BY ROHAN PEARCE
On November 3, six men in Yemen were murdered in cold blood by a US "hellfire" missile launched from a remote-controlled Predator aircraft. The men were "suspected" of being al Qaeda members.
The explosion, which obliterated the car in which the men were travelling, was initially thought to have been the result of a car bomb or the accidental ignition of a gas cylinder. However, on November 5 US deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz revealed that the attack was a new phase in Washington's "war on terror".
Although the different tentacles of the US state have long been involved in assassinations — directly and by proxy — the Yemen killings were among the most high profile since US President Gerald Ford signed Executive Order 11905 in 1976. The order stated: "No employee of the United States government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination".
While the official ban on assassinations by US government agencies remained in effect after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the US administration claimed that the order did not prevent actions taken in "self-defence".
'Executions'
Many commentators noted that the similarity of the Yemen executions to Israel's euphemistically named "targeted killings" of selected Palestinian leaders — a policy which has drawn only muted criticism from the White House.
Human rights groups were quick to criticise the US atrocity. A November 8 media release by Amnesty International stated: "If this was the deliberate killing of suspects in lieu of arrest, in circumstances in which they did not pose an immediate threat, the killings would be extra-judicial executions in violation of international human rights law.
"The United States should issue a clear and unequivocal statement that it will not sanction extra-judicial executions in any circumstances, and that any US officials found to be involved in such actions will be brought to justice."
Among those thought killed were Qaed Snyan al-Harithi, an alleged member of al Qaeda accused of organising the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, and Kamel Derwish, a US citizen.
A November 9 CNN report quoted an unnamed US official, who stated, "[Derwish's death] doesn't change anything. If you're an American citizen, it doesn't mean you get a free pass to be a terrorist".
On November 5, a journalist asked White House spokesperson Ari Fleischer, "Shouldn't justice involve a judge, a jury, a prosecution, a defence?". Fleischer responded: "Absolutely, when it's a case of American citizens and when it's a case of anything covered under America's laws and our ... constitutional protections for American citizens." Mohammed Al Banna, a member of the American Muslim Council, told the November 18 Newsweek that Derwish "is an American citizen. He hasn't been tried or convicted in a court of law."
Factory bombing
The US terror attack echoes the 1998 cruise missile attack, ordered by the US President Bill Clinton's administration, on the el Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. US officials claimed it housed chemical weapons.
A January ZNet article by David Edwards noted that "half the pharmaceutical production capacity of Sudan was destroyed by those missiles: 'Tens of thousands of people — many of them children — have suffered and died from malaria, tuberculosis and other treatable diseases', Jonathan Belke of the Boston Globe writes. The German Ambassador to Sudan reports: 'It is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African country died as a consequence of the destruction... but several tens of thousands seems a reasonable guess'."
The Yemen "hit" was also strikingly similar to the use of a Predator-launched missile to kill "suspected" al Qaeda leaders in February in Afghanistan. US "suspicions" were aroused by the sight of a "very tall" person in the group, who they thought might be Osama bin Laden. It turned out that the three people murdered that day were local villagers salvaging scrap metal.
The November 11 Yemen Times noted that Yemenis "[seem] to be outraged" by the US attack. A poll conducted by the newspaper found that 93% of respondents objected to the strike and 85% thought "Yemen's national sovereignty has been undermined".
One of the participants in the poll, Abdoh Ibrahim Mahyoob, told the Yemen Times: "[The] US has no right to assassinate any human beings without trial. The Yemeni government cannot bless any act of killing of its own people. This is indeed a violation of our national sovereignty and should terminate our relations with the USA. But if the Yemeni government insists on its stance [of] supporting this act of the US, then the street should protest this action openly."
The "extra-judicial killing" — premeditated murder — of people the US brands "suspected terrorists" provides a graphic example of what the White House and Pentagon's Orwellian "war on terror" really means. That such an open violation of human rights can occur, with barely a whimper of criticism from the mainstream press and politicians, shows that Washington believes it can get away with almost anything in the name of fighting "terrorism".
From Green Left Weekly, November 20, 2002.
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