well, i see the whole logic of the "war on terror" as lunacy, so in a sense this is merely another episode.
there are many particular moments of incomprehensibility brought to you by this meme "war on terror"
anyway, the release of this wider bit of infotainment is obviously tied to this business:
US says aviation security system failed in Flight 253 case | World news | guardian.co.uk
because of the central position played in the story by going to yemen to study islam in setting up whatever is at this point known about the attempt to blow up a plane from amsterdam as it approached detroit on xmas day. so a system lapse allowed this guy to board in amsterdam....to counter that, the release of infotainment concerning actions ongoing in yemen, presumably aimed at getting at a root issue.
a small, mobile focused organization working underground with resources adequate to moving place to place will make a nation-state military entirely insane. what i see as a problem here really is that. tracking such an organization down is like trying to grab water with your hands. think the algerian war. the french managed to almost destroy the fln through 1956. to do it, they functionally declared war on the algerian people--torture, etc.---but within a couple years the fln was back, based in a different place, made up of different people most of whom were mobilized politically because of the french actions in 1956.
the french couldn't find the fln because there were lots of flns.
it didn't go well for them.
so i see basically a large-scale variant on this same dynamic taking shape. and this is one of those situations in which i'd rather be wrong, because the outcomes of the last go-round (you could also point to vietnam, but the parallels are a little looser) were not great. for anyone.
more later maybe.