has shown.

The will of the people is being systematically eroded and incrementally broken down. Airports are serving as reservations where the fundamental right to privacy must be left at the door.

Travelers have been acclimatized over time to know they must remove their shoes, take off their belts, untuck shirts, discard water, baby milk, shampoo and toothpaste. During the flight hands must be visible on laps, and even bathroom visits can now become national incidents as we have recently seen.

A culture of extreme fear has been engendered where the only way to stay safe is to cozy up to big brother, a psychological response akin to that of Stockholm syndrome.

This is where the technological control grid plays such a key role. Imagine if TSA agents were made to take women and children and physically strip search them while they held their hands aloft, the public would balk at such an abuse. However, with the body scanning machines there is a divide that clouds the process in futuristic technology.

Click here to read the full report

Al-Qaeda Threats Close U.S. Embassy In Yemen

January 4, 2010

Canadian Press

By Ahmed Al-Haj

The U.S. closed its embassy in Yemen on Sunday, citing ongoing threats by the al-Qaida branch that has been linked to the failed Christmas Day bombing attempt of a U.S. airliner headed to Detroit.

The confrontation with the terrorist group’s branch in Yemen has gained new urgency since the 23-year-old Nigerian accused in the attack, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, told U.S. investigators he received training and instructions from al-Qaida operatives in Yemen. President Barack Obama said Saturday that al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen was behind the attempt.

“The U.S. Embassy in San’a is closed today, January 3, 2010, in response to ongoing threats by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula … to attack American interests in Yemen,” the embassy said in a message posted on its Web site.

An embassy spokesman reached on the phone would not comment if there was a specific threat. On Thursday, the embassy sent a warden notice to American citizens in Yemen urging them to be vigilant and practice security awareness.

It was unclear from the statement how long the embassy would be closed.

There have been a spate of assaults on the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden and the site of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. The embassy has closed several times over past threats.

The most deadly in recent history happened in September 2008, when gunmen and two vehicles packed with explosives attacked the U.S. Embassy in San’a, killing 19 people, including an 18-year-old American woman and six militants. None of those killed or wounded were U.S. diplomats or embassy employees.

Al-Qaida later claimed responsibility. In March 2003, two people were shot dead and dozens more are wounded as police clash with demonstrators trying to storm the embassy. In March 2008, three mortars missed the U.S. Embassy and crashed into a high school for girls nearby, killing a security guard

Last January, gunmen in a car exchanged fire with police at a checkpoint near the embassy, hours after the embassy received threats of a possible attack by al-Qaida. Nobody was injured.

As recently as July, security was upgraded in San’a after intelligence reports warned of attacks planned against the U.S. Embassy.

The embassy’s closure follows an announcement of U.S. plans to more than double its counterterrorism aid to the impoverished, fragmented Arab nation in 2010 to boost the fight.

Gen. David Petraeus, the U.S. general who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and who announced the increased aid, visited Yemen on Saturday and met with President Ali Abdullah Saleh, a Yemeni government official said. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk to the press.

Yemen has also deployed several hundred extra troops to two mountainous eastern provinces that are al-Qaida’s main strongholds in the country and where the suspected would-be Christmas airplane bomber may have visited, security officials said.

U.S. and Yemeni investigators have been trying to track Abdulmutallab’s steps in Yemen, which he visited from August until Dec. 7. He was there ostensibly to study Arabic in San’a, but he disappeared for much of that time.

Al-Qaida has also killed a number of top security officials in the provinces in recent months, underscoring Yemeni government’s lack of control of the country. Tribes hold sway in the region, and many of them are discontented with the central government and have given refuge to al-Qaida fighters, both Yemenis and other Arabs coming from Saudi Arabia or war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yemen has carried out a series of airstrikes and raids against al-Qaida hide-outs in nearby provinces last month. The strikes, Yemen’s heaviest in years, targeted what officials said were top leaders in the terror network’s branch there. But the intensified campaign has not yet reached into the strongholds of Marib and Jouf.

Britain has joined the U.S. fight against the Yemeni al-Qaida branch, with the government confirming Sunday that Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown agreed to back a counterterrorism police unit in Yemen to tackle the rising terrorist threat from the country in the wake of the failed Detroit-bound plane bombing.

“Amongst the initiatives the PM has agreed with President Obama is US-UK funding for a special counterterrorism police unit in Yemen,” an emailed statement, from Brown’s Downing Street Office said. Britain is also to host a high-level international conference Jan. 28 to hammer out an international strategy to counter radicalization in Yemen, the poorest in the Arab world.

Click here for the full report.

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