“Faisal
bin Ali Jaber, a 56-year-old who works at Yemen’s environmental
agency, has been on a mission to find out why his innocent nephew and
brother-in-law were killed in a strike that also took out three
suspected militants. He made it to Washington D.C. last fall, he told
journalist Michael Isikoff, where he met with two White House
national security aides. They listened, but said little in response.
Then, this summer, Jaber was given a bag of “freshly minted”
bills by a Yemeni security official. The money, he was told, came
from the U.S. Government.”
“In one
controversial strike last December, drone-fired missiles hit a convoy
of vehicles in Yemen that turned out to be transporting a wedding
party. The victims’ families were eventually paid more than $1
million.”
“The
reticence may also reflect that the U.S. is loath to admit whom it
considers a terrorist target, and whom a civilian. In a detailed
account of the wedding party strike published this summer, Buzzfeed’s
Gregory Johnsen suggested that leaving the money with the Yemeni
government allows 'the U.S. the wiggle room to have it both ways,
counting the dead as militants while paying for them like
civilians.'”
“Though
the idea of paying for human life seems callous, human rights groups
have argued for compensation for civilian deaths first in Afghanistan
and Iraq, and now in the drone war, as a gesture of respect and as an
acknowledgment of hard financial reality. (In Afghanistan and Iraq,
the military conceived of the payments as part of a hearts-and-minds
strategy – “money as a weapons system,” in the parlance of one
Army handbook.)”
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