News

by F. William Engdahl

Global Research, January 5, 2010

On
December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab
aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges
of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since
then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other
sources that he was "suspected" of having been trained in Yemen for his
terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the
emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate
state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background
suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda in Yemen.

For some months the world has seen a steady escalation of
US military involvement in Yemen, a dismally poor land adjacent to Saudi
Arabia on its north, the Red Sea on its west, the Gulf of Aden on its
south, opening to the Arabian Sea, overlooking another desolate land
that has been in the headlines of late, Somalia. The evidence suggests
that the Pentagon and US intelligence are moving to militarize a
strategic chokepoint for the world’s oil flows, Bab el-Mandab, and using
the Somalia piracy incident, together with claims of a new Al Qaeda
threat arising from Yemen, to militarize one of the world’s most
important oil transport routes... >>>