Secret US military action Widens on Two Continents

[Jeffersons Ghost]

Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents
By SCOTT SHANE, MARK MAZZETTI and ROBERT F. WORTH

WASHINGTON — At first, the news from Yemen on May 25 sounded like a modest victory in the campaign against terrorists: an airstrike had hit a group suspected of being operatives for Al Qaeda in the remote desert of Marib Province, birthplace of the legendary queen of Sheba.

But the strike, it turned out, had also killed the province’s deputy governor, a respected local leader who Yemeni officials said had been trying to talk Qaeda members into giving up their fight. Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, accepted responsibility for the death and paid blood money to the offended tribes. The strike, though, was not the work of Mr. Saleh’s decrepit Soviet-era air force. It was a secret mission by the United States military, according to American officials, at least the fourth such assault on Al Qaeda in the arid mountains and deserts of Yemen since December.

The attack offered a glimpse of the Obama administration’s shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/15/world/15shadowwar.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

[ixion]

1. Can you imagine the outcry if a Yemeni drone on a 'terrorist hunt' killed a US

Lt. Gov?

Seriously. It would be all out war, and those of us who asked for restraint would be told to STFU, just as we were for Afghanistan and Iraq and on and on.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. You are such a hopeless radical!

What is it that you fail to understand about American exceptionalism?

[izquierdista]

5. And it WILL happen

Technology, like unmanned drones, only gives a fleeting time edge to the party using it. In the 1940s, technology gave the atomic edge to the Americans, yet today, one of the world's poorest countries, North Korea, has that edge. I will predict right here today, that the next 9/11-type attack on the US will be by unmanned drone, done by people the Secretary of State will testify "couldn't have expected to happen".

[burnsei sensei]

3. More over-reaching stupidity

in the name of the War on Terror.

[mike r]

4. We have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here

cuz them bad people are gonna invade us