{"id":17593,"date":"2012-12-31T14:37:35","date_gmt":"2012-12-31T22:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=17593"},"modified":"2012-12-31T14:37:35","modified_gmt":"2012-12-31T22:37:35","slug":"us-bombs-killed-at-least-223-people-in-yemen-in-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/31\/us-bombs-killed-at-least-223-people-in-yemen-in-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"US Bombs Killed At Least 223 People in Yemen in 2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US government has killed 223 people in Yemen in more than 40 drone strikes in 2012, according to\u00a0estimates from the Long War Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Long War Journal is a project of the\u00a0Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative think-tank in Washington, DC that has been shown to systematically underestimate information about the drone war.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0new study<\/a>\u00a0from\u00a0Columbia Law School\u2019s Human Rights Institute<\/a>\u00a0finds that the number of Pakistani civilians killed in drone strikes are \u201csignificantly and consistently underestimated\u201d by tracking organizations which are trying to take the place of government estimates on casualties, which the Obama administration won\u2019t comment on because the drone war is technically secret.<\/p>\n

The study \u201cwarns that low civilian casualty estimates may provide false assurance to the\u00a0public and policymakers that drone strikes do not harm civilians.\u201d Many low-ball estimates \u2013 like those from\u00a0Long War Journal and New America Foundation \u2013 are due to reliance on news reports, which \u201csuffer from common flaws\u201d like trusting \u201canonymous Pakistani government officials or unnamed witnesses for the claim that \u2018militants\u2019 \u2013 rather than civilians \u2013 were killed.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even if we take this probably low-ball estimate as a decent enough approximation of the truth, there is a huge problem in estimating how many of the 223 killed were civilians.\u00a0The Long War Journal says that 19 percent were civilians.<\/p>\n

But \u00a0according to the\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/a>, the Obama administration \u201ccounts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants\u2026unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, as\u00a0The Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0last week,\u00a0the Yemeni government as a policy tries to conceal when US drones kill civilians, instead automatically and systematically describing the victims as al-Qaeda militants, regardless of the truth.<\/p>\n

“Forget,” Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations sarcastically implores, “that most of the 223 people killed by US airpower in Yemen are not ‘the most senior and most dangerous AQAP terrorists,’ but actually primarily engaged in a\u00a0domestic insurgency<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

The US is taking out the domestic enemies of the Yemeni government – not individuals engaged in direct attacks on the United States.<\/p>\n

“I’m particularly worried that the US drones in Yemen are being used to settle long-standing scores on the ground,” writes<\/a>\u00a0Yemen scholar\u00a0Gregory D. Johnsen.<\/p>\n

The US has bombed Yemen at least 42 times in 2012, up from an estimated 10 times in 2011. This, unsurprisingly, has prompted anger among the local populations and has coincided with a marked increase in the estimated number of al-Qaeda militants in Yemen.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur entire village is angry at the government and the Americans,\u201d a Yemeni villager named Mohammed told the\u00a0Post<\/em>. \u201cIf the Americans are responsible, I would have no choice but to sympathize with al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda is fighting America.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US government has killed 223 people in Yemen in more than 40 drone strikes in 2012, according to\u00a0estimates from the Long War Journal. The Long War Journal is a project of the\u00a0Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a neo-conservative think-tank in Washington, DC that has been shown to systematically underestimate information about the drone war. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-17593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17593"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17596,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17593\/revisions\/17596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17593"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=17593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}