Here, al-Qaida’s ranks have swelled in the last year, and at least five ciites are now controlled by the terrorist group.

Despite the hefty death toll, some think the military assault might be aiding the terror group more than hurting it, sewing sympathy for the militants and anger toward the Americans.

Yemenis who live in these poverty-stricken areas, long neglected by the central government, said that with al-Qaida now governing large parts of the region, some stability has finally arrived.

One local merchant, when asked by GlobalPost what he thought of the new government, said, “Very, very good. Very peaceful. I go to prayer knowing my store is safe. I leave the door unlocked.”

Gregory Johnsen, an expert on Yemen at Princeton University, said the renewed military operations could have unintended consequences. He said the U.S. should focus more on strengthening Yemen’s central government than its military.

“I think such an approach actually does more to exacerbate the problem of al-Qaida in Yemen than it does to solve it,” he said. “The US counterterrorism strategy of air and drone strikes has also killed dozens of innocent civilians, which has further inflamed public opinion in Yemen and driven even more men into the arms of al-Qaida.”

Abyan has suffered from high unemployment, extreme poverty and rampant illiteracy rates, creating an environment in which extremist groups flourished.

Jaar, the first city in Abyan captured by al-Qaida last year, after nationwide protests shattered Yemen’s divided government, has become the main breeding ground for al-Qaida. It is now governed in a style reminiscent of how the Taliban ruled Afghanistan.

It’s also one of the top military targets of U.S.-Yemeni forces.

In a rare visit by a foreign journalist to Jaar on March 5 — the day after militants stormed a Yemeni base outside Zinjibar, killing more than 150 Yemeni soldiers and capturing 73 more — GlobalPost witnessed civilian life in the bombed out city.

At first glance, Jaar resembles most rural Yemeni towns, struggling after a year of uprisings choked off what few services a corrupt state government was willing to provide. Donkey carts wind through desolate streets piled with trash. Feral cats and dogs root through the garbage. In the shade of bullet-pocked storefronts and vacant buildings, haggard, bearded men drink tea and chew qat — a leafy stimulant widely used in the region.

But in one important way Jaar is different. The black-and-white flag of al-Qaida flies at each entrance to the city, flapping behind Kalishnakov- and grenade-strapped soldiers on motorcycles. Other al-Qaida soldiers patrol the city’s streets in army trucks pillaged from the Yemeni military weeks earlier.

Townspeople said al-Qaida provided them with reliable services, such as electricity, food, water and even healthcare, though officials would not allow GlobalPost entry into the town’s only hospital, one wing of which had been shelled in recent months.

While speaking to merchants in Jaar’s central market, an elderly man with a long red beard asked GlobalPost, “Why American drones?” The sound of the drones buzzing overhead was a constant reminder, they said, of the strikes that could happen at any time.

Others in the region were less supportive of al-Qaida. Some said the group was simply exploiting Jaar’s destitute masses, who are clinging to any form of stability during a time of conflict and uncertainty.

For the United States, al-Qaida’s ability to control Jaar is a matter of national security and it’s military, with the cooperation of Yemen’s central government and national army, has responded in force.

Since December 2009, after a failed plan to detonate a bomb on Northwest flight 253 over Detroit on Christmas day was traced back to Yemen, the US military and the CIA are known to have carried out at least 21 missile strikes here.

The bulk of those strikes occurred in the wake of al-Qaida’s dramatic May 2011 takeover of Zinjibar, the provincial capital of Abyan, 35 miles from Aden, a major port city.

Within seven months of taking Zinjibar, militants captured three more cities — Shaqra, Rawdah and Azzan — bringing the total number of al-Qaida-style Islamic emirates to five and setting the stage for the now ramped up airstrikes. CIA Director David Petraeus said in September 2011 that the area had become “the most dangerous regional node in the global jihad.”

Al-Qaida has responded with its own bombing campaigns.

Following the Feb. 25 swearing-in of President Abd Rabbo Monsour Hadi, who had replaced the 34-year rule of Ali Abudullah Saleh after a referendum-like vote, al-Qaida unleashed a string of bomb attacks across the country.

Hadi is tasked with leading the country through two years of democratic reforms, outlined in a Gulf Cooperation Council deal that eased the unpopular Saleh out of office. The controversial deal granted Saleh immunity for crimes he had committed against peaceful protesters at the height of Yemen’s pro-democracy movement.

The world’s No. 1 oil exporter and Yemen’s neighbor to the north, Saudi Arabia, spearheaded the pact with the backing of Washington and the United Nations Security Council.

The three major powers brokered the agreement to calm anti-Saleh protesters and create an environment in which Sanaa’s divided government could reassert control over its southern territories.

Local al-Qaida leaders rejected the power transfer deal outright.

“America aims to steal the fruits of the revolution,” read a statement translated by SITE intelligence group, which was released after Hadi’s inauguration. “America’s project in Yemen will never succeed . . . our operations will reach the American project and its tools . . . wherever they are.”

In his first public statement on the inherited terrorist threat in March, Yemen’s new president rebuked al-Qaida.

“We are unwaveringly resolved to keep up the fight against al-Qaida and we will chase them to every cache until they are eradicated, no matter what the cost is going to be,” Hadi said, to the delight of his U.S. counterterrorism partners.

But Hadi is facing many more problems than just a resurgent al-Qaida. He is under mounting pressure to reform a military whose highest echelons remain largely in the hands of the former president’s family. And he is charged with turning around a broken economy and securing relief for a worsening famine amid rising food prices, as well as tackling separatist movements in the north and south that are unrelated to the conflict with al-Qaida.

“At this point,” Johnsen said, “it looks as though Yemen is going to be a broken and weak state where Islamist groups are able to thrive for some time to come. The US can either double-down on its current policy of bombing in the hopes al-Qaida doesn’t attack it first, or the U.S. can completely revise its approach to Yemen and come up with a policy, which would include a strong counterterrorism component that would deal with all of Yemen’s problems — not just al-Qaida.”

Merah, who was shot dead on Thursday at the end of a 32-hour police siege in Toulouse, was believed to be responsible for a killing spree in the city and in nearby Montauban that left seven people dead, including three children.

Authorities had reported early on that Merah was believed to have worn a video camera as he carried out the killings.

According to Le Parisien, the package bore a postmark dated March 21, or the day Merah was cornered by police. The newspaper said investigators were working to determine if the package was mailed by Merah himself on Tuesday evening March 20 or by an accomplice on the morning of March 21.

According to Reuters, a “source close to the investigation” said the video comprised a montage and audio of Islamist war songs.

An al-Jazeera employee confirmed this account, acoriding to Reuters.

Here and elsewhere, it looks like we can expect the Obama administration to continue to barrel down the path that has already taken us far from the country we used to be. And by next year, if a different president is in the Oval Office, expect him to lead us even further astray. With that in mind, here are five categories in the sphere of national security where 2012 is likely to prove even grimmer than 2011.

1. Ever More Punitive (Ever Less Fair-minded).

Those who imagine the era of overreach in the name of national security coming to an end any time soon would do well to remember that some spectacular national security trials are on the horizon — and that we may be entering a new age of governmental vindictiveness. Among the most newsworthy of those trials: the military commissions at Guantanamo that will bring to the docket Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attack, and his co-conspirators, as well as Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged point person in the 2000 suicide attack on the U.S.S. Cole in the port of Aden. These will likely include capital charges and be prosecuted in a spirit of vengeance.

But that spirit won’t stop with al-Qaida ringleaders and operatives.  A series of cases not involving attacks on or the killing of Americans will also be argued in the name of national security and in a similar spirit of vengeance. To begin with, there is the upcoming court martial of Pfc. Bradley Manning, accused of downloading classified U.S. government documents and leaking them to the website WikiLeaks. And then, of course, there is the potential prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in federal court — a federal grand jury is now considering his indictment — for his alleged collaboration with Manning.

Both cases have been hailed with a righteous anger that might strike an outsider as akin to frothing at the mouth. Top officials have insisted that the WikiLeaks materials threatened American lives and left “blood” on the hands of both Assange and Manning (though no one has yet pointed to a single individual physically harmed by the release of those documents).

At the more bloodthirsty end of the American political spectrum, former Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and Congressman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), among others, have called for Manning’s execution. As Rogers explained, “I argue the death penalty clearly should be considered here… [Manning] clearly aided the enemy to what may result in the death of U.S. soldiers or those cooperating. If that is not a capital offense, I don’t know what is.”

A similar, if less lethal, desire for punishment lies behind the Obama administration’s determination to aggressively pursue and crack down on leaks to the media from inside the government, even when they don’t involve the actual theft of government documents. Obama, of course, entered the Oval Office proclaiming a “sunshine” policy when it came to the workings of the government, only to move beyond George W. Bush in attempts to clamp down on whistleblowers.

The pending trials of two former CIA officers exemplify this pattern. Jeffrey Sterling is charged with leaking classified documents to the New York Times’ James Risen about plans to release flawed information to Iran in a potentially counterproductive effort to subvert its nuclear program; John Kiriakou just pled not guilty to releasing information to the media about Bush-era torture policies. All told, the administration has gone after six suspected leakers — more than all previous administrations combined — using the draconian Espionage Act.

In the matter of leakers, the message couldn’t be clearer or more vengeful. The government’s position has been this: expose us and we will turn on you with a fury you can’t imagine. As terrorists have been warned that new laws and legal systems can be built to deal with them, those accused of leaks to the press are being told that even the full extent of the law may not be the limit when it comes to punishment.

Witness the treatment of Bradley Manning in his first year of punitive captivity before he was charged with any crime: he was kept in a Marine brig in total isolation and forced to sleep naked. Or consider the attempt not just to prosecute but to destroy the life of former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake. He was accused of leaking classified information on what he considered to be a wildly wasteful NSA program. In the end, though charged under the Espionage Act, he pled guilty to the misdemeanor of essentially borrowing a government computer — but not before his life had been turned upside down and his job lost.

2. Ever More Legal Limbo (Ever Less Confidence in the Constitution).  

By now, it’s old hat to acknowledge that the indefinite detention of those once deemed “enemy combatants,” now termed “unprivileged enemy belligerents,” has become as American as apple pie. Like the Bush administration before it, the Obama administration insists on its commitment to holding nearly 50 Guantanamo detainees in indefinite detention without charge or trial.

In May 2009, in a speech at the National Archives, the president couldn’t have been clearer: indefinite detention, he stated, would remain an option in the national security toolbox under his administration.  In this way, he guaranteed that an American version of offshore (in)justice and the essential character of Guantanamo, which he once claimed he would shut down, would continue intact.

In 2012, however, there is a worrisome new indefinite detainee category to worry about: U.S. citizens. Previously, Americans were exempt from incarceration at Guantanamo and so from its policy of detention without trial. In 2002, Yaser Hamdi, a Saudi-American citizen, when discovered at Guantanamo Bay, was hurried to a plane in the wee hours of the morning and whisked away, a sign of the rights still accorded American citizens. Similarly, the “American Taliban,” John Walker Lindh, apprehended on the Afghanistan battlefield, was brought into the federal court system.

Lately, however, Congress has shown less respect for the distinction between rights accorded to citizens and non-citizens. Last month, Congress passed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The debates over its passage reflected a concerted effort to make American citizens as well as foreigners subject to indefinite military detention.

Ultimately, citizens supposedly remain exempt from the new law, but even so, it was a close call and a signal about where we may be headed. As a recent Congressional Research Service report on the NDAA explained, it is “not intended to affect any existing authorities relating to the detention of U.S. citizens or lawful resident aliens, or any other persons captured or arrested in the United States.”

Still, there remain many fears and much confusion about what protections are retained by U.S. citizens under the Act. Nor did President Obama’s signing statement, asserting that he would “not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens,” assuage those fears and confusions. If American citizens were indeed protected from indefinite detention under the new legislation, why was such a signing statement necessary?

There is yet another place where the law seems to have plunged into legal limbo without in any way abridging U.S. actions: the high seas. Earlier this year, the Obama administration announced that it was detaining 15 pirates captured off the coast of Somalia — and that they were being held without reference to any legal status whatsoever. According to New York Times reporter C.J. Chivers, “where interdiction ends, an enduring problem begins: what to do with the pirates that foreign ships detain?”

According to the State Department, the pirates will be tried. But where? In the words of Vice-Admiral Mark I. Fox, “We lack a practical and reliable legal finish.” In other words, the U.S. has not yet found a country under whose law it can try them. In the meantime, according to the latest reports, the U.S. Navy continues to confine them. Think of this, conceptually speaking, as a floating Guantanamo intended to hold for-profit enemies.

3. Ever More Secrecy (Ever Less Transparency)

“Necessary” secrecy has been the fallback explanation for much of the information that has been withheld from public scrutiny since 9/11. The military commissions at Guantanamo will proceed, for instance, in part on the claim that, if the accused, many of whom have already been held for a decade, were to be tried in federal court, too much would be revealed that could somehow compromise the country’s security.

To counter civil libertarian claims that secrecy is only an attempt to hide embarrassing or wrongful behavior, the current administration has promised “transparency” in the military commissions scheduled to begin later this year. Efforts at transparency, announced last fall, included a website where documents — filled with redactions (blacked-out sections) — could be accessed by the public, and a closed-circuit viewing, albeit with a 40-second delay, for the media and members of the victims’ families.

It has taken next to no time, though, for the government to contradict those vows of transparency, ensuring that, in the polite words of Spencer Ackerman of Wired’s Danger Room blog, Guantanamo will remain “not a place of openness.” Meanwhile, all mail between the detainees and their military defense counsels is being screened, a practice that understandably has those lawyers in an uproar.

In the category of non-transparency and the growth of secrecy as a first principle of government, there is the administration’s elaborate dance of nondisclosure over a memo produced by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).  It was evidently written to justify the assassination by drone in Yemen last September of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, alleged to have been the “bin Laden of the Internet.”

Until recently, the administration has ducked questions about al-Awlaki’s killing and that of another American citizen, Samir Khan, the editor of the al-Qaida magazine Inspire. In January, the government announced that Attorney General Eric Holder would soon make public the OLC memo that legalized the killing, but delayed the Attorney General’s explanation until early March. Meanwhile, the New York Times and the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for its release. On March 5th, Holder finally gave a detailed explanation of the tortured reasoning behind the targeted killing of al-Awlaki, but still, no memo seems to be forthcoming.

During the past year, the imposition of secrecy on government activities of all sorts has only become more pronounced. To offer just one egregious example among many, consider the government’s behavior in the case of former CIA agent Jeffrey Sterling.  At its request, a federal judge has now agreed to allow it to invoke the “silent witness rule.” In other words, she will let government documents be shown to the jury without being made public, on the grounds, according to prosecutors, of “national security.”

After a decade in which the customary practice in matters of “security” has been to sweep all too many government documents of significance into the shadows under that rubric of national security, this should hardly be surprising. Americans now know ever less about what the government they elected does.  If it were not for the FOIA lawsuits of the ACLU and others, very little of what we do know about torture, warrantless surveillance and other instances of government malfeasance would ever have seen the light of day. Consider the increasing number of whistleblower prosecutions as one more way to try to shut government activities off from the eyes of the citizenry.

4. Ever More Distrust (Ever Less Privacy)

For years, the prospect of warrantless wiretapping in the name of national security has had a chilling effect on Americans who have opposed government policies in the war on terror. In 2008, President Bush signed a new FISA Amendments Act (FAA), which authorized the government to snoop on citizens with minimal oversight from the already secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts.  (They were set up in 1978 to oversee the granting of surveillance warrants against potential foreign intelligence agents.) The Obama administration has continually opted to uphold this power and the government’s freedom to warrantlessly tap electronic communications between people outside the United States and people inside the country in the name of national security.

Meanwhile, the latest revelations in the ever-more-distrust, ever-less-privacy sweepstakes are led by news that the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has implemented surveillance programs that violate the civil liberties of that city’s Muslim-American citizens.  The NYPD infiltrated mosques and universities, collecting information on individuals suspected of no crimes, in conjunction with a CIA officer (now withdrawn) using methods traditionally reserved for that agency.

This surely represents, however informally, an abrogation of the CIA’s mandate to conduct its surveillance only abroad, and it’s likely that no one involved will pay a penalty for it. In addition, in a striking combination of security overreach and police profiling, the NYPD has been investigating and surveilling Muslim-American citizens well outside the city limits — from New Haven, Connecticut, to Newark, New Jersey.

To make matters worse, the government just approved the use of surveillance drones as part of a growing law enforcement arsenal for gathering information in the United States. On February 14th, President Obama signed a bill allowing for the use of such drones in a broad array of arenas, ranging from business activities to law enforcement.

The message is clear enough: this year (next year and the year after) will be the year of more snooping.  For law enforcement, your life is apparently an open book.

5. Ever More Killing (Ever Less Peace)

Scarcely a day goes by without news of the use of Predator and Reaper drones to kill individuals in foreign countries, including in recent years Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Libya and the Philippines. It’s as if the CIA and the military have been handed a new toy that they just can’t refrain from using, or teaching others to use. According to the Atlantic, “Conservative estimates suggest hundreds of noncombatant civilians have been killed in Pakistan alone.”

Meanwhile, the drumbeat for war with Iran continues to build. Faced with the prospect of an Israeli attack on the Islamic Republic, the Obama administration has refused to definitively back away from the prospect of becoming part of that war.

“Iran’s leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment,” the president said.  “I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. And as I have made clear time and again during the course of my presidency, I will not hesitate to use force when it is necessary to defend the United States and its interests.”

In fact, the urge to stop a potentially disastrous confrontation, which could seriously affect the price of oil and the global economy, has sent high military and civilian officials winging from Washington to Israel with warnings against an attack on Iran.  Still, war continues to be treated by diplomats and others almost as a fait accompli.

The news then is certainly grim, and moving in one clear direction — the use of the law, or at least the Justice Department’s version of the law, to justify whatever acts the government feels are necessary against whomever they deem to be the enemy. Attorney General Holder summed the situation up tellingly in his defense of the al-Awlaki killing.

In significant detail, he explained that the killing of an American citizen (and terror suspect) was lawful, despite the fact that it brought into question the guarantee of due process under the Fifth Amendment, and despite the guarantees offered by the laws of war. “Due process,” he declared, “is not judicial process.” It was a startlingly honest admission of something new under the American sun: due process is now what the president and his closes advisors decide it is, a constitutional rethinking of the first order to justify the “targeted killing” of an American citizen.

To sum up, the legal gray zone Washington has, over the course of a decade, plunged us into — and everything that goes with it, including punitive measures, attempts to bypass constitutional guarantees, the spread of secrecy and surveillance, a growing distrust of American citizens, and straightforward killing — isn’t something we will soon put behind us. The move away from the rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution and the law is very clearly the way of the American future in our new age of enemies.

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Sounds grave, doesn’t it? No less penetrating a critic than Esquire’s Charles Pierce characterized Holder’s March 5 speech at Northwestern University’s School of Law, as “a monumental pile of crap that should embarrass every Democrat who ever said an unkind word about John Yoo.”

Yoo, of course, is the Bush administration lawyer who helped write memos rationalizing that anything short of “organ failure or death” wasn’t torture.

Then why are so many Americans, myself included, so blasé about it? Partly because we’ve all been raised on spy thrillers like the Jason Bourne series, in which picturesque world capitals teem with rogue CIA agents scheming to bump off Matt Damon.

But more importantly because most feel that, American citizen or not, if you’ve run off to join a band of lunatics at war with the United States, then the United States is also at war with you. Indeed, Congress has specifically authorized armed hostilities against al-Qaida and its affiliates.

Anwar al-Awlaki called the play; he basically got what he asked for. John Yoo has nothing to do with it.

Terrorism suspects can be arrested in Detroit or Miami, read their rights, and brought to trial. Holder made a big point of that, taking credit for the life sentence administered to failed “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

Not so, however, in the Pakistani tribal areas or the mountainous wastes of Yemen where al-Qaida plotters hide—places where governments barely control major roadways, and then only by day.

At Northwestern, Holder enumerated circumstances under which the President, as commander-in-chief, can legally use “lethal force” against an al-Qaida operative planning terrorist attacks.

“First, the U.S. government has determined, after a thorough and careful review, that the individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States; second, capture is not feasible; and third, the operation would be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.”

He added that “the Constitution does not require the President to delay action until some theoretical end-stage of planning—when the precise time, place, and manner of an attack become clear.”

In short, it’s not a legal proceeding; it’s an act of war.

In a stinging editorial, the New York Times declared Holder’s reasoning “deeply inadequate.” Specifically because, the newspaper argued, the attorney general “gave no inkling what the evidence was in the Awlaki case…Mr. Awlaki made tapes for Islamist Web sites that justified armed attacks on the United States by Muslims. But was he just spouting off, or actively plotting or supporting attacks?”

Actually, Holder gave far more than an inkling. Don’t Times editors feel a responsibility to read the attorney general’s speeches before condemning them?

According to the Justice Department transcript, Holder said Abdulmutallab confessed in detail to FBI agents “how he became inspired to carry out an act of jihad, and how he traveled to Yemen and made contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen and a leader of al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. Abdulmutallab also detailed the training he received, as well as Awlaki’s specific instructions to wait until the airplane was over the United States before detonating his bomb.”

He confessed these things freely, without being tortured.

Holder never said so, but the U.S. District Judge who accepted Abdulmutallab’s plea needed to be convinced that his story checked out—both for his sake and the government’s.

So I have no tears for the late Anwar al-Awlaki. Nor for Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, a Saudi bomb maker also reported killed by the same drone-launched CIA Hellfire missile. He built Abdulmutallab’s infamous dud bomb, among several others. Also among the dead was Samir Khan, an American citizen of Pakistani origin who edited articles like “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”

No, we don’t kill people in the USA for blogging about jihad. But Khan surely understood the risks he was taking.

As for secrecy, my goodness. U.S. and Yemeni agents had pursued al-Awlaki ever since Abdulmutallab dropped the dime on him in 2009. Yemen’s army fought pitched battles with rebellious villagers sheltering him. The manhunt couldn’t have been better publicized had Donald Trump led the posse. He knew he was wanted; everybody knew why. If al-Awlaki had wanted a jury trial, there was never a time he couldn’t have surrendered.

Moreover, in a war, no commander is obliged to risk more soldiers’ lives than an objective is worth. For all the dubious morality of drone strikes, this would seem the kind of operation for which the weapons are well-suited.

Are there troubling precedents? Certainly. We can all imagine a President Santorum raining Hellfire missiles on promiscuous women or proponents of the Albigensian heresy.

But that’s make-believe. al-Awlaki’s terrorist bombs were real. President Obama certainly wasn’t obliged to wait until one of them exploded.