Evicting Yemen's Drone Base - James Gundun

Ultimately The Washington Post added little to previous reporting fromThe Wall Street Journal and Associated Press. By the time this “secret” base was outed in June, MQ-9 Reapers had already increased their patrols over Yemen and begun to search for targets after a year-long slowdown. U.S. Hellfire missiles had terminated the deputy governor of Marib in May 2010, killed while allegedly meeting an informant from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). CIA Director David Petraeus, then CENTCOM commander, negotiated these joint-strikes under Ali Abdullah Saleh’s table, only for Yemen’s strongman to flip after a tribal revolt.

When U.S. warplanes and drones again increased their activity "to exploit" the power vacuum opened by Saleh, the besieged president had actually begun passing new information to Washington, starting with AQAP cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Saleh’s tactics haven’t changed before 

or after Yemen’s revolution and neither has U.S. policy.

FROM HERE.