BlackFive

I interviewed Eric Coulson who used to write the Badgers Forward blog when he was deployed. His unit was not from Wisconsin, but in a pre-deployment training, I think in Utah, he mentioned that the area was lousy with badgers. This cracked me up as badgers are notoriously anti-social so it was hard to imagine an area being lousy with them. Anyhow.

It appears that Yemen is lousy with AQ and many running around with the full knowledge of the "government". Mr. Roggio illuminates the infestation.

But for years Yemen has refused to keep wanted al Qaeda operatives behind bars or transfer them to the US for trial. Two wanted al Qaeda operatives, Jamal Ahmed Mohammed Ali al Badawi and Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al Quso, have operated openly in Yemen despite being wanted for their roles in the Oct. 12, 2000, bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, that killed 17 US sailors.

Another wanted al Qaeda operative, Jaber A. Elbaneh, was a member of the Buffalo Six, an al Qaeda cell based in Lackawanna, New York.

The US government has a $5 million reward for information leading to the arrests of Badawi, Elbaneh, and Quso, yet the Yemeni government has rebuffed efforts by the US to have them extradited to the US.

Two radical clerics known to support al Qaeda have also operated freely in Yemen. Abdulmajid al Zindani manages a radical Islamic university despite being designated a terrorist by both the US and UN. Ansar al Awlaki, a radical cleric who provided spiritual support to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers as well as to a Muslim US Army major who murdered 13 US soldiers in a shooting spree, has delivered sermons via teleconference across the globe while running a jihadi website.