Yemeni military officials are confirming that an air strike earlier this weekend killed 14 people, all of them civilians, including a number of women and children. The strike was in the Bayda Province and targeted two vehicles on the highway.
Officials said that the attacks were the result of “faulty intelligence” and that they had initially believed the people in the vehicles were members of al-Qaeda. The initial reports had left doubts over whether it was a Yemeni air strike or a US drone strike, but Yemeni officials insist they carried out the attack themselves.
Of course, the Yemeni government has in the past lied and taken credit for US “mistakes” in air strikes in an attempt to keep heat off the Obama Administration for civilian deaths. This will likely mean that suspicion over the actual attackers will linger.
The US is in a bit of hot water itself over a drone strike last week, one of several launched in Yemen, which killed a moderate cleric. The cleric had been an critic of al-Qaeda for years and the Association of Southern Provinces Clerics filed an official complaint with the Yemeni government.
Bin Laden, a Yemeni, differed from the rest of the bin Laden industrial magnates in claiming an ancestral entitlement to Arab lands ceded by British legerdemain to the House of Saud. If it weren't for US power, such a claim might find favor with Saudi Arabia's imported work force and lots of others contemptuous of Saudi 'royals' magically transformed from nomadic boors into world-important power. This why we're in Yemen killing civilians? Our preservation of a single Arab clan's control of the world's oil markets may turn out to be more of a cause for blowback than even our one-sidedness with israel over Palestinian rights.
A government that sells the lives of its people at the bidding of a foreign power has lost all legitimacy (if it ever had any) and has absolutely no right to govern.
Those were not civilians, they were [fill in the blank: terrorists, insurgents, militants] in the making. All it would have taken for them to turn against their kind benefactors was the slaughter of their families. See, that's how good the US really is as pre-emptively eliminating a problem that hasn't even started yet. And you guys thought they were clueless and incompetent.
This is all, as already mentioned by W_ThePoster, an attempt at controlling the Arabian space, by giving power to the few "proven" friends. Those "friends" are as loyal as they can be. it is because they have zero choice. What choice does royal Saudi family have? They have to get "engaged" in any project US wants them. With Saudi oil money, with Saudi propaganda, with Saudi and other Western intelligence recruiting the raw material, poor useless young people for fighting anywhere for any cause. Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Caucases, Iraq special-purpose squads, Bosnia imported religious extremism, Kosovo's crime family business, Libyan "revolutionaries", Syrian "revolutionaries", and of course, inventing militants in Yemen. In Yemen, the idea is to prevent South to separate from the North Yemen, a union that will not last no matter what US does with drones. On the ground, the situation is not sustainable, and Sana'a will not be able to keep Hadhramouth from splitting. At present, the rich families of Saudi Arabia that are of Hadhramouth origin heavily finance this separation.