Yemen Bombers May Have Aimed to Take Embassy Hostages, Impact U.S. Elections

CQ Politics Blog
Jeff Stein, September 17, 2008

The attack on the American Embassy in Yemen serves notice that the recent claims of al Qaeda's demise were premature.

Only two days ago, the State Department's top counter-terrorism official claimed that al Qaeda was "imploding" and had "no popular appeal".

"Absolutely it's imploding. It's imploding because it's not a message that resonates with a lot of Muslims," Dell Dailey, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism, told the Associated Press.

And four months ago, CIA Director Michael Hayden said that, while al Qaeda had plenty of punch left, it was "essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border."

But the attack early Wednesday on the U.S. embassy in Sa'ana, carried out by a large team of operatives in military fatigues, leaves no doubt that the terrorist movement still has a capability to shock.

A group that calls itself Islamic Jihad of Yemen claimed responsibility for the attack, which left 16 dead, none of them Americans.

U.S. officials could not verify the claims of responsibility, but a State Department official told Reuters the attack "bears all the hallmarks" of al-Qaeda

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters the attackers apparently sought to breach the embassy's walls.

Their aim might have been to overpower the embassy guards, take hostages and influence the American presidential elections, as Iranian militants did in Tehran in 1979, said a retired spy familiar with the area. He asked that his name not be used because all the details of the attack were not yet known.

It seems like the team was large enough to do more than just blow something up.

Tactically it would have been interesting: Think Tehran-like embassy takeover, in the middle of a presidential election, hostages being executed on live TV. It would have to be a resolved by an assault, which the Yemenis are not trained to do.

Journalist Peter Bergen, an authority on al Qaeda, said Yemen remains an ideal place for terrorists to operate.

"The Yemeni central government is very weak, it doesn't control its own territory," said Bergen, author of The Bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader, among other works.

Its population is, per capita, one of the most well-armed in the world. It's mountainous territory, in the Arabian peninsula, a perfect place for AQ to thrive, as we have seen with a string of terror attacks that goes back to 1992.

The USS Cole was bombed there on Oct. 17, 2008, exactly eight years ago next month.

(continued)

http://blogs.cqpolitics.com/spytalk/2008/09/yemen-bombers-may-aimed-to-tak.html

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Well... if it's true that Al Quaeda is trying to take hostages to influence our election (again) as the writer suggests (and I'm sure he's very knowledgeable about this, or his sources are), then the logical conclusion is that AQ wants the Repubs to win, since McC is the one a terrorist incident would help.

Hmmm. So either that means 1) AQ is actually subcontracting for the Repubs; or 2) if AQ is not being paid by them and is really doing this as its own idea, then it means that AQ is less afraid of the Repubs than of the Dems. Neither possibility is very positive for McC, is it?

So that means this incident should be a HUGE talking point for Obama. After all of this huff-n-puff about National Security creds, it turns out this proves that Obama is better at it after all! AQ is dead-scared of him, to take this action. B/c if McC wants to argue that isn't true, he can only do it by admitting that the U.S. bankrolls AQ. (I doubt that he'd be willing to admit that.)

Interesting... If I were Obama, I'd be sure to make that point, and make sure it's out there on the record, before a second attempt at hostage-taking or something similar is tried. It might cause whoever is the "brains" behind it to reconsider whether that's a very good idea.

destroying the US. Well, not really, they just want to be in charge of something, even if it is a garbage dump. If the country must suffer for them to be in charge, so be it.

But yes, they have a friend in Al-Qaeda as the end result of both their desires are the same.

If the Bushies would have been on top of their game, they would have done a 9/11 to the sceurity forces at their target and had them stand down or chase red herrings, so tyhe Yemenese Bushies could sneak through and get the Bushie Job done.

Maybe the Bushies were too busy with fixing the McBush Win to be as propagandistically thorough as they usually are.

Maybe, given the massive amounts of suspicion directed at the Bushies by two-thirds of the nation about all things, the Bushies could not find a way to "9/11" the embassy and order a stand-down of embassy security as they did on 9/11 with NORAD and the USAF. Maybe they could not find a way to do it subtly enough, with enough "plausible deniability" in it to make the risk worthwhile.

No matter what actually happened to cause this Bushie Op to fail, it was sloppy work by the Bushies. They are getting sloppy. And people are getting too suspicious.

I did kind of think it might be this way, this Phony Election Year with the Bushies for the first time employing a series of "October Surprises" that act as a series of serial triphammer blows to national rational thought. This may have been the first, though it failed to come off fully (just the very fact it was tried probably shifted 1% to McBush). If that is the case, expect more.

Another thing I have noticed about Bushies and their area of true genius, fraud and propaganda, is that they understand that you "can't go to the well once too often" with the same assassinations (that's why I think the Bushies usually do them in threes, then cut them off for awhile just as people are starting to notice the "coincidence") or October Surprises.

So, whatever the October Surprise is this Phony Election, we can be almost certain that it will be different that the Bush-Bin Laden videos released by the Bushies two days before Phony Election 2004.

It probably won't be videos again, and it may happen a little earlier than the Bush-Bin Laden 2004 effort or it may even be the series of shocking triphammer blows of which this was supposed to be the first.

But it WILL come. 99% certainty or higher. Wait for it...

Even that first one was so obvious. I'm not a military person at all, I'm a woman with zip training about these things. But GEEZ! It's been crystal clear to me that if a terrorist group pulls some "surprise" then the candidate benefited is the one they WANT.

Come on, now. I mean, I know we're stupid in this country and all, but that's, like, OBVIOUS. And what amazes me now is, I've lost track of how many of these things we've had by now, over the years. This is phoney baloney. And yes, even though there was no election to go with it, I count 9/11 in with that too. A kid could see through this. I agree, there's been a few too many of these stunts.

Anyway, point being, to me it says terrorists are afraid of OBAMA!

Since of course, no Repub voters are going to care about obvious logic b/c they haven't in the past, then the next conclusion I'm led to is... this national security "concern" by so many Americans which leads them to support McC, is a load of elephant doo-doo.

But the biggest conclusion to draw from it is that terrorism itself is phoney. We don't even need facts to know that, logic is enough to understand that. If terrorists were "for real" they'd immediately see that terrorism makes no sense to their own objectives. Such utter bullshit, even an old lady civilian can see through it. And for this we create a giant cabinet agency and a never-ending war. What fol-de-rol.

why can't they get any members of that family to rat out Cousin Osama? Could it be that Cousin Osama's presence as a "Snowball" (cf. "Animal Farm") is too useful to them?