When U.S. drones kill civilians, Yemen’s government tries to conceal it

[xchrom]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/when-us-drones-kill-civilians-yemens-government-tries-to-conceal-it/2012/12/24/bd4d7ac2-486d-11e2-8af9-9b50cb4605a7_story.html


Sudarsan Raghavan/The Washington Post - Ahmed Saleh Ahmed al-Duqari lost two of his cousins in the Sept. 2 U.S. airstrike that killed 12 civilians near the town of Radda, Yemen.

Dhamar, Yemen — A rickety Toyota truck packed with 14 people rumbled down a desert road from the town of Radda, which al-Qaeda militants once controlled. Suddenly a missile hurtled from the sky and flipped the vehicle over.

Chaos. Flames. Corpses. Then, a second missile struck.

Within seconds, 11 of the passengers were dead, including a woman and her 7-year-old daughter. A 12-year-old boy also perished that day, and another man later died from his wounds.

The Yemeni government initially said that those killed were al-Qaeda militants and that its Soviet-era jets had carried out the Sept. 2 attack. But tribal leaders and Yemeni officials would later say that it was an American assault and that all the victims were civilians who lived in a village near Radda, in central Yemen. U.S. officials last week acknowledged for the first time that it was an American strike.

[Old Union Guy]

1. A quisling government appeasing an oppressor. n/t

[marmar]

2. k/r

[Kolesar]

3. Ignorant militants in Yemen were attacking America way before "the war on terror" ...

... 9/11, Iraq War, the new dictator in Yemen, or these drone strikes. It is not surprising that we ended up in this mess.

Smugglers on the Gulf of Aden are smuggling rockets to Hamas so that those fools can fight Iran's war as surrogates or proxies, IIRC.

[woo me with science]

4. Please make it stop. nt