Jeremy Scahill’s piece at the Nation website (“Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?,” 3/13/12) about imprisoned Yemeni journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye is riveting and deeply reported. But to Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum, the story doesn’t quite add up…because Barack Obama seems like a decent guy.

As Scahill reports, Shaye has “risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al-Qaeda and to interview its leaders.” He argues that this reporting has not exactly won him friends in the U.S. or Yemeni governments:

His collision course with the U.S. government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al-Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al-Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, 14 women and 21 children were killed.

Shaye was subsequently arrested and likely tortured by Yemeni authorities, who charged and convicted him on terrorism charges. The case has drawn international attention, with media and human rights groups denouncing the trial. Pressure inside Yemen seemed to be working, and a pardon was ready for then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh to sign.

Enter Barack Obama, who “expressed concern” over Shaye’s release. The pardon was shelved; as Scahill reports:

Yemeni journalists, human rights activists and lawyers have said he remains in jail at the request of the White House.

Salon‘s Glenn Greenwald weighed in (3/14/12), reminding readers that the initial media accounts of the attacks in Majala were wildly misleading–the strikes were carried out by Yemen, those killed were “militants,” and so on. As Greenwald puts it, the world knows the truth about this attack–which was a U.S. strike using cruise missiles and cluster bombs–because of Shaye’s reporting.

Seems pretty straightforward. But not to everyone. Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum wrote a response headlined, “Is Barack Obama a Murderous Sociopath?” The crux of Drum’s argument is that Shaye’s reporting isn’t all that important. “I wonder what’s really going on,” writes Drum. “Because here’s the thing: the attack on al Majala was no secret.”