Good morning cyber traders. Happy Monday on this May 6th. Good to see you all I do you grant leader at large. Good to see you all first of all. I like to make an announcement. I Told my wife I was gonna do this for her so Anybody watched the Kentucky Derby this weekend just out of curiosity. Anybody watched the Derby one of the probably a little bit of a horse fan myself, but probably one of the biggest Upsets in sports history. It was unbelievable, right? Any craze field? Well, anyway, it was a complete disaster Disaster for some people but the reason I'm gonna make an announcement is my wife actually had the 20 horse and she wanted to win she back. She told me she goes bet the 20 and bet the 13 Meanwhile, I was so dumb. I should have bet an exact the exact that paid the $3,000 I couldn't believe it So she won a fortune and she was jumping up and down the funny part is she thought I had one place in show When the horse came in second and she started throwing things at me young She had you in a better for place and show me why I says honey I think the horse got disqualified and then she like are you kidding me? I couldn't believe it was just a great experience So it's fun to see people win, but yeah, Debbie had a great time leader. I was awesome So hopefully I don't know if you had a fun experience on that I had but I thought that was pretty cool Anyway, what's going we look like we have another catastrophe going on this morning the stock market's taking a Major major hit and everybody obviously knows if you're watching the financial stations. What's going on? They said that the tariff is going to start be kicking in.  What do we trade? What's moving? What's moving in the market? Do we get in this? Do we get in that? Whatever well first of all old ETFs are on fire right now And you know, I'm not a big ETF fan, but there are times when you do have to trade ETFs and today is one of those days All right, so I need to go out there and focus on certain ETFs We'll check them out But you know you could see some of them the Vicks and all of them they'll do them pretty well I mean some we gapped up pretty nicely and so on but we're gonna we're gonna play around There are a couple of stocks that are moving and then we'll go there, but let's go Let's talk about what happened on Friday, but before we do that Just quick announcement I know we have a lot of new people that are joining us today here at Cybertron University and just remember please make sure you've watched your videos Over the weekend what to expect here in a trading room and most importantly make sure you talk to your education advisor here at Cybertron University So you can explain to you exactly what to expect be in the this trading room Please keep in mind. This is not a teaching room. It's a trading room. So just look listen and learn All right, so now what happened on Friday? Let's check out some of the stocks that we did trade on Friday. First of all We had us steal that did pretty well had a really nice recovery. You could see how that stock Let me just fix the time zone again on here Really nice recovery. That was one of the more stocks in our morning watch list and pre-market nine o'clock Winner of a 1460 popped out of the gate went to 15 all the way up to about 1620 and Pretty much that was about it at the 10 o'clock.  She did made your days pay. That was fine COty was a phenomenal mover just out of nowhere built a beautiful Falstow flag right around there You could see it right there, but this stock went from 11 only to 1260 had a little bit of a nasty shake But that stock did pretty well pins Pinterest I got out of my Pinterest. Okay, I got out of it stocks been taking a very very big hit Thank God we got out of it, but it's also taking on the continue to take a big hit right here with the market going down It was a really nice swing trade at the IPO price, but once again You know listen that's trading.  They come crashing down Everything comes back down. Nothing goes in a straight line, but that one did pretty well MA X R is another one that did pretty well on Friday. That one was pretty easy went from 550 You could see here to 10 o'clock went all the way to about 650 nice nice day nice little mover and Please don't look at this $55. I think it's going back since last year Just take what the goal is we make our money and we move on all right now What's moving this morning? Well, like well, there was this one stock all of you guys doing a pre-market right now the AMTX That one's actually doing really really nicely very cheap little stock Beautiful thousand flag right here at a buck 20 shot up to a buck 50. It's testing 160 Look over here on the matrix on the level three lot of big orders 2011 thousand, you know nice orders everywhere. So the stock is doing very very nicely That one looks like one of our strongest ones going in the market in the open It's already up about 80% and please guys don't Discriminate because it's on the $5. I always get people look at it and says oh I don't trade stocks like this You know what by the time you figure it out. You already out of it made your days pay You know what I rather trade distant trade Facebook at 200 bucks. I'll be honest with you need less money Less risk more reward now. What else do we have? Regarding about some of the stocks that are going on out there like I said the market's taking a very big hit Obviously a lot of the news has to do With the with the tariffs that are going on. I didn't think it was gonna take that big of a big hit I mean that is a substantial big hit. A lot of us are probably thinking about it. Is it a buying opportunity? Do we sell out of some of stocks? I'll tell you truth. I'm like considering getting out a lot of my long swing trades right now I mean that is a huge huge Corrections gonna go happen in the market, but I'm just looking at the the TV and just seeing what they're saying on regarding the news Very very important. You got to be on top of this Listen Positive negative doesn't matter. We're all in the same. We're all in the same business. We're all here to make money together So, you know, the trend is your friend.  Okay. Don't try to analyze it Don't try to figure it out. Don't try to stare at some some some uh crystal ball indicator to tell you Well, this one's crossed with that one. Listen Follow the money. That's all we do here. All right. So let's uh, so what we got going on is that we got some of the some of the etfs uv x y Is obviously capitalizing on this stock right here.    Some of the china stocks are probably gonna take big hits I probably look at some china stocks also that might uh might be affected when we have iq Right iq there. There's uh one of the china stocks Um What is it nio? I think that's the other one, right? Looks like a lot of china stocks are probably gonna take some big hits right here So you could do a couple of shorting here, but you know what the big thing we got to learn about today And a lot of you advanced traders know this Let's see what happens. Do not trade the first five minutes to the open let all the smoke clear Let's see what the with the big wall street um traders on the floor are going to be doing It's gonna gap up you might get some covering going on as some profit taking maybe people don't want to average down But give it about five minutes But you know regarding about the picks. I mean you got you know stocks to watch tv ix to another one biggie tf once again, this is like the double that was at the uh The triple short the double short on this one on the vix this one also is moving I mean all the etfs are all pretty much there. You could see them all are all moving Uh Stocks right here. This one gapped up. I don't know what this was all about this ov id The stock took a big big jump up and it's backing off right now I thought I want to keep an eye on that one too ov id But I think a lot of our attention should be more trading the market Which you know i'm not a very big fan of because the market really never trades this volatile But I think everyone's gonna have to take that consideration So the the biggest tip of the day to trade a market like this guys Is most importantly you work to get like a team and don't think this is your typical home run days We're not getting a lot of 50 75 percent 200 percent winners Um over the course of the day you might we'll see what happens if you open But when you get in a market like this especially going into a monday morning We know monday morning is always difficult because a lot of people come back with a hangover of the weekend You know and you know people still trying to get their feet going to work today So uh you don't get that much action, but with that news it looks like we're going to have an exciting day Fran's already up 45 cents in tvix. All right, let's give let's give fran a nice little round of applause.  You can see over here in the matrix. Definitely to look at that All right guys, so those are our watch lists and uh, let's just get ready for the open Just uh, go go uh go fill up on your coffee Then you go hit the little uh go hit the uh the restrooms if you have to And let's get ready for a very very exciting morning This isn't that we very rarely get this opportunity to kind of train a day like today So, uh, let's see how the street reacts and let's just follow their lead All right, everyone and remember if you're new to cybertree university Just make sure you talk to education advisor and just look listen and learn go look everyone happy trading


It's the network. What's up everybody once again is Brandman Sean and I'm back with another video of Inside the Network where we show you exclusive content from our conversations inside of brandmannetwork.com and in this video one of the artists asked me, how did I grow my YouTube channel? There's some things that I really want to break down and add at the end, but just to make very clear what is Brandman Network, it's a space where we help artists navigate through their situations. We've got artists that we help get signed, we've got artists that we're helping them build their fan base, managers that we're speaking with and in this environment for whatever reason though he decided to ask, what is my way of growing a YouTube channel? Here it is. It's the network. I had a question specific to YouTube Sean. I wanted to know if you could give us some insight on what was your strategy for growing your own channel? Okay, from my channel, two big things were at the beginning, SEO and just going to where people already are. So one, I actually had a few homies and this didn't even get me to a huge amount but I had a few people like people I had my festival and so many other things I'm doing. I had a strategy back on Instagram was still chronological where I had people for the first month posting my every time a video dropped and we all did it at the same time and kind of flood attention and all that stuff. That was just for one month. That might have got me to like 56 followers or something like that but at the beginning you've got to be as manual as possible to get any attention that you can. That's just the purpose of it. Two was the SEO. I'm choosing to do things about artists that people are looking for they're interested in versus just giving them straight information because how am I going to be found in the first place and how are people going to be some people are just curious about the artist first and then they'll realize, oh, I like this information. So and artists do that from in the artist ways, I do remixes that I do beats like such and such like all that stuff. That's the same thing just from an information standpoint. Another huge thing I did was particularly when I had my people posting, I interrupted attention. I'm big on pattern interruption. So I remember one of my homeboys he really didn't want to post my stuff. It was like it was a Fetty Watt video my very first video he was like, yo bro this looks spammy. I don't like the way it looks it feels like it just it was a real bad quality type post. But I have a lot of artists like the lot of artists were following me. This was not because of my general advice is just because of the people I work with work for and all that stuff in there. So like this is what a brand should look like this is what a brand like they love that more produced look like we just talked about the polish and I was like nah man that's the point. So much in this in my and our circle was polished. I know when they see this is going to interrupt their pattern on Instagram and they're going to be like what the hell is this they're going to critique they critique it. They're going to read it and then they're either going to check it out or they're just going to be like yo what is that either way they know what exists and they're not going to forget it. So the understanding that's always going to be relative right you know wearing wearing red to to work or whatever like or dressing in all red having red hair and then you go to some corporate job you probably gonna stand out you wearing red in a in a gang of bloods you just fitting in you know I mean like so it's always gonna be relative you have to realize where you're posting and where you're presenting yourself so you can stand out in that particular category first and evolve from there so again that's stand out SEO so leveraging things that are already getting attention to bring me some attention and then third I can't remember what the other thing I said was oh just how I had people like just posting chronological which a doubt that'll be hard to do these days because Instagram has different rules and actually this is less just YouTube but oh and I was also posting like Reddit forums and things like that looking for people with that interest so that's something to keep in mind and I also put that Instagram video who was wherever was asking about Instagram earlier make sure you check to check section I got two videos on that in there but one thing I got to make sure I say I say some of y'all might have heard this already from me but if it makes sense for you which you don't know it yet for sure just try it out figure out how to make TikTok work for you because in a place that is is early it's a sweet spot if you can get it to go you will get it to go and you will probably have more followers and and people checking out for your stuff in one month that you have on Instagram right now maybe went hard like some people are less than that so just keep that in mind for real for real for real. Alright so that's that video and there's a few things that I want to add because that was the conversation but I can always you know add on a few other things that I did in the very beginning so here's one thing as well I actually went on Reddit and I was dropping videos in Reddit groups that had interest in hip hop in just artist growth and things of that nature and I put the videos there as somebody else right at the very beginning until it got to the point where other people were posting my stuff there as well sometimes I got flagged and had to fight that situation generally speaking though I got a lot of great feedback especially since there was pretty much nobody doing those types of videos it seemed right at that time so yes I leveraged organic music marketing I mean organic advertising just using a small subset of influencers and by influencers I meant just friends and I'm not even talking about big influencers but they were influencers in a small community and I was targeting them so remember when we talk about influencer marketing or influencer PR and things of that nature and we make sure that you get on platforms that have an overlap of fan bases well this is exactly what I did essentially right I had friends that had similar friends and I was helping them advertise me in multiple ways so a lot of their concentric circle overlap started to experience my videos again and again and just looked like I was everywhere to a very small I mean to a very very small subset of people but it worked over time right and you can start in the exact same way not just a YouTube channel but as an artist whatever and then another thing especially if you're talking about how to grow a YouTube channel that's not like an artist thing being consistent and dropping a lot of content is a huge thing most people say they want to do it but consistency is an extremely hard thing most people won't do it so that sounds like some fluff thing you always hear but no it is a real thing and then the SEO making sure that you actually consider things that are trending there was a combination of things that I did right I did trending topics just to bring in some energy right to bring in that free traffic that comes from organic SEO but then I did other topics that other people weren't talking about because at the end of the day there might be more people trying to do that whole SEO game where they want to type create videos based off of things that are already searched but once you hit that all right there's gonna be other people doing it which means they're gonna be competition and you want to do those better than anybody else however on the other end when people come and they decide hey man I like what you have to say well I like your type of video then you also need to say look this is what I differentiate I don't want to just be the SEO topics that are trending just to stay top of mind what's going to create your brand and give a people idea of who you are deeper than the training topics and how you differentiate and position yourself in the marketplace is what you decide to talk about right I don't talk about a lot of production things I'm not a producer don't want to be a producer I don't talk about certain aspects of being an artist because I'm not an artist I'm a marketer right I have a lot of experience with artists right I've seen a lot of things but at the end of the day I'm a marketer so I don't get heavy into the legalities I don't get heavy into sync licensing and all those types of things even though I have a lot of the knowledge but for positioning sake especially marketing and branding right is because I do that is not just hey I'm doing this advice the general advice that a lot of people do on the channels I'm doing this in real life and I'm helping other artists so now I can I'm presenting that type of advice it helps position me if I stay in that pocket versus chasing other things that bunch me up with people who aren't necessarily even doing what I'm doing because marketing is definitely a trending topic how to grow a fan base like all those types of things right how to promote a song how to boost your Spotify plays that's something that a lot of people will talk about just to talk about because they're trending and they're going to give their advice on it just to get views on it but if I just talk about those and I just talk about those again in in the way that other people talk about them that won't differentiate me from people who just go and then create a video off of it and from me who is actually doing it and seeing these finer results so that's another thing brand positioning and that's something that you only get from going over over and over and over when it comes to the videos that you create and understanding that what is your perspective what is your POV and your POV doesn't mean you're talking head you're giving advice or anything like that even as an artist what do you have to say or what's interesting is there a strong aesthetic right is that is there a strong feel of vibe and energy that people get through get from you what do you want to own that part really becomes important after you get past that initial hacking of the SEO and things of that nature you don't have to run ads I didn't start running ads to to build my channel I didn't do a lot of things to build my channel that I know how to do what I do for other people why because a lot of it was just for one making sure that it was as real as possible and there were plenty of periods some of you might need this some of you might not there were plenty of periods where I did antiviral videos is what I call them right I do viral videos channel starts to really take off but what that happens with that is a lot of people a lot of people that aren't necessarily your core demographic the core audience you want to speak to start to experience the videos and they like it and they think it's dope or they're starting to be negative and stupid but then they start to also see the rest of your channel and it doesn't connect right right they think that you're I don't know another type of channel for my instance and they might think it's a world star or a DJ academics or a complex style channel or whatever that might be right when it's not it's not commentary for the sake of commentary or any of that it's analyzing how success happens in the music industry or providing marketing and branding type insights from real things that get done real data real experiences all of that stuff so my audience isn't the fans I don't want the fans generally speaking right my core that I need to make sure I grab first is people who actually care not people who just are artists no people who actually care to educate themselves and make decisions so that's a smaller and smaller audience and that doesn't mean that you don't need to have a huge fan base it means that you need to have people that you know that you're speaking to right and as long as you're speaking to those people the extra people they're all you know they're all good like that's cool so when I go back to the antiviral videos what I meant by that concept is I might have that video that pops off but then after that I might do a video that's so boring that is can't be bearable for anybody who doesn't want actual practical information right to do the task that I'm set out to do help artists grow right so they're not looking for that specifically and if they're only in it for like a quick fix right that's not the type of artists that I'm trying to communicate with the type of business music professionals that I'm trying to communicate with so I would literally go the other direction with that type of content just to weed out some of those general fans as you might call them right and even again some of those artists who aren't actually and really bear that and really just want somebody to hold their hands they thought they were going to study but not it they're not really serious serious for real for real alright so those are some concepts that you can utilize for yourself but it might not be relevant to you that's last thing especially but anybody who might be watching this was just building a channel in general that's not even music specific and might have a more business-minded focus those are some aspects that you can use especially the antiviral videos just to keep yourself on track because easy to get lost in the sauce of what's cool what's popping trying to get a hundred thousand two hundred thousand subscribers right trying to get millions of views all that stuff is cool but remember you can have a whole lot of views and very few people that respect and understand what you're saying that'll actually capitalize and pay you if they're doing it for a business need or you can have the right people and then build from there right which means they're gonna be better for business better to network with better to even be connected with just because they're obviously doing better for themselves or carrying themselves a different way same goals for fans right that's that same idea I'm either connected on a superficial level with not necessarily even the right people or I know who my core fan base is and I make a certain amount of money when they say that 1000 fans alright and I'm able to live a sustainable livelihood just because I've targeted and I'm clear on who I'm speaking to so that's it for that video again that clip that I originally pulled this from is from a conversation and brand man network calm we have a lot of great conversations and there's a lot of stuff that I'm not going to ever show inside the network because it goes very deep into artist situations no go investor negotiations so many things where we're talking to artists in real time helping them do their situation and the information is too sensitive to just pop on the YouTube channel all right so hope you like it hope you join or check it out it's not a hundred thousand members to be to be in brand man network it is only a limited availability so if you don't get in before it closes you can you know check out the wait list and if there's ever more space will let you know if you liked this video go ahead like button if you like it you might as well share it and if you're not subscribed you know what to do hit that subscribe


There are no real guidelines for us to follow when it comes to ancient artifacts. We have very little to go on in terms of what it takes to make sense of what's going on on this earth in the very remote past. For example, in a Scottish town that is now a housing estate, a mind-blowing discovery was made here in 1887. What was uncovered was not only one of the finest and oldest ancient works of art, but it is thought that it may even be some sort of star map. It is thought to be at least 5,000 years old and in 1967 the decision was made to bury the site. Isn't that astonishing or what? The reasons for burying it was of course to preserve it for future generations to try to uncover what this ancient marvel represents and what great secrets it may hold. It is older than the dynastic Egyptian civilization, but it is not older than the Giza Plateau. But if we were to believe the history books, then we are to believe that 5,000 years ago we were not only building structures for posterity, but we were also leaving graphic artwork behind that appears to represent some sort of star map. We have to conclude that the site at Clydebank in Scotland is far older than what they claim it to be. Again, we find a place on earth we can't make much sense of because it does not fall into line with our education. Thinking beyond what we have been told is our only option and we are convinced there are many thousands of clues to uncover throughout our world about an ancient civilization that history and time forgot about for countless thousands of years. There are plenty of artifacts that we can look at and really wonder how it was envisioned. One such artifact comes from the Sakara Necropolis that was discovered only five years before the Wright brothers took to the sky with a plane. Wait till you hear this. The year is 1898. This is a time when the Western world was basically looting Egypt for ancient artifacts. One of these reclaimed artifacts was what would later become known as the Sakara artifact. It may be a smoking gun as to how we develop the ability of aviation. Though its shape resembles a bird, it more closely resembles a modern airplane with the head of a bird. Furthermore, the higher glyphs on the model airplane read the gift of Aman and three papyrus found near the artifact mentioned the phrase I want to fly. Crazy, right? The history channel proved the Sakara bird was capable of flight. They turned towards Simon Sanderson to build a replica of the artifact. Sanderson performed several tests on the replica in a wind tunnel without a tail plane and found that it produced four times the gliders own weight and lift. The only thing that prevented the Sakara's bird from achieving flight was the lack of a rear stabilizing rudder needed to maintain balance. And according to researchers, the Sakara bird did in fact possess the critical component that was lost in time. It is not the only such artifact from history that appears to depict knowledge for flight. There are such clues in the Nazca lines and even from ancient Indian epics, which describe the amount of flying machines. Nazca lines being one of the better examples of flight. The lines could only be seen from the sky. They were accidentally discovered in the 1920s. And if we had never taken to the sky, we would have never have known that they were there. Does that not just blow your mind? Of course, we must have had the ability of flight here on the earth in the remote past. Even the Mayans literally depict a working fly machine on Lord Pakal's sarcophagus, complete with breathing apparatus, levers for control and even jet thrusters. It is just another example that a civilization existed on this earth that is beyond comprehension of what we have ever gave them credit for. We have evidence that ancient civilizations had knowledge of star charts, knowledge of advanced building techniques and the capabilities of flight. It all points to the obvious answer that we really don't know a lot about history beyond 5,000 years ago. Wouldn't you agree? The Sakara artifact is just a tiny part of the mini theories concerning the possibility of ancient lost technology. And like most controversial theories, we'll probably never know the real story. What do you guys think? Was there flying machines on our world in a time that predates history? Comments below. Thank you for watching.


Peyton's speech, I think we all kind of took away from it as, hey, this guy is going to run football. Everybody kind of just linked the other, like, oh, Peyton Man is going to be the commissioner of the NFL. Here we go. Roger Goodell, he's not going to be around for the next CBA.  Did he just propel himself directly into the conversation of this guy should be the commissioner and I'll say this. I bet he would get voted in by the NFL and its owners.


Well, welcome every morning, everybody, and thank you very much for joining us this morning for this event on counterterrorism in Yemen. It will not come as a surprise to anyone in this room that Yemen has become an increasingly visible security challenge for the United States over the past year. That is in large part because of its status as a weekly governed country, one in which al-Qaeda is seeming to gain some momentum. The one response to this has been increased attention to Yemen from the media, where we have seen all kinds of speculation about Yemen's future, including the possibility that Yemen is poised to become the next Afghanistan-failed state. And we have also seen an increased response from the U.S. government, which has made counterterrorism one of the pivots of its engagement with Yemen, and one of the central elements of its overall policy with Yemen more broadly. Now whether counterterrorism should be the pivot of U.S. policy in Yemen, and if it is, what kind of counterterrorism policy is most appropriate for a country like Yemen, which faces quite an extraordinary range of challenges, and whereby all accounts or by many accounts the numbers of al-Qaeda in the country remain relatively low, are very important questions for U.S. policymakers, and the reason why the Yemen Working Group at the U.S. Institute of Peace, which I direct, I'm Steve Heidemann, decided to focus our session this morning on the question of counterterrorism in U.S. policy in Yemen, and as a component of U.S. policy more broadly toward Yemen. And I can literally think of no one more qualified to address the subject of counterterrorism in Yemen than our speaker today, Ambassador Daniel Benjamin, who is the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism. Counterterrorism is a subject that Ambassador Benjamin has focused on for much of the past 20 decades in a variety of different capacities. No, two decades, 20 years, excuse me. You're very well preserved. Two decades, two decades. As a journalist, he has written two books on the subject. He has held a variety of senior positions relating to counterterrorism, both in and out of government, as a member of the staff of the National Security Council, as a foreign policy speechwriter and advisor to President Clinton, as director of counterterrorism in the Office of Transnational Threats. So this is a specialist on counterterrorism, I think, without peer in Washington and in the U.S. government. And we're delighted to have him here to comment on where counterterrorism fits in U.S. policy toward Yemen. I'm also especially pleased to have Ambassador Benjamin here because among his many impressive accomplishments is his tenure as a former USIP senior fellow. Ambassador Benjamin spent 2,000 here as a Jennings Randolph fellow. We're always particularly pleased to welcome our alumni back to USIP, especially after they have made good. And so please welcome Ambassador Benjamin. Thank you very much, Steve, for that kind introduction and for clearly designating me as the Methusel of CT specialists. However, I'll return to my regular age now if you don't mind. Anyway, it's a great pleasure to be at USIP. Again, always a pleasure to be in this room. I want to thank you and the Institute's Yemen Working Group for the invitation. I'm delighted to see colleagues who I think would have every bit as much to contribute to this subject right in the front row. Ambassador Barbara Bodine, who was one of my predecessors, as well as Ambassador in Yemen, and Ambassador Steve Krajewski. And there are many other people here I'm sure who could say just as much of value. Let me say it's also a particular pleasure to be at the Institute because of the role it played in my career, which you mentioned. And it gave me a home after I left the NSC at the end of 1999. That was really a critical opportunity for me to work through some of the ideas that I was developing about why Al Qaeda and its brand of terror was distinctive from what we had seen before. And it really was an extraordinarily valuable experience for which I will always be grateful. I also want to say that working where I do now, I see your new building quite frequently. It's extraordinarily beautiful. We very much look forward to having you in the neighborhood and having even more convenient conversations like this. So I hope you'll be kind enough to invite me to recapitulate this speech there. I'm sure many of you saw the recent Washington Post story claiming that government officials now rank Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and specifically in Yemen as the most urgent threat to United States security, even a greater threat than the Al Qaeda Corps in Pakistan. Let me just say for the record that we have no such rankings and such statements are of little value except to highlight a threat. Terrorism emanating from Yemen is a major security concern for the United States, but the Al Qaeda Corps in Pakistan remains an extraordinarily formidable and dangerous terrorist organization whose targeting of the United States continues despite the pressure that the group is under in the federally administered tribal areas. As we've seen over the last year though I think it's also important to note that the threat, the terrorist threat continues to evolve in ways that make a purely geographical focus less and less important. So we need to put away the ranking tables and turn our attention specifically to the danger and the nature of the threat. Let me also make clear what many of you and certainly Ambassador Bodino knows very, very well. Yemen isn't a new security concern. Al Qaeda has had a presence in Yemen since at least December of 1992 when it carried out. It was probably the first of Al Qaeda's attacks when it attempted to bomb in a hotel in Aden where American personnel were staying. Those troops you may recall were en route to Somalia to support the UN mission there. This was almost eight years before the bombing of the USS Cole. Al Qaeda has really always had a foothold in Yemen and it has always been a major concern in the United States, always that is to say as long as there's been an Al Qaeda. In the 1990s a series of major conspiracies were based in Yemen, most of them aimed at Saudi Arabia. Following the attack on the Cole, the Yemeni government with support from the United States dealt significant blows to Al Qaeda in Yemen through military operations and the arrests of key leaders. What is important today is that the December 25th conspiracy demonstrated that at least one Al Qaeda affiliate, AQAP, has developed not just the desire but also the capability to launch strikes against the United States in the homeland. The gravity of the AQAP threat was clear to the Obama Administration in day one and it has been focused on Yemen since the outset. In the spring of 2009 the Administration initiated a full scale review of our Yemen policy. That review led to a new whole of government approach to Yemen that aims to coordinate our counter terrorism efforts as well as our non-counter terrorism efforts with those of other international actors. Our new strategy seeks to address the root causes of security and to improve governance and central to this approach is building the capacity of Yemen's government to exercise its authority and deliver security and services to its people. To advance this strategy we've engaged consistently and intensively with our Yemeni counterparts at the highest levels I might add. Senior Administration, civilian and military officials including Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Jeff Feldman, Assistant Secretary, I'm sorry, former Sencom commander David Petraeus and myself have all visited Yemen to discuss how we can jointly confront the threat of Al Qaeda. We've put an unprecedented priority on Yemeni issues, Yemeni issues and continue to engage with a broad array of Yemenis from the government and from civil society. Recently as many of you know the National Defense University hosted a group of Yemeni officials for two weeks and I can tell you that an unprecedented number of senior representatives from numerous U.S. agencies met with the group while they were here. I actually met with them twice and just last week I met again with representatives from a Yemeni human rights organization. I've seen a lot of press pieces and think tank papers that discuss the need to deal with AQAP not just through security means but through a wide range of other efforts. What I haven't seen yet is much discussion of how we're doing just that. Of course we're working on the security issues, we would be negligent in our responsibilities to the American public if we were not. However we're also putting significant effort and resources into helping Yemenis achieve a more stable, peaceful, prosperous and democratic Yemen. So are other bilateral and multilateral players and we are also working to find ways to improve these efforts. But they are real and they should be recognized. Yemen's future is tied to its neighbors and to others in the global community. I already mentioned AQAP's ambition to strike the United States at home. Within the Gulf AQAP has already shown itself to be a formidable threat to Yemen itself with many recent attacks on security services throughout the country. And it continues to target Saudi Arabia including the attempted attack against the assistant minister of the interior and counter-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef. While terrorism knows no borders we must also be mindful of the regional dimension of the AQAP threat including its ties with Somalia. The large refugee population from Somalia amplifies the historic ties between these two states and we know that the vast majority of these connections are not related to terrorism but rather are a matter of economic migration or Somali refugees fleeing political strife. But clearly there are connections across the Gulf of Aden between extremists and they are concerned. Yes Somalia's al-Shabaab is a different kind of organization from AQAP in Yemen in many ways. It's much more focused on a Somalia centered agenda while AQAP continues to pursue a more classical al-Qaeda course of global terrorism. Even so we see a serious threat to regional stability in the connections between these groups and that gives greater urgency to our work against AQAP and to support the constructive forces of moderation and peace in Somalia. What is critical today is that the government of Yemen is fully aware of the threat emanating from AQAP. It has conducted multiple operations designed to disrupt AQAP's planning and to deprive its leadership of safe haven within Yemeni territory. These security operations may over time weaken the enemy's leadership and deny at the time and space it needs to organize, plan and train for operations. At the same time countering violent extremism in Yemen over the long term must involve the development of credible institutions that can develop, can deliver real economic and social progress. That's why our strategy in Yemen is two fold. To assist the Yemeni government not only to confront the immediate security concern of AQAP but also to mitigate the serious political, economic and governance issues that the country faces. The logic behind the strategy is that while we work with the Yemeni government to constrain and dismantle AQAP, we along with the international community will also assist the Yemeni people to build more durable and responsive institutions. Our goal is a more hopeful future and a more capable Yemeni government that will meet more of the needs of its people, a good in itself but also key for reducing the appeal of violent extremism. In fact, the United States has made capacity building one of the cornerstones of our Yemen policy. In the important areas of security, economic development and governance, the U.S. and its international partners are helping the Yemeni government address the state insufficiencies that are exploited by terrorists. As I mentioned, the United States isn't doing this alone. The international community has been active in helping Yemen address its shortcomings and our efforts in the country are part of a global partnership to enhance security and improve governance. We're working with all of Yemen's international partners to better coordinate foreign assistance and to make sure that it has an impact on the ground. Through the Friends of Yemen process, the United States is engaged with international partners including regional states and we're working with the Friends of Yemen to help address a multitude of problems. The Friends of Yemen Forum launched nine months ago in London has provided an environment for international coordination and created working groups on economy and governance as well as justice and rule of law issues. The Friends of Yemen are helping Yemen to support a national dialogue and parliamentary elections in 2011. Plan for new courts and an increase in police and judicial process in remote areas. Radicalization action plans and renew a push for coordination improvement in border security. The Friends of Yemen will hold a ministerial meeting later this month in New York on the margins of the UN General Assembly. We're encouraged by the progress to date and we expect further international coordination in this arena. The stability of Yemen is essential as well to the broader Gulf region and to global security and de-legitimizing AQAP also requires addressing Yemen's challenges to break the cycle of radicalization. AQAP takes advantage of insecurity in various regions of Yemen which is worsened by internal conflicts and competition for governance by tribal and non-state actors. Yemen's myriad social and political problems in the context of under-governed spaces means areas of Yemen are serving as incubators for extremism. The only way to address the problem of terrorism in Yemen is from a comprehensive and long-term perspective. We're working to help strengthen Yemen's capacity to provide basic services and good governance. Yemen, as you all know, is grappling with severe poverty. It is the poorest country in the Arab world. Its per capita income of $930 ranks at 166 out of 174 countries. Its oil production steadily decreasing. Water resources are fast being depleted and with over half of the people living in poverty and the population having grown from $8.4 million in 1980 to an estimated $23.8 million today, economic conditions threaten to worsen and further tax the government's already limited capacity. Moreover, corruption is all too prevalent in various sectors and further impedes the ability of the government to provide essential services. Therefore, the United States is providing development assistance to improve governance and help meet pressing socioeconomic challenges. USAID has started two development initiatives, a responsive government project and a community livelihoods program. In looking to tackle the areas that are most in need and most vulnerable to extremism, US assistance includes political and fiscal reforms, reducing corruption and implementing civil service reform and economic diversification to generate employment. In addition, the Middle East partnership initiative, MEPI, is working with Yemeni civil society to empower Yemenis to build a more peaceful and prosperous future. Let me provide you with some numbers. Baseline US assistance to Yemen increased from 17.2 million in fiscal year 2008 to 40.3 million in 2009 and will be around 67.5 million in 2010. The president has requested approximately 106.6 in baseline assistance for 2011. These numbers do not include let me emphasize that do not include counterterrorism assistance of 67 million in FY 2009 and 150.5 million in 2010, nor do they include humanitarian assistance. On July 24th, the president announced an increase in US humanitarian assistance to Yemen of 29.6 million, raising the total to 42.5 million for this fiscal year. This assistance will provide food, water, sanitation, shelter, and health care for over 324,000 individuals displaced by the conflict in northern Yemen, as well as refugees in southern Yemen. The United States urges other donors to support international agencies working to meet these urgent humanitarian needs as the United Nations Humanitarian Response Plan remains woefully underfunded. We're also working internationally to prevent funds from getting to AQAP. As soon as it announced its formation in January 2008, we began gathering evidence to build an international consensus behind designating AQAP under UN Security Council Resolution 1267. After our designation of the group as a foreign terrorist organization, and its senior leaders as designated terrorists, the UN announced the designation of AQAP as well as its leader, Nasser al-Wahishi and Saad al-Shihri, and more recently, Anwar al-Alaki on the consolidated list. This move requires all UN member states to implement an assets freeze, a travel ban, and an arms embargo against these entities. With these designations, the US and the international community concurred the financial networks and the freedom of movement of known terrorists. In the case of Anwar al-Alaki, this designation has made clear his role as an operator in a terrorist group. We should make no mistake about al-Alaki. This is not just an ideologue, but someone who has been personally involved in planning terrorist operations against Americans, against US interests, and against the homeland. Anwar al-Alaki prepared Umar Farouk Abdul-Muttalib for his attempted detonation of a bomb aboard Northwest Airlines flight 253 on December 25th of last year. In mid-July, al-Alaki was designated by the Treasury Department under Executive Order 13224 before he was added to the 1267 consolidated list of individuals and entities associated with al-Qaeda or the Taliban. In order to succeed in Yemen, it's vital that we understand how recruits are radicalized. What their motivations are and how we can address the drivers of radicalization so that we can begin to turn the tide against extremism. Some of our aid programs will help address underlying conditions for at-risk populations. Reducing corruption, building legitimate institutions, increasing economic opportunity with our assistance will also reduce the appeal of terror. And we will continue to build positive people to people engagement with the people of Yemen through educational and cultural exchanges. Programs that have had a multiplier effect as participants return to Yemen and convey to friends and families the realities of American culture and society and dispel damaging and persistent stereotypes. These initiatives contribute to the long-term health of our bilateral relationship and helps us allay suspicion and misunderstanding. We know the tasks are daunting and that's why we're looking for new partners from Yemeni civil society to work with us as we deepen our engagement with Yemen in this regard. In addition to such initiatives we are committed to supporting internal peace within Yemen and we support international efforts to achieve that goal. A ceasefire is currently in place in the conflict centered in the Sada government of northwestern Yemen between the central government and the Houthi rebels. A few weeks ago Houthi leaders and Yemeni government officials met in Qatar to further discuss implementation of the ceasefire agreement that they reached in February. The U.S. continues to encourage the Yemeni government to move forward toward a lasting peace in Sada as well as to allow for the provision of humanitarian and development assistance there. In the south of Yemen a growing protest movement has led to riots and sporadic outbreaks of violence and it is fueled by long standing political grievances. The U.S. continues to urge political dialogue and peaceful settlement of grievances to address the many concerns of southern Yemenis. The U.S. also calls for a comprehensive and inclusive national dialogue between all opposition groups and the ruling party. Such a dialogue needs to be undertaken in good faith and with haste by all parties to address legitimate grievances that facilitate successful parliamentary elections in 2011 and increase stability in Yemen. Our strategy recognizes that Yemen has not always had the political will or the focused attention to address its problems. We're working hard with our international partners to address Yemen security and other challenges. We're encouraged because the Yemeni government has shown more resolved than ever before to confront AQAP and to engage with the international community on domestic non-security issues. The United States commends Yemen on its counterterrorism operations and we are committed to continuing support for security initiatives and economic development initiatives. In closing let me just reiterate our approach to the problem of terrorism in Yemen must be comprehensive and it must be sustained. It must take into account a wide range of political, cultural, and socioeconomic factors. Ultimately the goal of the United States and international efforts is a stable, secure, and effectively governed Yemen. We know this is a long-term challenge. We've taken some steps since this administration came into office and we have taken toward that goal and we have taken some towards curtailing the threat. As the government of Yemen grows more transparent and more responsive to the requirements of its citizens, the seeds of extremism and violence will find less fertile ground and a more positive and productive dynamic will begin to prevail. Thank you for listening and I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much both for that very sort of thorough overview of U.S. policy but also for a very interesting diagnosis of the range of problems that Yemen confronts. We will soon move to questions and answers from the floor. We are webcasting this event and have welcomed questions from those who are hearing or viewing the event on the web. We understand that the U.S. Embassy in Yemen has assembled a number of people to hear what Ambassador Benjamin had to say and so we may find some questions coming from Yemen. Just one quick question to get things started. You mentioned that we have requested support from the government of Yemen to deal with issues of governance that seem to be contributing to conditions of alienation and conflict within the country. Could you be a little bit more specific beyond national dialogue which you referred to in which IA is clearly important about what we have asked from the government of Yemen and in particular how they have responded in its concrete way as you feel able to do so. Obviously this is an important part of the discussion and U.S. interlocutors raise it at every juncture because we know that governance is really at the very heart of the country's problems but also of the problems of radicalization in many different contexts around the world and especially wherever we find un- and under-governed spaces. Why don't I just leave this by saying because these are government to government discussions that the Yemenis have welcomed AID's governance program. We have found many positive and willing and committed interlocutors and implementers as well because AID of course is using lots of different partners on the ground. The Middle East partnership initiative is also active in this space and I think that we are hopeful that over the long term these many different seeds will bear real fruit. I think that one of the things that perhaps wasn't captured in my remarks enough but it's important to keep in mind is that for a number of years this decade our engagement was quite minimal so we know where we are starting from on this and related issues and it's important to keep that historical context in mind as we go forward. Questions? If you, we have microphones on the side and if you could identify yourself in advance of asking your question. I'm Hussein El-Hussein with a great newspaper. I see that you focused on the AQAP but somehow left out the reports on Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah training and then arming the Houthis in the north. Are these reports credible by any means? Thanks. We have seen the reports and as I and Assistant Secretary Feltman and others have said on numerous occasions we are unable to confirm them. We have not seen that these have been born out. Eli Lake from the Washington Times. Mr. Ambassador, can you give your assessment of the security of Yemeni prisons in the event that the U.S. would transfer detainees from Guantanamo to Yemen? Do you trust Yemeni jails to keep detainees from Guantanamo detained? Well obviously we've had some well-known jail breaks and they have actually contributed to the problem of AQAP in the region. As you know right now the administration has suspended the return of Guantanamo detainees to Yemen except in cases where the courts have ruled on habeas corpus petitions. It is an issue that we are concerned about and that has also been brought up in the context of the friends of Yemen and we understand that this is an area in which improvements clearly need to be made and in which in a very serious way U.S. security is affected. So we are looking at it now and as I mentioned we are not returning any more detainees at this time. Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. My name is Mohammed Khardar from CSIS. You mentioned that you were looking for partners in civil society of Yemen to aid in these efforts. I was wondering if you could speak to how that search is going as well as to the potential role that civil society actors in the U.S. and around the world could play and specifically if you would consider or there has been consideration of including Yemen in the Economic Empowerment Strategic Regions project at the state. You know it's a wise man who knows when he's out of his lane and I'm going to refer you to my colleagues at AID. I know that whenever I am speaking to Yemenis I'm confronted with any number of new NGOs that I had not known of before and I know that AID is working on getting to know these different organizations and I know that my colleagues seem to be optimistic about the opportunities for working in Yemen but as the counter-terrorism coordinator I can't give you the day-to-day on which organizations are looking hopeful and which aren't so I would suggest you contact AID. Hi, Chris Franders from the American Civil Liberties Union. We've been very concerned about the Target Killing Program and I was wondering if you'd be able to comment on the Target Killing Program as it relates to Yemen and to al-Aqi and in particular we've been very concerned about the government's refusal up to this point about disclosing legal justification for the program as well as what the criteria are for getting off or on it which really is kind of the core of the UN rapporteur on extrajudicial killings critique of the program. Well thanks for that question. As you know ACLU has brought suit on this issue and we are currently in court on this matter and I learned a long time ago not to comment on ongoing litigation for any number of good bureaucratic and legal reasons so I'm going to refer you to my colleague Harold Koh, the legal advisor. Let me just say about Anwar al-Aqi that underscoring what I said before this is not just an ideologue, this is an active terrorist and the United States is committed to preventing harm from being done to its citizens by those who would commit acts of violence against us. Ambassador, I'm Howard Sumpke, I'm the Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Middle East at USAID and I can't answer his question but the numbers that I have I appreciated to run through the budgets are more or less the same. I think the important point is to note that for USAID figures since 2008 we've gone from about 11 or 12 million aiming toward about 94 million in fiscal 2010 which reflects the community livelihoods program as well as the governance program as well as a very serious monitoring and evaluation effort that we're undertaking to try to understand what works. My question for you is how you see the interface between counter-terrorism actions which are immediate, which are addressed to deal with the threats that we might face in a very near future with the longer term requirements that these kinds of projects have, it's not possible as you know to build a community, to create good governance, to increase livelihoods in the immediacy of a terrorism threat but rather these are 2 year, 5 year, 10 year programs that require extensive development. Well first of all let me refer you to the earlier gentleman who wants to talk about NGOs in Yemen that we partner with but you raise an important question, it really goes to the very heart of what we're trying to do and how closely interwoven these different efforts have to be. Development is not going to proceed if there is no security, we know that that's absolutely true but we also know that if we can't get development projects going then we have abandoned the field to extremists and they will find ample pickings if that is the case and that's really been the president's approach throughout and he has really tasked us repeatedly to keep working and keep finding more ways in which we can address a fairly grave economic and social situation in Yemen and there's no walking away from it. We know that the demographic bulge that Yemen has experienced, the decline in its economic output especially in the hydrocarbon sector all these things, the water table these things are very, very serious indicators of a very troubled future and the demographic we've seen a leveling off in many Muslim majority countries of birth rates in Yemen the story is still quite dramatic and the projections 20, 30 years down the line are quite striking. So we do need to work together as one government and I think that we also need to and we are working to improve that connection where also our development efforts are specifically addressing radicalization and around the world I think development communities are recognizing how that really does fall within their ambit and that governments are going to look to them to be able to target those particular problem areas and work on them. Thank you. Before we You can't stop the New York Times. Sir, we have a couple of questions from both the website and the overflow room and let me just pass on a couple of them to you now. Tony Capaccio from Bloomberg asks, in terms of when did you conclude he was an active planner and not just an ideologue? Is this a recent judgment? That's a good question and I would have to go back through my own papers to find out when we made this conclusion but it was certainly clear in the aftermath of December 25th that he had played an integral role in the planning and the execution of the attempted bombing of Flight 253 and as I said we did have the designation this summer so my guess is that we were somewhere in that period. I can't rule out the possibility that we certainly knew that he was a problematic individual last year and his presence on the web and elsewhere has been widely attested to. Of course he came to light as well in the Fort Hood case so his role has been well attested to. The question is when we actually decided that he was not in one category but in the other and I would have to place it earlier this year but I couldn't say with certainty. One other question focuses on different conceptions of counterterrorism policy. What you've presented here today is a very expansive definition of counterterrorism in which the kinetic dimensions are complemented by attention to a wide range of economic, social and political concerns. How widely accepted is that definition of counterterrorism within US government agencies? Where are the fault lines in conceptions of counterterrorism and how are different visions being addressed in the interagency process? We could talk all day about that. I think the important thing is that there is a wide agreement across the government in all the relevant agencies that as John Brennan put it in a speech at CSIS a while ago, you have to also look at the upstream factors. Now we as a government face an interesting dilemma because we don't want to fall into the trap of saying that everything we do is counterterrorism because that is not productive and we don't want everyone who we engage with to feel like they are a target because everything we are doing is because of counterterrorism. As I mentioned before, we support a strong and capable Yemeni state, unified state that is answering to the needs of its people because that is a good in its own right. But I think we also recognize that there are many things that we do that have benefits that encountering radicalization, encountering violent extremist organizations. So to a certain extent the question becomes what do you label counterterrorism? What do you label countering violent extremism? What do you label just good governance? Labeling exercises can often be scholastic and counterproductive. The key thing is that we have to have the right focus and we recognize that it's more than kinetics, it's more than law enforcement, it's more than border security. It's also getting these very complex situations in places like Yemen in Somalia and a lot of other areas that have real governance problems and where the rate of the government may be limited. It's in addressing those broader issues. Hi, Eric Schmidt with the New York Times. At the end of the last administration there were proposals being discussed about creating essentially a rehabilitation center in Yemen modeled after what the Saudis have done somewhat successfully in terms of religious reorientation, job training and putting the onus back on tribes and families of course. What has happened to that initiative in this administration whether I understand the limitations of the US government trying to push this through but either working through the Saudis or the friends of Yemen this would seem to be a constructive way of trying to deal with at least some of the lower security type detainees that are at Gitmo. Thanks for that Eric. We continue to have active discussions on what we can do in terms of rehabilitation in Yemen and the Saudi model is a very attractive one. There are discussions going on within the friends of Yemen and in other fora on this matter. I think one of the things to keep in sight of however is that there are aspects of the Saudi model that are very much Saudi specific to look at two of them. One is that the Saudi model is very much configured to take advantage of the relationship between individuals, families and tribes. Not all of Yemen is as tribally oriented I guess you could say as Saudi Arabia so that is one important difference. Another absolutely critical difference is that Yemen doesn't have the kind of resources to put into this effort that a Saudi Arabia does. In fact very very very few countries do. And when we look at all of the different issues that need to be addressed in dealing with the terrorist threat in Yemen you have to prioritize as well. So rehabilitation remains an important issue but I don't know that we would be able to get to that kind of rehabilitation facility at least not immediately. We had two questions from the overflow room relating to U.S. plans for its military role in Yemen. One from John Bennett of the Defense News who asks what are the odds on a 1 to 100 scale that U.S. troops will be needed in Yemen meaning thousands or hundreds of thousands. The related question is can you go into more detail from Jeff Hines at American University. Can you go into more detail about how U.S. military involvement will evolve over the long term in Yemen? Let me try to answer both of those at once. I think the President has been quite clear in ruling out that kind of military engagement in Yemen if we're talking about major combat forces. I think he's been quite explicit about that and I don't see anyone contemplating that any time in the foreseeable future. So we will continue to be actively engaged in training Yemeni forces to deal with the threats that they face and getting them the equipment that they need and the skills and that will be the key military effort and it goes on in a military channel but there's also an awful lot going on in terms of training civilian authorities in the ministry of the interior so that they can also deal with the counter-terrorism mission. So there's both a military and a civilian side to it. You're not willing to. I'm going to pass on that and consign it to the same waste bin as U.S. news type tables on the al-Qaeda threat. Where is it worst and where is it best? Viewers on the website had two related questions and we can take these as the last of our questions unless there are others from the audience. I would encourage you to move to the microphones if you have them. The first is from a viewer from Gaston Mennonite University who asks how do you see Yemeni stability contributing to Middle East stability more broadly? What are the linkages there? And the second has to do with what capacity Yemen seems to have in being a source for export of terrorists under the al-Qaeda brand more broadly and in particular into sensitive areas in Africa across the Horn. The Yemeni role in broader Middle East stability obviously it's quite important. I think that it's fair to say that Saudi Arabia is deeply concerned and understandably so about the terrorist threat to its south and having suffered the traumas of May 2003 and the attacks there has really been resolved to remove violent extremism from the Arabian Peninsula and has been a terrific partner to the United States in that context and has also been a great partner together on Yemeni issues. Obviously anything that would affect security for Saudi Arabia has a very significant, it's a matter of great significance and concern for anyone who cares about the stability of the region. In terms of the whole region also to the extent that AQAP can maintain a foothold and be a source of extremist ideology but also extremist operatives it is a danger to the region and you know there are Yemeni communities in many different areas in the Gulf across the water in Djibouti and any number of other places and it will be a great concern and of course there are Yemeni diasporas around the world and hence when you find some of the shall we say culturally savvy operators like Al-Laki like some other people who were either American citizens or lived for quite a while here in the United States and who can broadcast that message in a sort of idiomatic way and appeal in a way that al-Qaeda operatives who were working through translation couldn't then obviously that's a big concern for us. There's no question that Al-Laki himself has had an effect on radicalization in this English speaking world that goes beyond what his predecessors had so it is a matter of great concern. Again to repeat what I said before he's also a terrorist operative not just someone who's making use of the opportunities afforded by free speech over the internet so he's a matter of great concern to the United States but the ability to use Yemen as a platform for radicalization especially in an ever more globalized connected electronic world is something we are worried about. You reference Saudi Arabia and Saudi stability as a principal consideration in thinking about connections between Yemen and the region more broadly. You didn't reference Iran and Yemen's repeated claims that Iran has played a role in the Houthi rebellion in the north in support of Houthi forces what is the current thinking in your office about Iran's role in this region? As I mentioned before we don't see an Iranian hand in the Houthi rebellion obviously one would like not to repeat the whole point so often that Iranians start to wonder whether they should be involved but to this point we have seen lots of accusations but we have not seen the evidence. So that has not changed from over the past several months thank you. Les Campbell from the National Democratic Institute or NDI I noted your comments about the importance of better governance in Yemen both to bring better livelihoods as well as potentially build institutions in capacity and certainly would agree with that. I guess a comment and question one comment I would make is that the Yemen government is also suffering from perhaps declining legitimacy and different reasons for that one is that southerners increasingly and I think you also addressed this increasingly would like to in a sense renegotiate the terms of unity and that has caused unrest as well as a perception of perhaps the government, the central government not treating the south well the Houthi rebellion caused for different reasons perhaps more selfish reasons from the Houthis though has kind of contributed to this idea of a government that is lacking legitimacy and finally perhaps good news, an increasingly assertive and organized opposition has drawn attention to things like a legitimacy debate. President Saleh perhaps is trying to groom his son, there are other pretenders for the presidency and so on and I just wonder if you have any view or if you can express a view on the importance of, you mentioned that the plan 2011 election parliamentary election but and I don't want to concentrate on that election but the importance of political processes that are seen to be fair and inclusive you've mentioned dialogue with opposition parties but for example on the election could you comment on the importance of an election that is carried out with agreed upon rules and in a transparent way that could perhaps start to address some of these legitimacy questions around the government Well I think your question sets the table very well obviously it's essential for Yemen to have free and fair elections, to have agreed upon rules of the road, I think that the national dialogue is essential, Ambassador Sesh who just finished his tour, worked very hard on promoting this goal, obviously you know we're going to have a hard time getting from here to there if we do not emphasize the governance aspect of this and you know we have spoken the Secretary at the Friends of Yemen conference made a point of underscoring the need for a unified Yemen, this is actually to come back to your question earlier this is absolutely essential for regional stability and for the future of the Yemeni people and anything that promotes any of these divisive tendencies will be harmful both to the people of Yemen but also to security in the Gulf and beyond so I can't do more than underscore how important it is that the April elections do go well and that we make progress, the Yemenis make progress in bridging these divides which have in the past also had a very negative effect in terms of diverting attention from the threat of extremism within the country so I think there's an abundance of reasons why the political process needs to continue in a positive way I'll in key sweater with Middle East Institute and see no resources Tom Friedman this week had a column called Super Power Super Broke talking about the U.S. and if I do my arithmetic correctly the U.S. aid programs are two to three hundred million dollars a year this year and that's about the number of al-Qaeda agents estimated in the press at least to being there and the prescription is wholesale reform of the society I'm sorry how many al-Qaeda the press I've read it said two to three hundred but maybe it's more I thought you said two hundred three hundred million no no no no no two to three hundred about a million dollars a piece is the point and the prescription is a fairly wholesale change of Yemeni society and long-term trends and this is just the tip of the iceberg so I guess this is a conceptual question and is there any thinking in the CT community about approaches that are not so expensive and that may be more affordable well let me turn your question a little bit on its head and say that I think that this is actually the more affordable way of going in comparison to many of our other assistance programs this is still not that large compared to what we have to deal with when a country is broken as in the case of Iraq or in Afghanistan this is really a very very small amount I would underscore as the president and as the secretary have that this is a matter for the international community and there are an awful lot of countries that have recognized this challenge and are showing their commitment with their pocket books it's a very difficult time obviously for us I think that right now you could argue that our British friends are on a very very difficult course of austerity but they're maintaining their commitment to Yemen and maybe increasing it there are regional actors who have very deep pockets who we continue to encourage to do what is necessary in Yemen whenever you get to the point where you have to use kinetic force things get a lot more expensive that's the first thing and if there are many other options other than waiting until you're sort of at the point of delivery of a terrorist attack and dealing with it then or stopping it earlier on I'm eager to hear them if you had any particular suggestions of course we continue to work aggressively on all the different Homeland Security programs that will restrict terrorist travel that was one of the conclusions or one of the initiatives that came out of December 25th that we had to redouble our efforts on that particularly in an era very inventive terrorist conspiracies in which people who had no prior records who were not in the usual databases were being deployed against us so obviously you know we don't like spending lots of money if we don't have to but this is a key security matter and also a key global issues so we'll continue to pay and to appropriate funds as necessary and I think the Congress has also seen the wisdom of taking this course so if you have that third way I'm eager to hear about it and otherwise I'm afraid we've got the strategy we've got for now it is not common for Yemeni citizens to have the chance to interact with senior U.S. officials I have two questions from people who've identified themselves as citizens of Yemen let me just pose those to you first does the U.S. speak with one voice in Yemen who has the upper hand over the Yemeni file the CIA or the State Department I suspect many Yemenis probably wonder that the second is did the U.S. military give Yemen or Saudi any assistance against the rebels let me answer the second question first with a categorical no on kinetic assistance we are not involved in that part in that conflict we have told them we have told the Yemenis repeatedly that the provision of military supplies is strictly related to the al-Qaeda threat and not to be used elsewhere and we have very comprehensive and used monitoring there was of course an attack against Saudi forces that went across the border that is to say Houthi forces that went across the border and attacked Saudis so in that particular case although I don't have the specifics in front of me the Saudis would certainly be able within their rights to use whatever we had delivered to them in terms of military assistance over the years so let me just be clear about that one there is only one U.S. government policy in Yemen it is hammered out in the interagency process in which the State Department, the Defense Department the intelligence community and others all participate in there isn't anyone that has an upper voice if anyone has a dominant voice it's the president and he's been quite clear that he wants to see this two pronged strategy proceed with all possible haste and sir I think you have the last question for our session I'm Sid Mahanto at Mother Jones Magazine I wondered how human rights abuses on the part of the Yemeni government would contribute to radicalization and perhaps undermine an effective counter-terror strategy in Yemen Human rights abuses are a driver of radicalization I don't think there's any question about that I had the opportunity to deliver the US view on that in a meeting at the UN Security Council earlier this year were quite categorical that human rights abuses together with poor governance the non-delivery of services these things are drivers of radicalization and it is for that reason that we communicate to our international partners and those we work with on counter-terrorism all the time that this is a key part of dealing with their threat when we do lots of different kinds of counter-terrorism training around the world whether it's through the anti-terrorism assistance program that my office runs jointly with diplomatic security or whether it's with any number of other kinds of assistance that are delivered we include human rights training so that our partners understand just how vital it is to maintain standards to avoid anything that will violate human rights and that is something that we do because it is appropriate in its own right but also because we are concerned about how it will contribute to radicalization and this is something my office is very concerned about I believe it's something that the Department of Defense is concerned about there's now a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Human Rights at DOD and it's part of the whole policy so I hope that answers your question and it's been a great pleasure Ambassador Benjamin thank you very much before you leave for the day on behalf of the institute you have not only our thanks but I wanted to give you a copy of a very recent USIP publication Crescent and Dove peace and conflict resolution in Islam we hope that you will find ways to make it useful in your work with our thanks again for your insights into a very complex set of challenges we are wrestling with in the US thank you


Welcome everyone to our session on implementing Dapper in an existing environment. Today we'll be taking you through how we use Dapper to improve an existing event-driven microservice landscape at AgroFirm. We'll discuss choices, the way Dapper has helped us, and give you some pointers on how Dapper may help you in your landscape to improve it. First of all, I want to give a quick introduction on our company. We are IT consultants at InfoSupport, a leading provider in IT consulting and software development. We specialize in delivering custom solutions for customers, including software development, data management, cloud services, and more. With a strong focus on innovation and collaboration, we help organizations achieve their digital transformation goals and stay ahead in today's rapidly-involving technology landscape. I want to give you an introduction on AgroFirm. AgroFirm is one of our customers. There are an agricultural cooperative specializing in providing practical solutions and support for farmers. With a focus on precision agriculture and sustainability, AgroFirm offers services ranging from animal nutrition to crop solutions. About a year and a half ago, we took over a project at AgroFirm where the main goal was to realize the implementation of e-commerce applications and a cell service portal to replace all the systems. The entire platform exists of multiple customer-facing applications and about 100 microservices. To accomplish this, we decided to utilize Dapper. In today's session, we will give you an insight into the work we have done, the choices we've made, and show you how Dapper has helped us implement an event-driven microservice architecture. I want to give you a quick introduction about us. Joining me today is Mika Kozbek, and my name is Stan Ilota. We both started at Infrasport about three and a half years ago and started at AgroFirm about a year and a half ago. During that year and a half, we have had about one year of experience with Dapper. What are we going to talk about today? Firstly, we are going to tell you why we chose Dapper, what led up to us choosing Dapper, and what were the benefits that drew us towards Dapper. Next, we are going to talk about how we implemented Dapper. We are going to give you some information about how we used the Dapper Helm chart in our Kubernetes cluster, which inputs and output bindings we use with multiple messaging solutions. We will show you how we implemented the stave store using Redis, and we will also show you how we managed our secrets using management entities and the secret component. Lastly, we will give you some takeaways on what we have learned and what might help you. Firstly, I want to give you some information on why we chose Dapper. When we joined our project about a year and a half ago, development had already been underway for a couple of years. During the implementation, a previous team decided on using Aka.NET, which is an implementation of the active framework for .NET. While Aka.NET is a powerful tool that certainly has its use cases, a lack of governance and a lot of over-engineering cause the landscape to become overly complex, turn into errors, and hard to navigate and govern. Early on, we decided to overhaul a lot of these services, eventually hoping to replace them, and most of the existing landscape for new components. To accomplish this, we would need to rebuild a lot of existing integrations, which were heavily dependent on Aka.NET, as well as Aka.NET-specific integrations and logic or interfaces. Aside from that, we wanted to keep our options open and have the possibility to replace existing message brokers or integrations with other alternatives. Dapper would give us the possibility to focus on implementing the actual business logic of our application without having to focus on implementing any best practices for the existing components in our landscape. To give you an idea of what our landscape used to look like, in this example, you can see the services used and required to replace or to place an order in the shop. During this process, a total of 12 services were required using multiple events. We used a total of three API calls that we sent through AVR management to SAP. Apart from that, we exposed a web hook to SAP to get updates on any changes on products. During the process, we also used external integrations like SendBrit to send emails to users and SignalR to update clients asynchronously about updates to orders. This process was too complex for what we needed to accomplish, and we decided to replace a big part of these services, combining them into fewer bigger services, which were using more logical separations, and at the same time, we wanted to step away from market.net. We mainly used Dapper for service-to-service communication and caching via Redis, but we might want to utilize more of Dapper in the future. All right. Next, I would like to talk to you about how we deployed Dapper on our Azure Kubernetes environment. At IHIFN, we use AKS to run and deploy our sites and services. Of course, to run Dapper on this environment, we also need to install all of the basic building blocks for Dapper. To do this, we decided to use the Dapper HelmChart. This is a HelmChart officially provided by Dapper, which, as you can see here, can be found in the GitHub repository. This HelmChart provides you with the standard components like the security components, the placement servers, the sidecar injector, and the Dapper sentry. We decided to use this with the HelmChart because of our existing workflow for CI CD. We use Argo CI CD, which is an open-source tool for GitHub's deployments to deploy all of our sites and services with HelmCharts already. The Dapper HelmChart has been pretty well with our way of working. Getting the Dapper HelmChart to work with Argo CI CD was quite easy. Only two minor changes were necessary to get it to run properly. It turned out that Argo CI CD was quite aggressive in killing the Dapper application if it didn't start up within a certain amount of time. As you can see here at the top, we had to increase the timeouts for the lifeliness probe and the readiness probe of Dapper so that it wouldn't be killed before it even had a chance to start. Secondly, our Argo CI CD instance didn't allow for applications to run in root mode, which the Dapper placement service did by default. We also had to turn this off with the setting here at the bottom. This is the way that we deploy Dapper to our Kubernetes environment. If, however, you are also using AKS and water-run Dapper, I would also highly recommend looking into the Dapper AKS extension, which is an extension for AKS also provided by Dapper, which allows you to achieve the same purpose as the HelmChart. It's a different option. We at the iPhone chose for the HelmChart because, as I said, it fit in with our way of deployment, but also due to technical limitations. This is definitely a very viable option. Next up, I want to talk to you guys about the State Store component. We used this to implement Redis into our application landscape. We wanted to use Redis as a caching method, especially in the services handling our shopping cards. We often have to retrieve those. They're quite big. We want to add stuff to them, update them, show them to users, and getting them from our relational database took quite a bit of time. We decided to implement Redis as a cache to speed that up. We used Dapper to enable that. What is the State Store component? For those who don't know, the State Store component allows you to do correct operations on a host of different state management tools. Think about Cosmos DB, Azure Blob Storage, MongoDB, and our case we used Redis. It also allows you to use transactions on those operations. That's quite nice. In our case, we used it. One of the benefits is that we didn't have to learn any fancy Redis SDKs or best practices. We could just use the Dapper client that enabled us to do everything that we needed. We only needed the correct operations so that helped us out. If you do need to do more complex operations, the State Store component might not have you covered, so take a look at the documentation for that. How did we implement it? First of all, we created a new component using YAML. It's quite easy. We specified the type of type Redis. Then we gave the host of our Redis instance, which is running on Azure. We used the default URL together with the name of our service. Then we have a password, which is a secret key reference. We can retrieve that from Azure Key Vault. I'll show you a little bit later in this demonstration how we set that up. It makes it quite easy that we don't have to handle any secrets or references to secrets, but we can just rely on Dapper to do that for us. Next up, we implemented the actual implementation of the Redis cache. We implemented a repository pattern, as known in DDD, to do this. Basically, what we did is, okay, we're going to check in the Dapper cache or in the Dapper client State Store component if we can retrieve a certain value. If that value is not available, we just return null. If it is available, we deserialize that to the object that we need. Later on, we could basically use it in our repository pattern. In the repository pattern, we specify if we want to use the cache. By default, we do want to use the cache. If we do want to use the cache, then we call that method that you saw earlier to retrieve a value. If we see that the value is not null, then we can immediately return that value from our cache. If it is null, then, well, we need to do something else. We can just retrieve it from our normal DB context. When we retrieve it, we also want to make sure that we save it to our cache. Let's say that I'm in our frontend, and I close it, and I want to open it again. I don't have to retrieve it from the database again, but from there on, it will be in my cache. It makes it quite easy to implement this without having to use any specific SDKs. You can just rely on Dapper. All right. That was the stay store component. Right now, I'd like to talk to you about the Dapper bindings that we use. In this simple diagram, I will show you the current setup at the end of the room we use for sending and receiving events. As you can see here on the left, we have Service A, which sends an event to Event Grid. Event Grid will then forward this event to all of the Azure Service Bus Qs that are subscribed to that event, and via the Service Bus Q, the events will end up at, in this case, Service B and Service C. Those are the two Azure resources we use. For that, we use two Dapper bindings. One is the input binding for Azure Service Bus, and one is the output binding for Azure Event Grid. Let's first have a look at the input binding. It's quite a simple component. As you can see, we use the type Azure.ServiceBusQs to connect to the Service Bus, for which we provide the name of the Service Bus and the namespace of that Service Bus. As you can see in this component, we use no credentials to connect to it or no connection strings. That is because we use Azure Managed Identities to connect to Service Bus. Well, as you might imagine, that's really useful because you don't have to worry about any credentials being in your code or anywhere else. It's all handled by Azure and Dapper. This is a simple code example of how we actually receive the events. The input binding will forward any events that it receives to this HTTP endpoint. Those two are matched based on the name. In this case, that's just Q. Here, we will receive the event as the HTTP post body. From there on, we can handle it as we see fit. Next, let's have a quick look at the output binding. As said before, this will connect to Azure Event Grid. In this case, Event Grid did not support Managed Identities. In this case, we actually had to use the access key for Event Grid and the endpoint. We did however use, as in the state store components, the secret sort to get this Event Grid key. We don't store it in the code. Let's also have a quick look at how we then send events. We can just use by using the Dapper Client and then the generic invoke binding action. For this, we pass the action create. This tells the component that it has to send an event to Event Grid. Then, as a parameter, we can pass it a list of events. The main advantage in this case for sending and receiving events with Dapper is that we are basically free to choose our sending and receiving technologies at any point in time. Currently, as shown in the diagram here, we use Event Grid and Service Bus, but because we use these bindings, we can easily change those technologies on the fly. For example, if at any point in time we decide to use Reviton Q, for example, we can switch it with almost no changes to the code. The only small change in this case, we would have to make in this little piece of code because Event Grid actually wants events in a certain format, Event Grid format. That's also something we provided here. For another technology for event sending, we'd have to change that up a little bit, but for the most part, the code will stay the same. Switching in the future, as we expect to happen at the algorithm, yeah, that will be ready for us. Lastly, I want to talk to you about secret management. We show you how we implement our components, but we also want to do that in a secure manner without having to pass around secrets or connection strings all over the place, which might increase risk. We're going to show you how we implemented that in our environment and hopefully it'll help you to do the same thing. First of all, we use Azure Managed Identities, which is a resource in Azure that manages your identity. You can provide it with a few roles for certain resources in Azure, and then you can couple that to either other resources in Azure or, for example, using Azure Workloaded Identity, you can then couple that to both services inside of your cluster. By doing this, you also enable Dapper to use those managed entities. It can out of the box pick up that it has a managed entity available on the surface that it's running on, and then it will use that to authenticate to services unless you specify a different method, for example, a connection string. To show how that works, first of all, I'm going to show you the roles that I assigned to my managed entity. Here I have a service bus topic and a few queues that I authenticated it to as well as event grids and app configuration. Then next up, I created an access policy on my key vault to say that it can get and list all the secrets from the key vault using, well, the application ID and object ID of the managed entity that I'm going to use in my service, which is the same one that I showed before with the roles. Then I can specify a component in Dapper where I say, okay, I want a secret store, and it has to be of type key vault, and then I can specify the name of my key vault. By doing this, because I already assigned the access policy to it, Dapper can immediately pick up, I have this managed entity available, I have the access policy underneath, so now I'm going to retrieve those secrets from there and I'll make them available to all other applications if they want to use them. So to show an example of this, or sorry, of all the other components that might you want to use them, so to show an example of this, I'm going back to the state store that I showed before. Here we have at the bottom a section about authentication where we can specify a secret store, and that's the same name that I specified for my secret store over here, so in this case, that will be Azure Key Vault, and from there on I can just, for any secrets that I need, so for example here for the password for Redis, I can say instead of a normal string, I provide the secret key reference, which is going to be the name of my secret key in the key vault, so in this case, the Redis password, so that enables me to, without having to know the actual secrets, still use secrets to authenticate to certain resources. You might also want to use those secrets inside of your application code, you can also quite easily do that by running the following code, so this example in our .NET code, we just add the dapper client using the SDK, and then to configuration, we can call an extension method, add dapper secret store with the name of the secret store, so in this case, Azure Key Vault, and then also an instance of the dapper client bottom, and this will enable our application everywhere to use those secrets. Do be aware that on startup, you might have some issues using these secrets, because if you retrieve secrets from Key Vault before the sidecar is available to serve them, you might run into an issue where neither your sidecar or your application is healthy, and that can cause your applications to crash, so be aware of that. Okay, so that was a lot of information, let's recap. At the start of this presentation, we saw the old situation at IRFOOM with a lot of complexity and very little manageability, after which we implemented dapper, where especially for us as developers, the key takeaways were that we saw that for new developers, it was quite a lot easier to get started on projects as to IRFOOM. Reason for that being that we only have one framework that developers have to learn, which is dapper to integrate with almost any external service that we have, and secondly, dapper also allows us to be very agile in our choice of technology. If at any point we would like to change any of the underlying infrastructure technologies, we can really easily do so with dapper with almost no changes to the code base. So with that, I'd like to thank you for your time. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them right now, we're happy to answer, and if you think of anything later, please contact us at either our email addresses or on LinkedIn. Thank you.