A U.S. drone strike Monday aiming for an al-Qaida leader has killed five [alleged] militants in the country's south as part of a Yemeni offensive against the Islamist group, Yemeni officials said.

They said the airstrike targeted Qaid al-Dahab, a[n alleged] local leader of al-Qaida, in a convoy of three cars near the town of Radda, 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of the capital, Sanaa. Four militants were wounded. The officials said al-Dahab's fate was not yet known.

Al-Dahab's sister was the wife of Anwar al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born radical militant cleric killed by a U.S. drone strike last fall.

There was no immediate word from Washington on the strike that targeted al-Dahab.

On Sunday, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta defended drone strikes in Yemen as a measure "to defend and protect the United States of America." He was interviewed by the American ABC TV network.

The Munafiqeen [Hypocrites] will be in the lowest depths of the Fire: no helper wilt thou find for them.

~ Sura 4 (An-Nisa), ayah 145, Qur'an

A couple of months ago, one of those dubious leaks made by "unnamed US officials" caught my eye. US media did something it doesn't often do; it publicised 'secret' Israeli government policy. Giving five minutes of prime time TV to Iranian scientist Mohammad Javad Larijani, brother of Ali Larijani, philosopher and chairman of the Parliament of Iran, two "senior U.S. officials" confirmed for NBC News what Mohammad Larijani was telling them: that Israel was behind the assassinations of Iranian scientists.

Specifically, the US officials stated that Israel's Mossad was financing, training and arming an Iranian dissident group that goes by many names, but which we'll call the People's Mujahedin of Iran (MEK) for now. In return, the MEK is "providing Israel with information." Speaking through NBC, these unknown officials confirmed what Larijani and the Iranian government have been saying for years: that Israel, through the MEK, carried out the attacks in which motorcycle-borne assailants attached sophisticated magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims' cars. The US officials further stated that the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement.

No sooner had the story been leaked than a series of car bombings took place outside Israeli embassies in India, Georgia and Singapore. The same types of bombs used in the assassinations of Iranian scientists were used to blow up vehicles near Israeli diplomats. The Israelis never actually intended to kill any of their own, because the Mossad warned the embassies ahead of time. Israel of course blamed Iran for the bombings. But these stunts were clearly intended to deflect attention from the US government's confirmation that Israel is murdering Iranian scientists through its surrogate, the MEK, and, once again, portray Israel as the eternal victim.

Incentivize victimhood, fraudulent accounting of income/collateral and gaming the system, and guess what you get? A nation of liars and thieves.

Memorial Day is traditionally a day to speak of sacrifices made in combat. Like much of the rest of life in America, it has largely become artificial, a hurried "celebration" of frenzied Memorial Day marketing that is quickly forgotten the next day.

Instead of participating in this rote (and thus insincere) "thank you for your sacrifice" pantomime, perhaps we should ask what else has been sacrificed in America without our acknowledgement. Perhaps we should look at the sacrifices that need to be made but which are cast aside in our mad rush to secure "what we deserve."

The unvarnished reality is that most Americans have no idea what service members experienced in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they don't want to know. When 4,488 white crosses were erected on a hillside to remind us of all those who made the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq, people didn't like it, labeling it "unpatriotic."That is not the real reason, of course; what is more patriotic than keeping those who served and sacrificed fresh in our awareness? One reason those 4,000 crosses make us uncomfortable is that they remind us of being conned by our civilian leadership into "wars of choice."

Another is that the reality of war and its long aftermath are not sufficiently "uplifting" for a brittle nation that prefers the distractions of "reality" TV to an acknowledgement of our problems and the sacrifices made and yet to be made.

Longtime readers know that one of my embedded concerns is the disconnect between the civilian populace and the U.S. Armed Forces. This disconnect starts with raw numbers: THANK YOU TO THE 0.45% of the population who served in the Global War on Terror (2001 to present).

Personnel are costly, not just in civilian life but in the Armed Forces, too, and so the Pentagon has "downsized" the Armed Forces to a smaller but more professional force. This reflects not just budgetary realities but the evolution of modern warfare.

But it's not just that fewer serve because fewer are needed; the number of civilians who want to know and want to acknowledge the experience of those who serve is dwindling everywhere, from Congress to the media to the living rooms of the nation.

The Cornucopia Institute is challenging what it calls a "conspiracy" between corporate agribusiness interests and the USDA that has increasingly facilitated the use of questionable synthetic additives and even dangerous chemicals in organic foods. In its new white paper, The Organic Watergate, Cornucopia details violations of federal law, ignoring congressional intent, that has created a climate of regulatory abuse and corporate exploitation.

When Congress passed the Organic Foods Production Act of 1990 it set up an independent advisory panel, the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) that, uniquely, has statutory power. Any synthetic input or ingredient used in organic farming or food production must be reviewed by the NOSB to assure that it is not a threat to human health or the environment.

At the NOSB meeting in Savannah, Georgia last year, a giant Dutch-based multi-national conglomerate, Royal DSM N.V./Martek Biosciences, partnered with the nation's largest dairy processor, Dean Foods, to muscle through approval of DHA/ARA synthetic nutrient oils. The additives, derived from genetically mutated algae and soil fungus, are processed with petrochemical solvents, grown in genetically engineered corn, and formulated for use in infant formula, dairy and other products with a myriad of other unreviewed synthetic ingredients.

As many have learned the hard way, protecting your reputation online can be difficult. The way the web works, once just one person publishes something bad or inaccurate about you, it lives forever in the net's cache. Should you be unfortunate enough to have someone, or even a team of people, who know their way around the Internet writing malicious things about you, it can be impossible to ever fully correct the record. Bad stuff tends to thrive online.

Just ask Tom Vanden Brook or Ray Locker. They're both reporters at USA Today; Vanden Brook covering the Pentagon for the paper since 2006, and Locker the White House and other agencies. Recently they teamed up to explore what the Pentagon calls "information operations" in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. A term of military art, "Info Ops" is frankly just another phrase for propaganda: the transmission of information, factual or not, with the specific goal of changing beliefs. "Winning the hearts and minds," as President Lyndon Johnson was fond of saying during the Vietnam war.

An Army private charged in a massive leak of U.S. government secrets to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks is seeking dismissal of 10 of the 22 counts he faces.

Pfc. Bradley Manning's civilian defense lawyer posted the motions on his website Wednesday night. A military judge will hear oral arguments at a pretrial hearing starting June 6 at Fort Meade, Md.

Manning contends eight of the counts are unconstitutionally vague. He claims two other charges fail to state a prosecutable offense.

Manning faces the possibility of life in prison if convicted of the most serious charge, aiding the enemy. He is being held at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

He allegedly sent WikiLeaks hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic cables and war logs downloaded from government computers.

Libyan Tuaregs Flee to Algeria Amid Reports of Ethnic Cleansing

More than 55 Libyans from the Tuareg tribe have crossed over into Algerian territory in the last two days through the border crossing at Debdeb in the province of Illizi. They left the town of Ghadames and its surrounding villages out of fear of reprisals by armed groups against certain individuals, and particularly against Tuareg families.

Sources inside the Libyan city of Ghadames told El-Khabar that the Tuareg tribes have been subjected to ethnic cleansing for the past eight months. The Ghadames tribe, which is backed by forces affiliated with the National Transitional Council, is allegedly carrying out these acts. The latter burned and destroyed hostels and stables belonging to the Tuareg tribe and expelled them from the city, forcing them to flee into Algeria.

At least 10 people were killed and several others sustained injuries when unmanned US predator drone targeted a mosque in Mir Ali area of North Waziristan Agency on Thursday.

Sources said that earlier the death toll was put at six which later rose to 10 with several others were still in critical condition. The mosque was completely destroyed as two missiles were fired on it. Identities of the victims in the strike are not known immediately as North Waziristan is a far-flung mountainous tribal area bordering Afghanistan.

This was the fourth strike since Parliament in March demanded an end to the drone hits and first attack after the Chicago Summit.

Forty-five US missile strikes were reported in Pakistan's tribal belt in 2009, 101 in 2010 and 64 in 2011.

Agencies add: The attack, in the Khassokhel village near Mir Ali in the North Waziristan, was the second to take place in less than 24 hours.

At the G8 summit last week, President Obama and other officials in his administration, began utilizing the talking point of Yemen being a model to be emulated in Syria. Ostensibly, they were referring to the "peaceful" transition of power in Yemen as an example of what they would like to see in Syria. However, the comparison goes much deeper than simply this superficial connection. The truth is that Yemen represents, in more ways than one, the blueprint that the US imperialist ruling class would like to see applied to the escalating conflict in Syria.

Puppet Regimes and Faux Democracy

The "transition" of power in Yemen, from Saleh to Hadi, is a prime example of the hypocrisy of US policy, touting it as a victory for democracy while concealing the obvious fact that it was the creation of a puppet regime. Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi has been presented as the legitimate leader of Yemen, despite the fact that he was the U.S. choice to govern that country. His legitimacy depended on the myth of a democratically elected regime; the US propagates this myth wantonly, pretending that people won't remember that Hadi ran unopposed in February.

Obama officials demand full, reform-free renewal of the once-controversial power to eavesdrop without warrants

In 2006, The New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize for their December, 2005 article revealing that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on the electronic communications of Americans without the warrants required by the FISA law (headline: "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts" "Officials Say U.S. Wiretaps Exceeded Law"). Even though multiple federal judges eventually ruled the program illegal, that scandal generated no accountability of any kind for two reasons: (1) federal courts ultimately accepted the arguments of the Bush and Obama DOJs that the legality of Bush's domestic spying program should not be judicially reviewed; and (2) the Democratic-led Congress, in 2008, enacted the Bush-designed FISA Amendments Act, which not only retroactively immunized the nation's telecom giants for their illegal participation in that spying program and thus terminated pending lawsuits, but worse, also legalized the vast bulk of the Bush spying program by vesting vast new powers in the U.S. Government to eavesdrop without warrants (in his memoir, President Bush gleefully recounted that the 2008 eavesdropping bill supported by the Democrats gave him more than he ever expected).