Shaye was the first journalist to go to the site of the attack. According to Scahill, it was Shaye who took photographs proving that it was the United States, not Yemen that conducted the assault. And it was Shaye’s work that proved that it wasn’t “34 militants” who were killed, as the New York Times reported, but women and children.
According to a report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation, on February 2 of this year, President Obama called Yemeni President Abdullah to “express concern” about the potential release of journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye from prison.
Shaye is a Yemeni journalist who has done a lot of reporting on America’s War on Terror, and on Al Qaeda itself. He has interviewed Al Qaeda leaders, even some that America had been hunting.
And his reporting has embarrassed the United States.
Glenn Greenwald explains the background story:
[O]n December 17, 2009, President Obama ordered an air attack — using Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs — on the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province; the strike ended the lives of 14 women and 21 children. At the time, the Yemeni government outright lied about the attack, falsely claiming that it was Yemen’s air force which was responsible.
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