Word: aden
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...women aboard the U.S.S. Cole had been at sea for two uneventful months when their vessel arrived in the Yemen harbor of Aden last Thursday. Unrest in the region and the Cole's upcoming six-month mission with the Navy's Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, where it would enforce the international oil embargo against Iraq, had upgraded the ship's Threatcon to "bravo," the Navy's second-highest state of alert. So as the Cole steamed into Aden harbor just before noon, maneuvering close to an offshore mooring station where it would refuel, crew members were on deck...
...attack could have taken place offered little cause for comfort. The size of the blast, the perpetrators' ability to conceal the bomb and their advance knowledge of the arrival of the Cole--the ship's commanders notified Yemeni authorities 10 days before last Thursday that it would refuel in Aden--suggest that the attack was plotted weeks, even months, in advance. Once it pulled into Aden, the ship was highly vulnerable--to the bevy of small craft mingling around it, to the port authorities who had dispatched the moorers, to anyone with the cleverness and forethought to plan carefully...
...fact is, Pentagon brass have received warnings about the vulnerability of Fifth Fleet warships since at least 1996, following the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia. More damaging fallout may emerge from probes into why the Cole was refueling in Aden in the first place. An Administration official said the U.S. was aware of "a general uptick in activity" in the past month among rogue groups hoping to use Arab-Israeli tensions as a justification for mischief. Yemen is a fertile staging ground for such mischief; the country is one of the world's poorest, and the government wields little...
...sense in that regard. "[Diplomacy] was at the heart of the motivation," Admiral Clark said last week. But the diplomacy outstripped the security. Crawling with terrorists who see the U.S. as invaders on the peninsula and protected only by a weak central government located 200 miles to the north, Aden was no place for Yankees, especially at a time of unrest...
...U.S.S. Cole was rammed in the port of Aden by an explosive-packed inflatable craft that blew a 30-foot hole in its port side, killing at least seven sailors and wounding about 30. Ten were reported to be missing and presumed dead. The Cole had been heading for the Gulf, where it was to help police sanctions against Iraq. The attack was followed Friday by an explosion at the British Embassy in Sana'a, the Yemeni capital. The suspect list in both incidents would have to include the Osama Bin Laden network, in whose stomping ground it occurred...