Free At Last! Yemeni Reporter Who Exposed U.S. Missile Strike Goes Home After 3 Years in Jail

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So, Ali Abdullah Saleh is in a postion where it was becoming politically untenable to hold him in prison. He says he’s going to pardon him. The Yemeni news agency releases this. That day, he gets a phone call from the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: This is like a year ago.

JEREMY SCAHILL: This was in February of 2011. He gets a phone call from the White House, not from, you know, some undersecretary of who knows what, but from President Obama personally. And President Obama, according to the White House’s own read-out of that call, expresses concern about reports that they were going to release Abdulelah Haider Shaye. And just to give you a sense of what a client state Yemen was, the pardon then is ripped up, and he remained in prison then over the course of the next two years. And, in fact, the White House—President Hadi just left yesterday from Sana’a. He’s visiting the United States right now. Supposedly it was for medical reasons, but he’s now going to meet with President Obama. And I think it’s going to be very interesting to see what comes out of that. The White House is clearly very, very irked that Hadi released Abdulelah Haider Shaye.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to the lawyer for one minute, to Abdulelah Haider Shaye’s lawyer, Abdulrahman Barman, who describes how Shaye was beaten and psychologically tortured by Yemeni security forces.

ABDULRAHMAN BARMAN: [translated] Abdulelah Haider received many threats from the security forces over the phone. And when he was kidnapped for the first time, they beat him and interrogated him concerning his statements and the analysis on the al-Majalah issue and the U.S. war against terrorism here in Yemen.

I think he was arrested based on a request from the American government. At the time of his arrest, they beat him, even though he did not resist them. He was asked by soldiers to come, and he went with them. They took him from his house. And when they were in his yard, the soldiers beat him cruelly using the butts of their guns. And one of them bit him in the chest, and the scar was still there when we met him.

In prison, he was not physically tortured, but he was psychologically tortured. He was put in a dirty bathroom for five days. He was told that all of his friends and family members had left him, that he was alone, and that no one supported his case. He was tortured by false information.

In the first session of the prosecution, I noticed that one of Abdulelah’s teeth was extracted and that another one was broken, in addition to some scars on his chest. That was after 25 days of detention. There were a lot of scars on his chest. We have noted that in the general prosecution minutes, and we requested a referral to a forensic doctor to prove the torture on his body. He was referred, but we have not received a copy of the doctor’s report, and we have not been allowed to make a copy for his case file so far.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Shaye’s attorney, Abdulrahman Barman. Rooj Alwazir, you just spoke with Barman. Can you talk about the conditions of Shaye’s release this week?

ROOJ ALWAZIR: Sure. Right now his health is deteriorating. He lost a massive amount of weight. But he’s in a better position. He’s with his family. He finally enjoyed his first iftar with his family and his kids. He’s hopeful that justice will still prevail, because, as he said—as soon as he was released, he said in a statement to his lawyers, "Although I am released, I am still not a free man. In the eyes of the political and national security, I am still a threat, and therefore I am not free."