«The U.S. closed its embassy in Yemen on Sunday, citing ongoing threats by the al Qaeda group linked to the failed Christmas Day bid to bomb a Detroit-bound flight.
"The U.S. Embassy in San'a is closed today, January 3, 2010, in response to ongoing threats by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula ... to attack American interests in Yemen," the embassy said in a brief message on its Web site. The message did not say how long the embassy, which has been assaulted and threatened several times in the past decade, would remain closed.
“There are indications that Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula is targeting our embassy and targeting our personnel. We’re not going to take any chance with the lives of diplomats,” White House Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Adviser John Brennan said on “Fox News Sunday.”
The British government joined the United States in closing its embassy in Yemen on Sunday, AP reports. Shutting an embassy is a rare and dire step, dramatizing the Arab nation's position as one of the world's premier terrorist havens.
The closures came a day after Gen. David Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, made a surprise visit to the country on Saturday, where he reportedly met with President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
“Gen. Petraeus was in Yemen today as part of our ongoing consultations with and efforts in support of Yemen," a senior administration official said Saturday, painting the trip as part of an ongoing collaboration with the government there.
Yemen is where alleged Northwest Airlines flight 253 bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is believed to have travelled to obtain from Al Qaeda the explosives he tried to detonate aboard the Detroit-bound airplane.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the attempted Christmas Day attack, a link President Obama acknowledged for the first time Saturday in his weekly address.
“As President,” Obama said, “I've made it a priority to strengthen our partnership with the Yemeni government—training and equipping their security forces, sharing intelligence and working with them to strike al Qaeda terrorists.”
“We are very concerned about Al Qaeda’s continued growth there,” Brennan said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But they are not just focusing on Yemen… they are increasingly looking to the West.”
“We keep thwarting their attacks, but they keep pressing,” warned Brennan.
On Thursday, the U.S. embassy had sent out a Security Warden Message encouraging U.S. citizens there “to follow good security practices and maintain situational awareness,” mentioning Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s “threats against Westerners working in embassies and elsewhere, characterizing them as ‘unbelievers’ and ‘crusaders.’”
The most recent attack on the U.S. embassy, in September, 2008, killed 19, including an 18-year-old American woman and six of the attackers, though no diplomats or members of the mission were hurt. Al Qaeda in Yemen took credit for that assault.
Petraeus’ visit Saturday came as President Obama and his top national security aides are sifting through the initial findings of reviews of airport security procedures and how the government tracks attempted terrorists.
Obama has called a high-level meeting in the situation room on Tuesday to go over the findings with his senior intelligence and national security officials. In the meantime, the White House dispatched Brennan, who is leading the reviews, to appear on several of the Sunday talk shows.
On CNN, Brennan conceded that “Clearly the system didn’t work. We had a problem in terms of why Abdulmutallab got on the plane.”
But he stressed that “There was no smoking gun out there… we had bits and pieces of information.”
“It was not like 9/11,” Brennan said of the failure of the intelligence process to flag Abdulmutallab before the attack. “There was no indication that any of these agencies were intentionally holding back information. There were lapses and human errors… [but] there wasn’t an effort to try and conceal information.
Former Sept. 11 Commission chairman Thomas Kean said Sunday that Abdulmutallab "probably did us a favor."
"The president now is saying the right things and I believe he'll do the right thing," Kean said on CNN, but added: "No matter what else is going on, this has always got to be number one."
Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said that Brennan, who appeared just before him, was “a bit defensive,” and that the intelligence failing was similar to 9/11.
"A lot of pieces of information, if they'd been put together, then we might have deterred that plot," he said. "This is the same thing."
Republican Sen. Jim DeMint (S.C.) took a similar line Sunday, saying “There’s no question that the president downplayed the risk of terrorism since he took office.”
“It begins with not even being willing to use the word.”
Sen. Clare McCaskill (D-Mo.), appearing with DeMint on CNN on Sunday, shot back, “It is unfair and frankly political to take pot shots as the president as we respond to this failure in our system that we’ve got to get fixed.”
On Saturday, the administration official stressed that "we have made Yemen a priority over the course of this year,” echoing language used by Obama in his weekly address. The official said that “Gen. Petraeus briefed John Brennan on the visit, and during the course of his consultations with the president, Brennan updated the president on Gen. Petraeus’s productive visit.”
Several announcements on Saturday seemed to reinforce that narrative. Yemen reportedly deployed several hundred troops to al Qaeda’s strongholds in the nation’s eastern provinces of Marib and Jouf.
Yemen, just south of Saudi Arabia and separated from Somalia, which has also emerged as a Qaeda outpost, by the narrow Gulf of Aden, is the poorest nation in the Arab world. The location of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, Yemen received $67 million in publicly disclosed training and support funds from the Pentagon in the current fiscal year year, up from just $4.6 million in FY2006 and second only to the $112 million received by Pakistan.
On Friday, Petraeus told reporters in Baghdad that U.S. counterterrorism aid to Yemen ''will more than double this coming year.''
''Al-Qaida are always on the lookout for places where they might be able to put down roots,'' he said.
Yemen, the ancestral home of Osama BIn Laden, is also the native country of nearly half the remaining inmates held at Guantanamo Bay, and the instability of the central government and increased presence and position of Al Qaeda there have emerged as major obstacles Obama’s pledge to close the prison.
While POLITICO, the New York Times and others have reported there was a decision not to release anyone else to Yemen, Brennan said Sunday and claimed that such cases would still be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
“Some of these individuals are going to be transferred back to Yemen at the right time, at the right pace and the right way, he said. “We want to make sure we are able to close Guantanamo. Guantanmo has been used a propaganda tool by AQ and others.”
America has already stepped up its military cooperation with Saleh’s government, whose influence is mostly contained to the capital, including a U.S.-aided air strike on December 24 apparently directed at al Qaeda leadership there. There were numerous reports that that attack employed drones such as those the U.S. has used to target terrorists in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
“We are continuing to press and maintain pressure on Al Qaeda in Yemen,” said Brennan on Sunday. “There a number of Al Qaeda operatives in Yemen who are no longer alive as of last month.”
Also Saturday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for an international conference on Jan. 28 on how best to counter radicalization in Yemen, as well as a commitment to fund, along with the U.S., the Yemeni police and coast guard’s counter-terror efforts. Pirates in the Gulf of Aden have taken four ships in the past week for ransom.»
in POLITICO.COM