by Rachael Woodhouse
GCN Live.com
False flag? Real threat? Coming just four days before Tuesday’s elections and saturating mainstream media headlines, President Obama’s brief press conference surrounding the mysterious “bomb threat” on Friday instantly grabbed the nation’s attention.
According to The Jerusalem Post, the target was the city that gave birth to the political aspirations of President Obama:
Chicago synagogues were apparently the destination of of two packages filled with explosives- laden bombs sent from Yemen and intercepted early Friday morning by authorities in Dubai and England. US President Barack Obama on Friday afternoon described the incident targeting “Jewish places of worship” as “a credible terrorist threat against our country,” and raised the prospect that al-Qaida was behind the attempted terrorist attack without directly blaming the organization.
GCN's Rob Redding: One of the "100 Most Important Radio Talk Show Hosts in America" (Talkers magazine).
GCN’s Redding News Review was on top of the incident as it happened, and host Robert “Rob” Redding Jr. broke in on his own show to carry the feed live. As Redding weighed in on the incident in real time, he also quickly arranged an impromptu live interview with RNR’s International News Editor, Bruno Gaston. Redding chose to avoid conspiracy theories and instead homed in specifically on Yemen, picking Gaston’s brain for insight into this Middle Eastern nation.
“What,” Redding asked, “do you know about our [the US government's] relationship with Yemen?”
Gaston said Yemeni officials have launched an investigation, but “as far as Yemen’s cooperation goes, you have to look also at their capacity to deal with terrorism, because there are terrorist groups, organizations. Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula has been noted many times in the conversation…because they have a stronghold in some parts of that country. Now, it’s very difficult for the Yemeni government to be able to monitor and address those parts because you’re talking about rural and tribal areas outside of the urban sector that the Yemeni government just doesn’t have the capacity to control. It becomes very difficult to address how some of the operatives or fighters from these organizations would move in that country.”
The message: "Obey"? Or simply, "Be Aware"?
“If we were to assume that they [Yemeni officials] were genuinely willing and everything they said was true, you also have to consider whether or not it’s possible or how possible it [a bomb threat] is. I mean, even if you look at the situation in nations like Iraq, or its neighboring countries, there is very little capacity in some of those nations to control terrorist groups. And when you’re dealing with situations, examples like in Somalia right now, you’re talking about very poor countries, limited security, porous borders, where it’s easy to move people, resources, [and] weapons. [There are] packages that originate from these poor nations or less-developed nations and they go…through Europe and then eventually to the United States.”
Gaston’s bottom line on terrorist organizations is that ultimately, they are disparate and scattered. “The different types of terrorist organizations – they have different ideologies. They have different operations in different countries and different ideologies as it relates to their message in terms of attacking their enemies, or establishing sharia law, or what have you. So there are shared interests, but there are differences in terms of how they want to go about achieving their goals. In terms of those that are sympathetic to these organizations and operatives, those elements exist all over the world: in developed countries, industrialized countries, as well as poorer nations.”