Wall Street Protests

U.S. troubled by Israeli release of some Palestinians

Reuters By Arshad Mohammed | Reuters – 10/18/2011

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has concerns about some of the 477 Palestinians Israel freed on Tuesday in exchange for an abducted Israeli soldier because they killed or injured U.S. citizens, a U.S. official said.

The U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration had conveyed its concerns to the Israeli government, suggesting it did so at the 11th hour as Israel engineered the swap to free Sergeant Gilad Shalit.

In one of the biggest such exchanges between Israel and the Palestinians, Shalit was freed after being held incommunicado for five years by Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian faction that rules the Gaza Strip and that vies for primacy with Fatah, which exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank.

In the deal with Hamas, which the United States regards as a foreign terrorist organization, Israel plans to free more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, the first 477 of whom left Israeli jails on Tuesday for Gaza, the West Bank and abroad.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters that the United States had concerns about some of the Palestinians whose release was envisaged in the deal but he would not specify whether any of these were among the 477 already freed.

"As a matter of principle, the United States opposes the release of individuals who have been convicted of crimes against Americans," he said in an email.

"We communicated our position to the government of Israel after we became aware of specific individuals who were identified as part of this release," he added.

The White House said President Barack Obama is pleased that Shalit has been freed and he wants Israelis and Palestinians to take steps toward resuming peace negotiations.

White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters during the president's bus tour in North Carolina that it was not yet clear how Shalit's release would impact the Middle East peace process but said Obama was "personally pleased" by the development.

"Each side needs to take steps that make it easier to return to negotiations rather than harder," Carney said.

While leaders of Islamist Hamas and their secular rivals in President Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah movement made conciliatory comments about each other's role in achieving the deal, it appeared likely to accentuate the divide between the factions.

Abbas is shunned by Hamas as a pawn of Israel and its Western allies but has angered Israel and the United States by refusing to revive long-stalled peace talks with the Israelis and by seeking full Palestinian membership in the United Nations.

Family condemns death of Awlaki’s son

Grandfather says teen, killed in U.S. airstrike, wasn’t in al-Qaeda
By Peter Finn , Tuesday, October 18, 2011
WP

In the days before a CIA drone strike killed al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki last month, his 16-year-old son ran away from the family home in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa to try to find him, relatives say. When he, too, was killed in a U.S. airstrike Friday, the Awlaki family decided to speak out for the first time since the attacks.

“To kill a teenager is just unbelievable, really, and they claim that he is an al-Qaeda militant. It’s nonsense,” said Nasser al-Awlaki, a former Yemeni agriculture minister who was Anwar al-Awlaki’s father and the boy’s grandfather, speaking in a phone interview from Sanaa on Monday. “They want to justify his killing, that’s all.”

The teenager, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who was born in Denver in 1995, and his 17-year-old Yemeni cousin were killed in a U.S. military strike that left nine people dead in southeastern Yemen.

The young Awlaki was the third American killed in Yemen in as many weeks. Samir Khan, an al-Qaeda propagandist from North Carolina, died alongside Anwar al-Awlaki.

Yemeni officials said the dead from the strike included Ibrahim al-Banna, the Egyptian media chief for al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, and also a brother of Fahd al-Quso, a senior al-Qaeda operative who was indicted in New York in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden.

The strike occurred near the town of Azzan, an Islamist stronghold. The Defense Ministry in Yemen described Banna as one of the “most dangerous operatives” in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, often referred to by the acronym AQAP.

U.S. assessment

U.S. officials said they were still assessing the results of the strike Monday evening to determine who was killed. The officials would not discuss the attack in any detail, including who the target was, but typically the CIA and the Pentagon focus on senior figures in al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen.

“We have seen press reports that AQAP senior official Ibrahim al-Banna was killed last Friday in Yemen and that several others, including the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, were with al-Banna at the time,” said Thomas F. Vietor, a spokesman for the National Security Council. “For over the past year, the Department of State has publicly urged U.S. citizens not to travel to Yemen and has encouraged those already in Yemen to leave because of the continuing threat of violence and the presence of terrorist organizations, including AQAP, throughout the country.”

A senior congressional official who is familiar with U.S. operations in Yemen and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive policy issues said, “If they knew a 16-year-old was there, I think that would be cause for them to say: ‘Gee, we ought not to hit this guy. That would be considered collateral damage.’ ”

The official said that the CIA and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command are expected to ensure that women and children are not killed in airstrikes in Pakistan and Yemen but that sometimes it might not be possible to distinguish a teenager from militants.

Nasser al-Awlaki said he was told by people in the area where the airstrike occurred that the two teenagers were about to have a meal with a small group of men when they were hit. He said he did not know who else was in the group but was told that they were mostly young people.

“The others I just don’t know. Maybe they were being targeted,” Awlaki said.

‘A typical kid’

In a separate statement Monday, the Awlaki family said that Abdulrahman “along with some of his tribe’s youth have gone barbecuing under the moonlight. A drone missile hit their congregation killing Abdulrahman and several other teenagers.”

Nasser al-Awlaki said the family decided to issue a statement after reading some U.S. news reports that described Abdulrahman as a militant in his twenties.

The family urged journalists and others to visit a Facebook memorial page for Abdulrahman.

“Look at his pictures, his friends, and his hobbies,” the statement said. “His Facebook page shows a typical kid. A teenager who paid a hefty price for something he never did and never was.”

The pictures on the Facebook page show a smiling kid out and about in the countryside and occasionally hamming it up for the camera. Abdulrahman left the United States with his father in 2002.

Nasser al-Awlaki said Abdulrahman was in the first year of secondary school when he left Sanaa to find his father. He wrote a note to his mother, saying he missed his father and wanted to see him. The teenager traveled to the family’s tribal home in southern Yemen, but Anwar al-Awlaki was killed Sep. 30 in Yemen’s northern Jawf province, about 90 miles east of the capital.

“He went from here without my knowledge,” Nasser al-Awlaki said. “We would not allow him to go if we know because he is a small boy.” He said his grandson, after hearing about his father’s death, had decided to return to Sanaa.

The family also condemned the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, 40, as an “unlawful assassination,” saying that he was an American citizen who had never been formally charged with any crime.

Anwar al-Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico, was one of al-Qaeda’s most prominent and effective propagandists, but U.S. officials said he had also become directly involved in terrorist plots against the United States. After his killing, President Obama described him as chief of “external operations” for AQAP.

U.S. officials had tied him to the attempted bombing of a commercial aircraft on approach to Detroit and the attempted downing of two cargo planes over the United States. They said he inspired an Army officer who is charged with killing 13 people in a November 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Tex., and a Pakistani-American man who tried to set off a car bomb in New York City in May 2010.

The family, in its statement, said, “Anwar was never a ‘militant’ ” nor was he “the head of Al Qaeda external operations.”

The United States has stepped up drone operations in Yemen to counter AQAP, which it fears is exploiting the country’s chaos to plot further attacks. Violent clashes continued Monday in Sanaa between government forces and troops loyal to an army general who broke with President Ali Abdullah Saleh to protect protesters calling for his ouster.

Obama Sends 100 Troops to Fight Ugandan Rebels

By BNO

October 15, 2011 BNO" -- WASHINGTON, D.C. : U.S. President Barack Obama on Friday announced the deployment of around 100 U.S. special operations troops to Uganda to fight the rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

In a letter to Congress, Obama informed that in the next months further U.S. troops will be shipped out to other African countries as well, including South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

However, the President noted that although the deployed U.S. forces are combat-equipped, "they will only be providing information, advice and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense."

In May 2010, President Obama signed into law the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act which reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to support regional partners' efforts to end the 'atrocities' committed by LRA in central Africa.

The United States' decision to send a group of military advisers to assist the forces that are countering the LRA, the U.S. State Department said, is part of the comprehensive, multi-year strategy that seeks to help mitigate and end the threat posed to civilians and regional stability by the LRA

The strategy outlined four strategic objectives for U.S. support, including the increased protection of civilians, the apprehension or removal of Joseph Kony and senior LRA commanders from the battlefield, the promotion of defections and support of disarmament, demobilization, reintegration of remaining LRA fighters and the provision of continued humanitarian relief to affected communities.
The LRA, formed in the late 1980s, has operated for over 20 years and is known for having murdered, raped, and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children.

Since 2008 alone, the LRA has killed more than 2,400 people and abducted more than 3,400 others. The United Nations estimates that over 380,000 people are displaced across the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and South Sudan as a result of LRA activity.

Since 2008, the United States has provided over USD 40 million in critical logistical support, equipment and training to enhance counter-LRA operations by regional militaries.

--BNO News

Fresh Uganda Oil Find ‘Africa’s Biggest’

By The Times

14 Jan 2009 "The Times" - -Heritage Oil announced details of a large oil discovery in Uganda yesterday, which the company claimed could be the largest onshore discovery in sub-Saharan Africa.

Heritage said that its latest discovery – Giraffe1 – in the Lake Albert region, could total at least 400 million barrels of oil.

However, Paul Atherton, chief financial officer, told The Times that the wider field it was developing, dubbed Buffalo-Giraffe, had several “billions of barrels of oil in place”, although it was unclear how much of this would be recoverable.

He said that the field, which is 9,000 square kilometers in size – or six times the size of Greater London – was unquestionably the largest onshore discovery made in sub-Saharan Africa in at least 20 years, possibly ever.

Mr Atherton said that of the 18 wells the company had drilled in the basin so far, all had produced oil. “Clearly the entire basin is full of oil,” he said. “It’s a world-class discovery, the most exciting new basin in Africa in decades.”

Previously, the largest onshore fields discovered in sub-Saharan Africa were at Rabi-Kounga in Gabon, where 900 million barrels were found in 1985, and at Kome in Chad, where 485 million barrels were found in 1977.

Mr Atherton said that it would take at least another three years to start commercial production. The crude could be exported by road or rail, he said, but analysts believe that the most practical solution would be to build an 806-mile pipeline to take it to Kampala, Uganda’s capital, and then the Kenyan coast. The pipeline would need to be heated and designed to traverse swampy and mountainous land. It would cost an estimated $1.5 billion (£1 billion) to complete.

Heritage and its partner Tullow Oil, which also has a 50 per cent equity stake in the project, would need to demonstrate that the field could produce at least 400 million barrels of oil to justify the cost of building such a pipeline. Richard Griffith, an Evolution Securities analyst, said the latest discovery “thrashed” this commerciality threshold.

See Also - Uganda : Pressure Mounts To Make Public Oil Agreements:Uganda's oil discovery is already attracting major players like Italian oil giant Eni Spa, U.S. Exxon Mobil, France's Total and of recent the China National Offshore Oil Company. The country does not have the funds to finance the production of oil and instead signed agreements with oil giants spelling out how the revenue will be shared with investors willing to fund the production phase. The companies will build an oil refinery in Uganda and an oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean. This will enable the landlocked country to sell its estimated two billion barrels of crude oil internationally

Uganda's oil contracts leaked - a bad deal made worse: The repeated claims by the Ugandan government and the oil companies that Uganda has received a very good deal and the best in the region are not only a fiction, but were reliant on the real terms of the contracts being kept secret. While the contracts will deliver vast profits to Tullow Oil and Heritage Oil, the contracts will prevent the Ugandan people from receiving their due benefits.

Oil extraction and the potential for domestic instability in Uganda: The paper identifies and discusses in detail three sources of domestic volatility that may arise as a result of oil development.

Uganda: Oil could cause war : The attacks are by armed gangs suspected to be rebels of the FDLR, LRA, and the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF). In the ongoing campaign in DR Congo, President Joseph Kabila is being criticised for failing to restore peace in this vital area.