Brennan defends U.S. drone attacks despite risks to civilians

WASHINGTON -- White House counterterrorism advisor John Brennan on Sunday defended the administration's campaign of drone missile attacks against militants while acknowledging that the air strikes have sometimes killed noncombatants.

"Unfortunately, in war, there are casualties, including among the civilian population," Brennan said on ABC News "This Week," answering a question about the covert drone program. U.S. missile attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere are not officially acknowledged by the administration but are frequently discussed indirectly.

"We've done everything possible in Afghanistan and other areas to reduce any risk to that civilian population," he continued. "Unfortunately, Al Qaeda burrows within these areas, you know, safe havens as well as areas where there are civilians, but we've been very, very judicious in working with our partners to try to be surgical in terms of addressing those terrorist threats."

"Sometimes you have to take life to save lives," Brennan added, "and that's what we've been able to do to prevent these individual terrorists from carrying out their murderous attacks."

Al Qaeda diminished since Bin Laden's death, U.S. officials say

WASHINGTON -- One year after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the core of Al Qaeda is greatly diminished and the main terrorist threat has shifted to affiliates in Yemen and elsewhere, senior U.S. intelligence officials said Friday.

“Some could argue that the organization that brought us 9/11 is essentially gone,” said a counter-terrorism official who briefed reporters on Al Qaeda under rules that did not allow him to be identified. “But the movement certainly survives … in a variety of places outside of Pakistan.”

The assessment is backed up by U.S. operations data. The number of reported CIA drone missile strikes against militants and Al Qaeda figures in Pakistan has dropped sharply in recent months, but the pace of drone attacks and other U.S. airstrikes has picked up in Yemen.

“This isn’t a science, where we have a yardstick that says we are halfway toward strategic defeat,” the official said. It’s difficult, he said,  “to announce that we’ve achieved strategic defeat when you still have active affiliates, you still have propaganda coming out of Pakistan.”

Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian doctor who leads Al Qaeda, is not the unifying figure than Bin Laden was, said Robert Cardillo, deputy director for intelligence integration of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which overseas America’s 16 intelligence agencies.

As a result, Cardillo said, the network’s center of gravity has shifted. Some of the affiliates are more concerned with fighting their own governments than with attacking the West, as Bin Laden had urged. A key challenge, Cardillo said, is balancing effective anti-terrorism operations with the risk of exacerbating local grievances and producing new converts to the Al Qaeda cause.

The political upheaval in the Arab world has been a setback for Al Qaeda’s propagandists, Cardillo said.

“We judge that core Al Qaeda and the global jihadist movement will experience a strategic setback, in that the Arab Spring strikes at the very core of their jihadist narrative,” he said. Elections and other political reforms in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen “threaten the fundamental Al Qaeda view,” he said.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, as the Yemen affiliate is known, remains the greatest threat to the United States. Ibrahim Hassan Asiri, who is believed to have built the underwear bomb used in the failed attempt to destroy an airliner over Detroit in December 2009, remains active in the group, the officials said, and AQAP continues to plot attacks on U.S. targets.

Cardillo said an attack on the United States involving nuclear, chemical or biological weapons is “unlikely” in the next year.

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Photo: Picture provided by the IntelCenter monitoring group shows Al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri speaking in a video released  March 16, 2012. Credit:  IntelCenter 

Yemen forces recapture key town from Al Qaeda, kill militants

Yemeni government forces have recaptured a strategic southern town from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, killed more than 50 militant fighters in the last few days and forced the resignation of an air force commander who had resisted the political and security aims of the Arab country's new leadership, diplomatic sources and news agencies reported Tuesday.

Reports of the government's retaking of key government buildings and large swaths of Zinjibar, capital of the Abyan region, coincided with the visit of FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to Sana, the capital, for talks on ways to shore up the joint fight against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. U.S. intelligence officials have said they consider the Yemen-based group the greatest security threat bequeathed by the late Osama bin Laden.

One of the group's most wanted figures, Mohammed Saeed Umda, was killed in an airstrike Sunday in Marib province, the Yemeni government said Tuesday in a statement from its Washington embassy. It did not make clear who staged the air assault, but U.S. drone activity has increased in recent weeks and Mueller was reportedly seeking broader backing for air targeting of militants during his meetings with President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi.

Umda, who had been convicted of orchestrating the 2002 suicide bombing of the French oil tanker Limburg in the Gulf of Aden, escaped from prison in 2006 along with about two dozen other militants, and was suspected in a rash of more recent terrorist activity in southern Yemen. The jailbreak made international headlines and provided propaganda for Al Qaeda.

U.S. officials confirmed the airstrike, but said they have not confirmed that Umda was killed.

Yemeni troops killed 52 militants in operations over the weekend, the Defense Ministry reported Tuesday, according to the Reuters news agency. YemenOnline reported over the weekend that the Al Qaeda-allied group Ansar al Sharia had acknowledged that fighters "encountered a massive offensive by Sana regime forces." Ansar al Sharia contended then that the militants still held Zinjibar, which they captured 11 months ago amid widespread political turmoil aimed at ousting longtime President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Saleh left office under a negotiated leadership change in February, but many of his relatives and loyalists have remained in their offices and put up resistance to Hadi's efforts and collaboration with U.S. authorities to drive Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula out of its Yemeni strongholds. The militants had made significant inroads into the oil-producing areas and strategic coastal territory from which it was feared they were planning attacks on oil shipments.

Hadi's government announced Tuesday that Saleh's half brother, Mohammed Saleh Ahmar, had resigned as air force commander, a major symbolic victory for Hadi in removing one of the former president's most powerful vestiges from the new hierarchy.

"The hand-over has taken place as stated in the decree issued by the president," U.N. envoy Jamal Benomar told reporters in Sana, describing the transition as smooth and unconditional, Reuters reported.

Mueller was in Sana "to reinforce Washington's strong commitment to President Hadi's new administration and Yemen's ongoing political transition," said Yemeni Embassy spokesman Mohammed Albasha. During their talks, Albasha said, "President Hadi emphasized that he is strongly committed to combating extremism and working with the U.S. to counter the mutual threat of terrorism."

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is also suspected of instigating other attacks on Western targets, including the thwarted attempt by a Yemeni militant to bomb a Detroit-bound jetliner on Christmas Day 2009. Al Qaeda extremists from Yemen were also behind the 2000 suicide bombing of the U.S. destroyer Cole, in which 17 U.S. sailors died. 

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Photo: FBI Director Robert Mueller, left, meets with Yemeni President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, right, in Sana to discuss the growing threat from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen's embattled south. Credit: Yemeni presidential office

European court OKs extradition to U.S. of five terrorism suspects

This story has been updated. See the notes below.

REPORTING FROM LONDON -- A fiery Muslim cleric who celebrated the Sept. 11 attacks in sermons and allegedly tried to set up a terrorist training camp in Oregon can be extradited to the United States from Britain, the European Court of Human Rights ruled Tuesday.

The court said Abu Hamza Masri and four other terrorism suspects could be sent to face trial in the U.S. without fear that they would face “inhuman and degrading” conditions in a maximum-security prison if convicted. The men had argued that they could be subject to solitary confinement for the rest of their lives in a so-called “supermax” prison in Colorado where many terrorism convicts are serving time.

The case is considered an important one for U.S.-Europe relations, because a ruling against extradition would have been tantamount to a denunciation of the American judicial and corrections system and could have dealt a blow to anti-terrorism cooperation across the Atlantic.

The five men will not be immediately deported, however, despite the British government’s pledge to “ensure that the suspects are handed over to the U.S. authorities as quickly as possible.” The suspects have three months to appeal the decision to the European court’s Grand Chamber, but such appeals are rarely taken up.

A girl in Yemen waits to go home -- others are not so lucky

Every day on World Now, we choose a striking photo from around the world. Today we were arrested by this shot of a little girl waiting to be evacuated from Yemen and taken back to her home country, Ethiopia.

Others may not get that chance. The International Organization for Migration says it is short on funding to help stranded Ethiopian migrants return home, forcing it to stop unless new money is found.

Ethiopians and other East African migrants pass through the town of Haradh, where this girl was photographed Wednesday, as a stepping stone to Saudi Arabia, the group said. Many end up being stranded in Yemen or deported back there from Saudi Arabia or other Arab destination countries.

The Times reported on the flight of Somali and Ethiopian refugees to Yemen two years ago:

The roughly 200-mile passage to Yemen from port cities and fishing villages in Somalia and the shorter voyage from Djibouti are treacherous. For two days, refugees are crammed shoulder to shoulder in creaking boats -- nothing more than 30-foot wooden dinghies.

Along the way, they face high winds, deadly storms, pirates and possible detention by the Yemeni coast guard or international anti-piracy patrols. Many are women and children. Some are raped, beaten or thrown overboard by smugglers wary of being caught if they deliver their human cargo too close to shore. Untold numbers disappear at sea.

Some African migrants have been kidnapped and tortured in Yemen until their families send money, the humanitarian news network IRIN recently reported. A local Yemeni news website published some photographs of the victims earlier this month. (Warning: These images are graphic.)

The migration group says that more than 400 people are now packed into a transit center for migrants who want to go home. The shelter was built for 150. It estimates that 12,000 stranded migrants, mostly from the Horn of Africa, remain in Yemen, suffering diseases and wounds inflicted by smugglers.

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Photo: An Ethiopian girl waits Wednesday with her family to be evacuated at a departure center in the western Yemeni town of Haradh, on the border with Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Credit: Hani Mohammed / Associated Press

 

Suspected Al Qaeda attack welcomes Yemen's new president

REPORTING FROM CAIRO AND SANA, YEMEN -- The inauguration of Yemen’s president was barely over Saturday when a car bomb exploded at a presidential palace, killing at least 25 people and highlighting the dangers the new leader faces in trying to bring stability to the long-troubled Arabian Peninsula.

The brazen attack was a taunting welcome to President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, who was sworn in to end the 33-year despotic rule of Ali Abdullah Saleh.

The country’s spiraling chaos took another twist when Saleh, who had been undergoing medical treatment in the U.S., returned home before Hadi addressed the nation. Saleh’s reappearance and the palace bloodshed indicated that the tribal and political unrest that has gripped Yemen for more than a year will not likely be calmed by the election of a new president.

Shortly after Hadi vowed in his televised speech to parliament to defeat an emboldened Al Qaeda network, a suicide bomber raced toward a palace in the southern town of Mukalla, more than 300 miles west of the capital, Sana, where Hadi was inaugurated. No one claimed immediate responsibility for the blast, but a security official said it bore the imprints of Al Qaeda.

Witnesses said a car bomb exploded outside the palace gates as troops in the Republican Guards were gathering for lunch. Most of the dead and the 45 wounded were soldiers. The strike, reportedly carried out by a militant who had escaped prison last year, was believed to be the latest in a string of assaults by Al Qaeda, which has exploited the country’s instability by seizing territory and towns in the south.

Egyptians' sense of safety has plummeted, poll finds

Egyptians feel much less safe than they did before the "Arab Spring" uprising, a new Gallup poll has found. Pollsters found the percentage of Egyptians who said they feel safe walking alone at night in their neighborhood dropped to 47% from 82% since the revolution.

The numbers echo what Jeffrey Fleishman and Amro Hassan wrote in a recent article for The Times:

Soldiers guard streets but few people feel safe. Police have largely returned to duty after months of work slowdowns, but their presence is sporadic; they appear and disappear at whim. Many Egyptians wonder whether security forces are complacent about or complicit in the mayhem around them, a sense of unease felt by fruit vendors and bankers alike.

"This is an Egypt I do not know," said Tarek Fouad, a sales manager at an international corporation. He said he saw this bewilderment in the faces at the funeral for a relative, who was shot in a January carjacking on the affluent outskirts of Cairo.

Gallup cautioned that the uneasiness doesn't necessarily mean there is more crime. An earlier poll found that Egyptians' sense of safety differed depending on what television stations they watched. The Times reported there are few reliable statistics on how much crime has actually risen in Egypt.

Tunisians and Bahrainis also felt less safe, Gallup found. Like Egyptians, Tunisians pushed out a president. Bahrain has been roiled by protests against its monarch, but he remains in power. Gallup interviewed at least 1,000 people in each country before and after the uprisings:

"Regardless of whether residents' perceptions of safety are accurate or based on real-life experiences, there are serious potential ramifications for each of these countries," Gallup Center for Muslim Studies senior analyst H.A. Hellyer wrote. Tourism could be pinched by concern about safety, Hellyer said. People may be less supportive of reforms if they believe their safety is at risk. And international trade and investment may drop off.

Yemen, unlike Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain, saw only a small drop in perceived safety. Hellyer speculated that feelings about safety didn't change much because people in Yemen felt less safe to begin with.

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Photo: An Egyptian woman and her child pose in Cairo for a photo by a combo mural depicting military ruler Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi on the left half and ousted President Mubarak on the right. Credit: Nasser Nasser / Associated Press

Somali militants reportedly join forces with Al Qaeda [Video]

A militant Islamic group linked to suicide attacks and bombings in Somalia officially has joined Al Qaeda, according to a monitoring service translation of a video message from its leader.

U.S. officials have long thought that the group, Shabab, was strengthening its ties with Al Qaeda. In July, U.S. intelligence said that Al Qaeda forces in Yemen had provided weapons, fighters and explosives training to Shabab, which they cited as signs of a widening alliance of terrorist groups.

Shabab has tried to ensure that Somalia remains chaotic because that helps secure its role as a base for its global struggle against the West, The Times reported in October. It has wreaked havoc in Somalia by barring aid to famine-stricken people and stopping them from fleeing, human rights groups say.

The Times' Robyn Dixon shared a vivid account of Shabab recruitment from a boy named Abdi. His story could not be independently verified, but was consistent with other accounts of Shabab training:

They were taught how to blow things up, make explosive devices and lay booby traps on roads. The training terrified him.

Spies in the camp listened for the whispers of defection. There was a fence, and guards. The commanders were harsh ...

"If they caught you talking about running away, they would kill you," Abdi said. "They said: 'You have to die. You have to sacrifice your life because these guys killed your father and mother. They will kill your people, so before that happens you have to sacrifice yourself and kill them.' "

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Video: A Shabab leader reportedly gives “glad tidings” that the group had joined Al Qaeda. Credit: Aaron Y. Zelin

Think kidnapping is bad in Somalia? It's worse in Mexico

Somalia is a hot spot for kidnapping, as the rescue Wednesday of two hostages by U.S. Navy SEALs has spotlighted. But Mexico, Afghanistan and Venezuela are even worse, according to a company that tracks threats across the world.

Somalia and Kenya together ranked ninth in the world for kidnapping foreigners from October to December of last year, with two kidnappings a month, the Britain-based company AKE found. (Somali waters, where piracy has been a persistent problem, ranked fifth, with 13 crew members taken a month.)

It may seem surprising that a private company is gathering these statistics. Taryn Evans, an analyst at AKE, said that governments do release data on kidnapping, but they are often skewed for political reasons. Even if governments don’t fudge the numbers, many kidnappings are never reported.

The results from official sources aren't so believable: Canada had the highest kidnapping rate in the world as of 2009, according to the most recent United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime data. So to get better information, the British company uses on-the-ground experts to track kidnappings.

Here are its most recent rankings for the worst kidnapping spots in the world:

1. Mexico 
2. Venezuela
3. Afghanistan/Pakistan
4. Colombia
5. Somali waters
6. Gulf of Guinea waters
7. Philippines
8. Sahel region
9. Somalia/Kenya
10. Iraq
11. Democratic Republic of the Congo
12. Nigeria
13. Sudan/South Sudan
14. Yemen

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Photo: A woman hides her face behind a screen door where she lives in secret far from her ancestral home. She and her family fled their remote ranch near the U.S.-Mexico border after members of the  Beltran-Leyva drug cartel kidnapped her brother and took over her house. Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times

Yemen's president traveling to U.S. for medical treatment

REPORTING FROM CAIRO, WASHINGTON AND SANA, YEMEN -- Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh left his battered nation Sunday and headed to the U.S. for medical treatment. The mercurial leader asked his countrymen to forgive him for years of turmoil and vowed to return to the Arabian Peninsula state he has ruled for decades.

It was not immediately evident what effect Saleh’s absence from Sana would have on a government weakened by protests, resurgent Al Qaeda militants, secessionist rumblings in the south and a rebellion in the north. The president’s departure was characteristic of his seemingly impulsive actions that have long kept his friends and enemies off balance.

“I will leave for treatment in the United States and I will return to Sana as head of the General People's Congress party,” Saleh was quoted by the state news agency as telling party officials in the capital. “I ask for pardon from all Yemeni men and women for any shortcoming that occurred during my 33-year rule and I ask forgiveness and offer my apologies.”

The State Department said Sunday that Saleh's request to travel to the United States for medical treatment had been approved.

"The sole purpose of this travel is for medical treatment and we expect that he will stay for a limited time that corresponds to the duration of this treatment," a State Department spokesman said.

Saleh, who was severely wounded in a bomb attack on his compound in June, flew to Oman on his way to the U.S. The trip came one day after parliament granted him immunity from prosecution. The president left behind a family he has kept at the center of power, including his son, Ahmed, and nephews and a brother who oversee military and intelligence agencies.

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Photo: Protesters in Sana react to the departure from Yemen Sunday of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is en route to the United States for medical treatment. Credit: Hani Mohammed / Associated Press