So, you know that Al-Qaeda insurgency in Yemen the US is helping to fight...

[Cain]

...Yeah, well, about that...

http://antiwar.com/blog/2012/08/31/us-backed-yemeni-regime-collaborates-with-supports-al-qaeda/

Foreign Policy reports there are "many Yemenis who have come to suspect that their government is not fighting, but helping cultivate, jihadi activity in their country."

According to sources in Yemen's Interior Ministry and Defense Ministry, as well as independent Yemeni analysts and journalists with intimate knowledge of al Qaeda in Yemen, the Yemeni government is fully aware of a number of al Qaeda cells — and their existence is tolerated and their crimes covered up.

Indeed, this phenomenon is well known in Yemen. As Jeremy Scahill of Nation magazine wrote after visiting Yemen earlier this year: "Since the mujahedeen war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and continuing after 9/11, Saleh has famously milked the threat of Al Qaeda and other militants to leverage counterterrorism funding and weapons from the United States and Saudi Arabia, to bolster his power within the country and to neutralize opponents."

Abdulghani al-Iryani, a Yemeni political analyst, has said has much about the Saleh regime and he told Foreign Policy that the collaboration between the new US-supported Yemeni regime and al-Qaeda militants continues. "At all levels of Yemen's political elite you have collusion and cooperation with militants and terrorists," he said.

Why?  Well, it's quite simple.  Keeping Al-Qaeda at a boiling point keeps US arms and money flowing in.  Arms and money secure the leadership.

US counterterrorism policy = 169% 0WN3D.

[Salty]

Wow. Well that's just great.

[Nephew Twiddleton]

Why am I chuckling?

[Lenin McCarthy]

If the Yemeni government really wanted to fight Al-Qaeda, providing things like food and employment for its citizens would probably be a much better strategy anyway.

[Roly Poly Oly-Garch]

Well at least we're not--

Oh...Nevermind...

http://truth-out.org/news/item/9668-guantanamo-scandal-the-forty-prisoners-still-held-but-cleared-for-release-at-least-five-years-ago

The Task Force recommended 126 prisoners for release, including 29 Yemenis, and created a category of "conditional detention" for 30 more Yemenis, claiming that they could be held until the security situation in Yemen improved. However, as a result of the hysteria that greeted the news that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian citizen who tried and failed to detonate a bomb in his underwear on a flight into the US on Christmas Day 2009, had been recruited in Yemen, President Obama issued a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo in January 2010. This is still in place nearly two and a half years later, even though no connection has been made between the Yemenis cleared for release from Guantánamo, and the al-Qaeda offshoot in Yemen — al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — that apparently recruited Abdulmutallab.

So basically, the detainees aren't deemed to be a risk, but we're holding them anyways cause their neighborhood is the suck. Human rights win!

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Well at least we're not--

Oh...Nevermind...

http://truth-out.org/news/item/9668-guantanamo-scandal-the-forty-prisoners-still-held-but-cleared-for-release-at-least-five-years-ago

The Task Force recommended 126 prisoners for release, including 29 Yemenis, and created a category of "conditional detention" for 30 more Yemenis, claiming that they could be held until the security situation in Yemen improved. However, as a result of the hysteria that greeted the news that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian citizen who tried and failed to detonate a bomb in his underwear on a flight into the US on Christmas Day 2009, had been recruited in Yemen, President Obama issued a moratorium on releasing any Yemenis from Guantánamo in January 2010. This is still in place nearly two and a half years later, even though no connection has been made between the Yemenis cleared for release from Guantánamo, and the al-Qaeda offshoot in Yemen — al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — that apparently recruited Abdulmutallab.

So basically, the detainees aren't deemed to be a risk, but we're holding them anyways cause their neighborhood is the suck. Human rights win!

No.

Basically, because we can.

[Verbal Mike]

No, to make sure al-Qaeda have actual current unnecessary detentions of Yemenis by the Great Devil to use in recruiting other Yemenis. "Hamed, Samer, your own uncle is still being held by these monsters, won't you help us fight them?"