White House Says Threat ‘Ongoing,’ Still Light on Details

After days of increasing warnings and an order for US citizens to all leave Yemen immediately, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney offered few details, beyond saying that the threat is “real” and “ongoing.”

But there are a lot of questions that are left unanswered, as Carney and the rest of the administration appear reluctant to provide anything more than the broad strokes of the “threat,” insisting only that what they are doing is appropriate to whatever information they have.

For instance, though officials have not indicated any new information in the past several days, the decision to close the Yemeni embassy came over the weekend, but the order for US citizens to leave only finally came today, leaving open the question of why they acted so much sooner on the one than the other. Previously, the State Department offered only a global travel warning with no specifics, which didn’t suggest Yemen was the likely target.

Indeed, for the past few days officials had repeatedly suggested that there was no specificity on what was being targeted, and if something has come up since then pointing to Yemen, officials sure don’t feel like talking about it.