THE EVIL SIDE OF PRES. OBAMA

This story had been bothering me for a few days and now that I've looked into it, I'm convinced it reveals that Pres. Obama can be as vindictive and mean-spirited as Dick Cheney.

Yemeni president pardons reporter Obama wanted kept in jail
By Adam Baron | McClatchy Foreign Staff
Posted on Wednesday, July 24, 2013

SANAA, Yemen — Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom President Barack Obama once personally lobbied to have remain in jail, has been pardoned and released, fulfilling a months-old pledge from Yemen’s president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.

But he earned the ire of U.S. and Yemeni authorities for his reporting that revealed that a December 2009 bombing in the village of Majalla in the southern province of Abyan was an American cruise-missile attack that killed dozens of civilians, including 14 women and 21 children,rather than a Yemeni airstrike on an al Qaida training camp, as originally claimed.

Political pressure from activists and tribal leaders initially pushed Yemen’s then-president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, toward pardoning Shaye. But the opposition of the Obama administration convinced Saleh to abandon the plans. In February 2011, Obama personally raised the issue with Saleh in a phone call that the White House acknowledged in a statement. “President Obama expressed concern over the release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP,” said the Feb. 2, 2011, statement, using an alternate spelling of Shaye’s name.