Two US rights groups on Tuesday urged the United States to divulge details of a 2009 missile strike in Yemen that targeted Al-Qaeda militants but allegedly left dozens of civilians dead.
Yemen initially said it launched the December 17, 2009 strike in a remote mountain village, but media reports later quoted unnamed US officials saying it was an American operation. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a statement they had filed a request for details on the strike under the Freedom of Information Act. The request seeks information about the legal and factual basis for the strike, whether officials knew there were civilians present and what steps have been taken to investigate what went wrong or to compensate victims’ families, the statement said.
The rights groups say 41 people were killed in the attack, including 21 children and 14 women.
Although US officials say operations targeting Al-Qaeda militants cause few civilian casualties, reports of civilian deaths in Yemen, Pakistan and elsewhere “raise serious questions about whether the government is violating international and domestic law by failing to distinguish between civilians and combatants, and by using lethal force away from active battlefields,” it said.
The US military declined to comment on the request.
US officials usually avoid publicly discussing “targeted killings” against militants abroad, including the 2009 attack in Yemen.
A 2010 diplomatic cable — divulged by the WikiLeaks website — showed Yemeni leaders telling the then chief of US forces in the Middle East, General David Petraeus, that they would cover up Washington’s role in strikes against Al-Qaeda militants.
“We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is quoted as saying in talks with Petraeus, who is now head of the Central Intelligence Agency, according to the cable.
The leaked diplomatic cable also confirmed Yemeni concerns about the accuracy of cruise missiles like the weapon used in the 2009 strike.
