U.S. drones kill civilians in Yemen while the Yemeni government is trying to conceal it, The Washington Post reports.
The report cited a rickety Toyota truck packed with 14 people as an example of blind strikes by U.S. drones. It explained how the vehicle “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.”
The incident occurred over three months ago in central Yemen, according to the paper.
“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 Post said.
According to the report, 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 later said 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.
More than three months later, the incident offers a window into the Yemeni government’s efforts to conceal Washington’s mistakes and the unintended consequences of civilian deaths in American air assaults, the daily said.
The CIA and the U.S. military use drones to target and kill those Washington describes as “suspected militants” in Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia and Libya.
The United Nations has identified the U.S. as the world's number one user of "targeted killings."
Have your say: Is this gift of death visited upon the Yemenis by the USA being swept under the rug by the forces-that-be in Yemen? What is the signifiicance of this Christmas-time revelation?
