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Contrasting views of Yemen, North Korea, and Iraq. In today's New York Times, we see that a Stalinist state with a nuclear weapons program has apparently shipped Scud missiles to Yemen:

North Korea recently disclosed that it has a program to make nuclear weapons from highly enriched uranium, in violation of its international agreements, but the United States has taken pains to defuse any sense that it is planning an immediate confrontation over the issue. That policy is in contrast to the administration's approach with Iraq, where the Bush administration has threatened military action to disarm President Saddam Hussein if he does not voluntarily dispose of any weapons of mass destruction.

To qualify the distinction between its posture on Iraq and North Korea, it stands to reason that either (1) the administration has specific material evidence against Iraq that it refuses to share with UN weapons inspectors, leading them and the rest of the world as well as the American people on a wild goose chase, or (2) the administration is pursuing a secret agenda of its own, probably related to the needs of the energy industry and the legacy of Bush presidencies.

In another article, we learn that Yemen is our "friend and partner":

Asked if Yemen was a state that sponsors terrorism, [White House spokesman Scott] McClellan said: "No ... We now know that in fact Yemen has been a friend and partner in the global war on terrorism.''

And yet Richard Clarke, NSC Coordinator for Counterterrorism, 1992-2001, feels otherwise, in a report from Frontline:

I think there were two things going on in Yemen [in the FBI investigation following the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole]. The first thing was the government of Yemen didn't want us to know all the details; in part, because that would reveal that some low-level people in the Yemeni government may have been part of the conspiracy; in part, because it would have shown that the Yemeni government didn't really have control over a large section of Yemen; in part because it would have shown that Yemen was filled with terrorists from a whole variety of different organizations. So Yemen didn't want to cooperate fully, didn't want us to see everything that was there.

The other thing that was going on was that you had an U.S. ambassador [Barbara K. Bodine] who wanted to be fully in control of everything that every American official did in the country, and resented the fact that suddenly there were hundreds of FBI personnel in the country and only a handful of State Department personnel. She wanted good relations with Yemen as the number one priority.

[FBI counterterrorism expert] John O'Neill wanted to stop terrorism as the number one priority, and the two conflicted. Almost all of us who were following the details in Washington, whether we were in the Justice Department, the FBI, the White House, State Department, the Defense Department -- almost all of us thought that John O'Neill was doing the right thing.

From the same set of interviews, we hear the following from Clint Guenther, Former FBI Agent NYC – Counterterrorism:

Q: Now we know the connections. There were connections between some of the individuals there in Yemen and the Malaysian meetings and some of the [9/11] hijackers. There were dots to be connected. What did we lose by, months before 9/11, having to pull out the best people [O'Neill's team] to investigate the case, having to pull them out of Yemen?

A: That's hard to say, what we lost. We could've lost a lot. We could've lost the intelligence that could've connected that dot to the World Trade Center. I don't know that to be a fact, but a lot of the Al Qaeda people are coming out of Yemen. A lot of the Yemenis are involved. I think if we could have had better investigative effort over there, had been able to build the confidence of the local law enforcement, we may have been able to find people, interrogate them, and get a lot more intelligence that would have shown us something going on.

In its so-called war on "terror," the administration protects Yemen and Saudi Arabia, ignores North Korea, and mobilizes all of its resources against Iraq.

Could this make any less sense? There is no doubt that there are real threats facing this country, and that the administration has yet to demonstrate it is remotely capable of addressing them.

{ 12:37 PM }

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