Conservative Principles Now

The foiled bomb plot to destroy a Northwest Airlines flight as it descended over Detroit on Christmas day has focused new attention on the al-Qaeda franchise based in Yemen. The radicalized Nigerian Muslim who failed to destroy the airliner, Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, reportedly has told the FBI that he was equipped and trained by al-Qaeda operatives while he lived in Yemen from August to early December. News of this Yemeni connection has spawned a spate of media reports about a “new front” in the war against terrorism. But those who follow terrorism issues know that Yemen long has been a stronghold of al-Qaeda and a staging area for many past terrorist attacks.

In fact, al-Qaeda’s first terrorist attack against Americans came in Yemen, the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden’s father, who had migrated to neighboring Saudi Arabia before the birth of the al-Qaeda leader. In December 1992, bin Laden’s followers bombed a hotel in Yemen that was used by U.S. military personnel involved in supporting the humanitarian food relief flights to Somalia.

In October 2000, seventeen American sailors on board the USS Cole, were killed in an al-Qaeda bombing in the harbor of Aden, Yemen’s main port. An earlier attack on another U.S. naval vessel, The Sullivans, had failed in January of that year when the attackers’ boat sank under the weight of its own bomb. In 2002, al-Qaeda bombed the French oil tanker Limbourg off the coast of Yemen. Later that year, a senior al-Qaeda leader was killed in Yemen in one of the first publicly revealed Predator drone attacks.

Al-Qaeda grew much stronger in Yemen following the February 2006 escape of 23 imprisoned al-Qaeda suspects, including some of the terrorists responsible for the bombing of the Cole, from a Yemeni prison. U.S. intelligence officials told the Washington Post that the well-organized jailbreak was assisted by members of Yemen’s intelligence services sympathetic to al-Qaeda.

The weakness of Yemen’s government and the escape or release of terrorists imprisoned in Yemen has been a factor that has led the United States to drag its feet on releasing more Yemeni prisoners from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, where they form the single largest group of remaining prisoners.

In fact, ABC News reported yesterday that two of the planners of the Northwest Airlines bombing were al-Qaeda members who were released from Guantanamo in 2007. The two Saudi nationals had been sent home to Saudi Arabia, where they were enrolled in an “art therapy rehabilitation program” that had little known effect on their murderous ideology.

The two later found sanctuary in Yemen, where the Saudi and Yemeni branches of al-Qaeda announced last January that they had merged to form “Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.” Yemen has become increasingly important as a base of operations for al-Qaeda as the global terrorist network has sustained losses in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia in recent years. Yemen, one of the poorest Arab countries, has been torn by a civil war in the northern part of the country and chronic secessionist activity in the south. The government’s control over Yemeni territory also has been undermined by fractious tribes that have fiercely guarded their independence in Yemen’s mountains.

The United States has prodded the Yemeni government to take stronger action against al-Qaeda, which it previously perceived to be less of a threat than Shia rebels in the north or secessionists in the south. The launching of two missile strikes against terrorist targets this month suggests that the Yemeni government has stepped up cooperation against al-Qaeda. But the transnational terrorist organization is likely to remain a force in that troubled country for many years to come.

Hopes for a quick diplomatic breakthrough in the long-running stalemate over Iran’s nuclear weapons program have been dimmed by Iranian backtracking on a tentative agreement reached on October 1 in Geneva and Iran’s foot-dragging on future negotiations. Reuters today quoted an anonymous senior Iranian official as saying “Time is on our side” and declaring that Iran plans to slow-walk the diplomatic negotiations that will resume on October 19 by sending junior officials who do not have the authority to make firm commitments.

This confirms previous suspicions that Tehran will exploit the P5+1 talks to engage in a diplomatic filibuster that will defuse momentum for further international sanctions while Iran continues to move forward on its nuclear program.

The value of the “agreement in principle” reached in Geneva on October 1 also has been substantially downgraded by a blockbuster revelation publicized today in a Washington Post column by David Ignatius. Ignatius cited an article in Nucleonics Week that reported that Iran’s supplies of low-enriched uranium appear to be contaminated by impurities that could wreck centrifuges if Tehran tries to boost it to weapons grade fissile material. Ignatius wrote:

You’ve got to hand it to the Iranians, though, for making the best of what might be a bad situation: In the proposal embraced in Geneva, they have gotten the West to agree to decontaminate fuel that would otherwise be useful only for the low-enriched civilian nuclear power they have always claimed is their only goal.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal today reported that U.S. intelligence officials are considering whether to rewrite the controversial 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran’s nuclear activities. The findings of that NIE, which concluded that Iran had suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003, have been disputed by intelligence agencies from Britain, France, Germany and Israel. Even IAEA officials, who have long treated Iran with kid gloves and accorded it the benefit of the doubt, have been critical of the NIE’s findings. The recent revelation of Iran’s secret uranium enrichment facility hidden inside a mountain near Qom also has cast further doubt on the NIE.

Congressional pressure is building to review the flawed 2007 NIE. Last week Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, urged Congress to establish an independent “red team” of outside experts to review the 2007 NIE in light of disturbing recent revelations about the Iranian nuclear program. Rep. Hoekstra is right: a re-evaluation of the NIE is long overdue.

For more on the 2007 NIE, see: The Iran National Intelligence Estimate: A Comprehensive Guide to What Is Wrong with the NIE

For more information on the Iran nuclear program see: Iran Briefing Room