After about a year of mass protests urging the U.S.-supported dictator of Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh to resign, Yemenis voted in February in a referendum on a U.S.-backed transition deal to formally depose Saleh and elect his deputy Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi, who was the only name on the ballot.

The deal granted Saleh total immunity for the crimes he committed while on Washington’s dole and despite the sham, single-candidate “election,” the U.S. praised it as democracy. The Obama administration, eager to restart its modus operandi of bribing and propping up a brutal Yemeni dictatorship in exchange for allowing U.S. missiles to pepper the country, almost immediately restarted military aid.

Yemenis have since realized that no substantive change has occurred and so people are still protesting against the government. But now Obama has decreed that anyone obstructing the transition to Hadi’s rule, anyone speaking out or putting money towards activism against the dictatorship Washington has upheld in the embattled Gulf state, will have their financial assets frozen by Obama’s Treasury Department.

This isn’t the first instance of the Obama administration targeting those the Yemeni state doesn’t like. “As the pace [of the drone war] quickens and the targets expand,” the Los Angeles Times reported in April, “the distinction may be blurring between operations targeting militants who want to attack Americans and those aimed at fighters seeking to overthrow the Yemeni government.”

That practice seems to aim to kill anti-government actors in Yemen, whereas this new Executive Order merely threatens sanctions for anti-government speech or activism, for both Yemenis and Americans.

The decree specifies that U.S. citizens are included in this threat of sanctions. The order says any interference in the U.S. plan to install Hadi as the new dictator in Yemen “threaten[s] the peace, security and stability” of the country. Peace, security and stability, in this case, means foreign-backed despotism and an unaccountable U.S. drone war.

The new measures clearly violate the First Amendment rights of Americans and of Yemenis. Anyone who uses their activism or their assets “in opposition to [the Government of Yemen]” will be targeted.

That’s no coincidence, though, as the “non-lethal aid” turns out to have come in the form of huge quantities of high tech weaponry, which the US didn’t directly pay for but which the US is helping smuggle into the country.

The report comes as US officials say that they consider the ceasefire a “failure” and a civil war “inevitable.” Indeed it seems to be, now that the rebels are awash in arms from the GCC nations and have tacit US backing to spurn the ceasefire.

On Monday, the rebels attacked Syrian troops around Rastan, killing at least 23 soldiers. Yesterday, they engaged in an even bigger fight along the coast, capturing four UN ceasefire monitors in the process.

US and other western officials have repeatedly blamed the Assad regime for all of the ceasefire violations, and while combatants on both sides have violated it in small measure, the big attacks and the official condemnations of the peace talks have come from the rebels, and the US has been fueling this belligerence.

EU warships have been off the coast of Somalia since 2008, but has just recently changed their operating standards to allow attacks on the coast. Initially saying it would only target “moored ships” they quickly decided to attack anything on shore that was conceivably in use by pirates.

EU officials declined to say which nations were involved in the attack, but hinted at further strikes in the future, saying that they had a long list of possible targets and that this one just seemed like the most promising to hit at the given time.

Early reports suggest that there were no casualties in the attacks, but there is virtually no media in Somalia, which makes such a determination virtually impossible to make.

The monitors were with Syrian forces when fighting broke out at the site of a funeral. Rebels say that the troops attacked a funeral procession, but the military insists that they were attacked first. One of the vehicles the monitors was riding in was destroyed in the fighting, and troops with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) made off with the monitors.

Reuters contacted the FSA regarding the monitors, and spoke with one on the phone. When asked if he was being held prisoner, he didn’t reply, but another person insisted that they were “safe with the Free Army.”

FSA spokesmen have since said that they are working on a way to escort the captured monitors out of the country, saying that permitting them to leave FSA custody was out of the question because “the regime will terminate them because they have witnessed one of its crimes.”

Allen’s departure will continue a trend of officials serving a year or less as the commander before either being “promoted” elsewhere or fired outright. Allen will reportedly be made Supreme Allied Commander for Europe.

Though obviously all of this is purely speculative, Vice Admiral Robert Harward has apparently been tapped as his successor. He is currently deputy head of Central Command (CENTCOM).

Harward, a Navy Seal, has a long history in special operations positions, heading up Navy Seal efforts in Bosnia and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also was in charge of the various US detention facilities in Afghanistan.

The letter, addressed to the House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Buck McKeon (R – CA), attacks the recent efforts by Reps. Adam Smith (D – WA) and Justin Amash (R – MI) to roll back the “indefinite detention without charges in military custody” portion of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012.

The letter argues that any change in the law that would restrict the ability of the federal government to indefinitely detain suspects without charges would amount to “rewarding terrorists” and would make terror attacks more likely. It goes on to claim that removing the law would be unconstitutional because—and get this—it would restrict the president’s ability to “fulfill his constitutional duties as commander in chief.”

Rep. Smith defended the efforts to ensure that people arrested actually eventually get to a court, saying that the letter was “disingenuous and purely political.” Though Congress cheerfully passed the NDAA by a wide margin, a massive public backlash against the law has a number of its former proponents looking for cover, and fearing that their support for indefinite detention could harm their reelection.

The border was closed on November 26 after US warplanes attacked two Pakistani military bases, killing 24. The Pakistani parliament had demanded that the US agree to stop launching attacks against Pakistani territory and apologize for the attacks in return for reopening the border.

In the end, they got neither of these things. The US continues to launch regular attacks against Pakistan’s tribal areas, and is said to be only “considering” the possibility of apologizing for the attacks. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry says it will continue to raise both issues.

So what does Pakistan get? Very little as it turns out. Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari will be allowed to visit Chicago for the summit on Monday. There are no indications of what they’ll do there, but the Cubs aren’t even in town, so his options are limited.

The use of the facility, inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, continues in spite of official orders from the Justice Ministry to close the site. It has been operating both as a place to torture detainees and to hold them outside of the oversight of the already questionable Iraqi legal system.

Most of the detainees at the secret prison were said to be political detainees, Sunnis who were tied in some way with the Ba’ath Party or people who have participated in anti-government protests.

The Iraqi Human Rights Ministry denied the charges, saying that the claim was “politically motivated” and that the facility was closed at the start of 2011, despite repeated reports from officials since then of its continued use.

The move is a response to questions over the warplanes’ oxygen systems, concerns which have led pilots to refuse to fly the advanced planes. The exact same concern grounded the entire fleet for several months last year, and nothing was ever resolved.

Rather, officials seem to have waited for the media furor to quiet down then simply sent the fleet back up. The oxygen systems have reportedly been failing, causing serious breathing problems and in one case even a pilot’s death.

The F-22 program itself cost $66.7 billion, and though officially the “unit cost” is listed as about $150 million, government auditors say that the actual per-unit cost is closer to $400 million. That fact is moot at any rate, since the planes can’t even safely be flown from the factory to an airfield anymore, and all F-22′s are going to have to be removed from Alaska’s air patrol duty. There is speculation that the F-22′s even more expensive successor, the F-35, is going to have the exact same problem.

Though a number of clashes and attacks on protesters were reported, the rallies and violence were muted compared to last year, when Israeli soldiers killed 20 protesters nationwide. Analysts speculate that the resolution of most of the hunger striking among Palestinian prisoners yesterday calmed some of the anger.

The commemoration of Nakba, during which roughly 700,000 Palestinians were displaced, is treated with considerable hostility within Israel, and in 2009 a bill very nearly passed which would’ve criminalized its recognition.

Though the 2009 “ban” bill did not ultimately become law, a 2011 law was eventually passed allowing the Israeli Finance Minister to defund any state-supported bodies that commemorate the day.