"They detained me in a room... They kept beating me hard... After five days, they gave me an injection and I slept... When I woke up my hand was not there."

When Ansar al-Sharia ruled Yemen's Abyan province.

"Turmoil in the Arab world linked to an American-made video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad spread on Thursday to Yemen..."

"... where hundreds of protesters attacked the American Embassy, two days after assailants killed the American ambassador in Libya and crowds tried to overrun the embassy compound in Cairo."

Writes the NYT, where I struggle to figure out how they know the precise motivation of a mob. Who is conveying this information to the NYT? And even if we do know that it is that video that's firing up the mob, I'd like to know the source of the mob-members' knowledge of the video? Surely, they are not individually clicking on YouTube and watching it and deciding on their own how outraged to be. There must be intermediaries inciting the mob, saying things about the video to stir people up and set them off. Who are they? What are they saying?


There's this, down at the end of the article:

Little is known about the origin of the video that provoked the protests, which is called “Innocence of Muslims.” It was made in obscurity somewhere in Southern California and promoted by a network of right-wing Christians with a history of animosity directed toward Muslims. When a 14-minute trailer of it was posted on YouTube in June, it was barely noticed.

But when the amateurish video was translated into Arabic and reposted twice on YouTube in the days before Sept. 11, and promoted by leaders of the Coptic diaspora in the United States, it drew nearly one million views and set off bloody demonstrations.

Where's the proof of causation in that last sentence? Is it just the timing? This happened and then that happened. Correlation/causation. Were the demonstrators people with internet connections, or were the one million views from the Coptics? Who is promoting this theory of causation and why should we trust them? The video was translated.... Save us from the passive voice, New York Times. I remember when journalists asked a set of question the first of which was who?

Meanwhile, we know what our leaders are saying about and to this mob (though I don't see how these statements reach the mob, so maybe they aren't to the mob at all):

“This video is disgusting and reprehensible,” Mrs. Clinton said in remarks at the State Department, broadcast live on CNN. She also said “The U.S. government had absolutely nothing to do with this video.”

Do these mob-members — on the off chance that they're listening — understand that assertion? If they don't care about freedom of speech and want government suppression of blasphemy, then it is the government's responsibility. If there's a spree of robberies in my city, I'm going to get mad at the government, even though the robbers aren't government agents.

Protesters tore down and burned an American flag, replacing it with their own banner proclaiming the Islamic faith, witnesses said.

They want a different system of government, which would prohibit the video Mrs. Clinton denounces as disgusting and reprehensible. And we here in America are having a debate about what our political values are. It is not to censor videos. I trust that's not in question. But there is a question about whether our governmental officials should denounce privately made and distributed movies in an effort to calm down people who hate our political values.

President George Bush said it well: They hate our freedom. Here's his speech from September 20, 2001:

Americans are asking "Why do they hate us?''

They hate what they see right here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East. They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.

These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life. With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends. They stand against us because we stand in their way.

We're not deceived by their pretenses to piety.

We have seen their kind before. They're the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century. By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power, they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies.

11 years later, we are having a debate here in America. We've cast George Bush out into the shadows. We elected a President 4 years ago who made many of us believe he could make them not hate us. We're having a new election now, and we have to talk.

The U.S. kills an al Qaeda leader... after releasing him from Guantanamo.

It's a nice achievement for the Obama administration... except that the man — Ali al-Shihri — could have been in detention all these years, instead of contributing to terrorism. Exactly when was he released? WaPo says:

Shihri was captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and spent nearly six years as a prisoner at Guantanamo. He was released to the custody of the Saudi government as part of a rehabilitation program for militants. In 2008, however, he decamped for Yemen and helped to revive al-Qaeda’s organization there.

The Bush administration released him. There's better detail in the UK Telegraph:

The Saudi was among the last survivors of al-Qaeda's pre-September 11 generation. Shihri trained in a camp in Afghanistan under bin Laden's guidance as early as 2000, before fleeing the US onslaught that followed the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

He was arrested while trying to cross the border into Pakistan in December 2001. After two months in Pakistani custody, Shihri was handed over to the US and consigned to a prison cell in Guantánamo Bay for six years.

When the Bush administration tried to reduce the number of inmates inside this bitterly controversial detention centre, Shihri was released in 2007 and sent back to his home country, Saudi Arabia.

Here, the authorities placed him on a course designed to rehabilitate even the most hardened al-Qaeda operatives. The kingdom has trumpeted the alleged success of this scheme, which often allowed its beneficiaries to walk free if they recanted.

Shihri appears to have been released in 2009, whereupon he immediately crossed into neighbouring Yemen and joined AQAP, rising to occupy its second highest position.

2011 Nobel Peace Prize has "included the Arab Spring... but we have put it in a particular context."

Unless the new governments include women "there will be no democracy."

The Nobel Committee characterizes the prize to Yemeni rights campaigner Tawakkul Karman as a "signal" to the Arab world to deal with "the oppression of women."

Sharing the prize are Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian activist Leymah Gbowee.

***

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf — Africa's first elected female head of state — is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. She received a degree in accounting in 1964.

"The American government secretly backed leading figures behind the Egyptian uprising who have been planning 'regime change' for the past three years."

Reports the UK Telegraph, looking at a WikiLeaked document:

In a secret diplomatic dispatch, sent on December 30 2008, Margaret Scobey, the US Ambassador to Cairo, recorded that opposition groups had allegedly drawn up secret plans for “regime change” to take place before elections, scheduled for September this year...

Ambassador Scobey questioned whether such an “unrealistic” plot could work, or ever even existed. However, the documents showed that the activist had been approached by US diplomats and received extensive support for his pro-democracy campaign from officials in Washington. The embassy helped the campaigner attend a “summit” for youth activists in New York, which was organised by the US State Department.

That's 2008 — pre-Obama. And here's Elliott Abrams in the Washington Post: "Egypt protests show George W. Bush was right about freedom in the Arab world."

[The developments in Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen] seem to come as a surprise to the Obama administration, which dismissed Bush's "freedom agenda" as overly ideological and meant essentially to defend the invasion of Iraq. But as Bush's support for the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon and for a democratic Palestinian state showed, he was defending self-government, not the use of force. Consider what Bush said in that 2003 speech, which marked the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, an institution established by President Ronald Reagan precisely to support the expansion of freedom.

"Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe - because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty," Bush said. "As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."

"While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq."

"Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged. In contrast with the troop buildup in Afghanistan, which came after months of robust debate, for example, the American military campaign in Yemen began without notice in December and has never been officially confirmed."

Is President Obama the victim of "the stubborn complexity of his national security inheritance"?

That's Scott Shane's angle in the NYT:

For much of President Obama’s first year in office, his national security team worked to devise a secure plan to send dozens of Yemeni detainees held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — the largest single group at the prison camp — home to Yemen, perhaps to a rehabilitation program....

Since November, the administration had been preparing to move the highest-profile Guantánamo prisoners — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four accomplices accused of plotting the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — to Manhattan for a federal criminal trial.

It seems to me that the President is the victim of his own ideas about how to do things differently. If he had graciously accepted the inheritance left by George Bush, he wouldn't have had either of these problems. He squandered an inheritance that he failed to value!

Bush — despite his reputation for simplicity — did understand the complexity of the problem, and he had a solution. There was stability. After posturing about "change" in his political campaign, Barack Obama seemed to think that he could apply the immense power he had won to changing things in the real world. And there is no blaming Bush for failing to know the difference between what sounds good and what works well.

George Bush — the extreme contrast to Barack Obama — knew that he was doing a lot of things that didn't sound good and left him open to harsh criticism, but he made a decision early on to accept that and to do what he thought was right. He didn't get enough credit for that. Maybe he will some day. But he also avoided the torrent of justified criticism that would have fallen on him if there had been further terrorist attacks.

Fortunately, there is a limit to how far Obama will go in his dream world of "hope and change." I voted for Obama, but the Obama I voted for was Obama the Pragmatist. I'm glad to see OTP finally emerging, even if part of his pragmatism is blaming Bush. But he will throw that aside if it doesn't work, which it shouldn't. For now, I'm glad he's making some better decisions... even as those freed detainees roam around Yemen.

ADDED: Click and scroll here for all my "Obama the Pragmatist" posts. Like, remember in August 2008 when Joe Biden assured us that Obama "is a clear-eyed pragmatist who will get the job done"? And then there was the time I said:

Forced to choose between Clinton and Obama [in the Wisconsin primary], I voted for Obama — even though he stated positions that were farther from what I want than Clinton's — because I thought he had more mental flexibility and pragmatism, that he was more likely absorb and process evidence and advice and exercise sound judgment.

"I am happy that I am divorced now. I will be able to go back to school."

Says the 8-year-old girl Nojud Mohammed Ali, whose lawyer said "I believe there are thousands of similar cases" in Yemen.

In other news from the Middle East:

A Turkish barber accused of swearing at God is sentenced to death in Saudi Arabia, with his family back in Turkey calling on authorities to intervene....

According to reports, Boğday argued with his neighbor, an Egyptian tailor, and was arrested after the tailor told the police that he had sworn at God....

Muazzez Boğday said her husband knew the laws of Saudi Arabia well and would never swear. “Even if he did, he would never swear at God. He knows what the punishment would be,” she said.