From The Atlantic Drone Debate (September 2013)
"On Thursday, October 25, 2012, as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney crisscrossed America in a final mad scramble along the campaign trail, three officers from Yemen’s elite Republican Guard were holding an unusual meeting half a world away, on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
"That day was Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, which in the Islamic tradition commemorates
Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael..."
"Standing in front of them was the reason for their clandestine gathering: an 8-year-old boy..."
"At the time of the meeting, the boy didn’t know that the United States had decided to kill a man named Adnan al-Qadhi, and had turned to its allies in Yemen for assistance. Now the Yemeni government needed the child’s help.
"The Republican Guard officers told him what they wanted him to do: plant tiny electronic chips on the man he had come to think of as a surrogate father. The boy knew and trusted the officers; they were his biological father’s friends. He told them he would try.
"He would be their spy."
The eight year-old's name is Barq al-Kulaybi and his biological father was an enlisted man in Yemen's Republican Guard whose salary wasn't large enough to put food on the table for Barq and his five brothers and sisters.
Barq was sent to wealthy relatives who refused him, and he wound up living on some unfamiliar streets. Al-Qadhi took the eight year old into his home, treating him as one of his own five children.
"By the time President Obama gave the order to attack Adnan al-Qadhi, the U.S. had been killing al-Qaeda fighters for years, in places ranging from the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the deserts of Yemen and Somalia.
"The strikes had taken a toll on the terrorist organization. More than a decade after September 11, Osama bin Laden and many of the most obvious targets were already dead.
"Qadhi, a burly Yemeni military officer, was a less obvious target.
"But as the U.S. entered the second decade of its war against al-Qaeda, it increasingly found itself going after
men like Qadhi, who were targeted not so much for what they had done as for what they might do."
Did an 8-Year-Old Spy for America? - Gregory D. Johnsen - The Atlantic
Hours after Obama finished celebrating his victory over Money Mitt in Chicago and half-a-world away in Yemen, the chips planted by eight year-old Barq lead to the drone demise of Qadhi and another man named Abu Radwan.
Another win for the "good guys."
