– 2017-02-04 01:20:29
Pentagon Defends Yemen Killings, Insists Slain Were ‘Female Combatants’
Pentagon Defends Yemen Killings,
Insists Slain Were ‘Female Combatants’
Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com
(January 30, 2017) — SEAL Team 6’s weekend raid in Yemen killed a lot of people, with local officials putting the toll at 57 slain. The Pentagon hasn’t finalized their own toll, but is hard at work shifting their narrative after media reports of a large number of women and children getting shot up in the hour-long raid.
Though they didn’t mention it at all yesterday, the Pentagon is now claiming that there “were a lot of female combatants” involved in the fighting, and that of the 14 people they say were killed in the fighting, there were a number of women.
The Pentagon refused to comment on the images of several slain children, including the eight-year-old of US-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, saying they’re still “evaluating” the death toll.
They stuck to the 14 terrorists killed figure from yesterday despite credible reports of a lot more dead bodies than that being left in the wake of the US attack, leaving totally open who all the rest of the slain were.
One US soldier was reported killed in the offensive, and three others wounded. A fourth US soldier was also wounded in the first evacuation attempt, during which a V-22 Osprey crashed. This was the first ground raid authorized by President Trump, who bragged it would “assist the US in preventing terrorism.”
SEAL Team 6 Kills an 8-Year-Old Girl,
Scores More in Yemen Attack
Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com
(January 29, 2017) — Pentagon officials confirmed that Navy SEAL Team 6 attacked what they described as an “al-Qaeda headquarters” in Yemen’s central Bayda Province, bragging of killing “about 14” al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula fighters and taking a cache of information. They reported a single soldier killed.
Absent from the Pentagon’s account of what happened over the course of the raid, which supposedly lasted less than an hour, and left a large number of women and children riddled with bullets, including at least one eight-year-old girl named Nora, the daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US cleric who was assassinated by the Obama Administration.
The Cairo AP office reported receiving photographs showing the bodies of several young children who were shot multiple times during the raid. Roughly 57 people were killed overall, according to Yemeni officials, though they claimed a lot more AQAP fighters slain than the US reckoning of 14. Either way, a substantial number of civilians were among the slain.
Awlaki’s 2011 assassination was hugely controversial, both because he was a US citizen killed on the orders of the Obama Administration and because the administration declined to charge him with any crimes beforehand, simply presenting his sermons as proof of terrorism. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son was assassinated, again on Obama’s order, two weeks later.
Officials say this raid had initially been proposed to President Obama but wasn’t approved until after President Trump took office and signed off on the plan. Even with the Pentagon ignoring all the slain children, the narrative isn’t exactly one of a super successful first ground raid into Yemen going off without a hitch.
“Pentagon officials confirmed the death of one US soldier in the fighting. Three other soldiers were wounded during the raid, and a fourth was wounded in the initial evacuation attempt, in which the V-22 Osprey crashed into the ground during a failed landing.
Pentagon Withdraws Decade-Old Video
They Claimed Was Netted in Yemen Raid
Jason Ditz / AntiWar.com
(February 3, 2017) — Still desperately trying to present the disastrous weekend raid into Yemen as having netted a treasure trove of valuable intelligence, the Pentagon released, and then sheepishly retracted, a video which they presented as a “detailed, do-it-yourself lesson” on terror attacks.
The release was supposed to vindicate the raid, but media outlets noted within minutes of the Pentagon statement that the video itself had been publicly available since at least 2007, and that the only difference was the Pentagon had gone to the trouble to subtitle it.
The Pentagon withdrew the video shortly thereafter, saying they did not want to give the impression they were trying to deceive people by presenting a decade-old video as new. They didn’t want to give that impression, at least, once it became apparent to everyone that’s what was happening.
Centcom appeared more contrite, insisting they had no idea the video was as old as it was and would never have tried to push it as a major intelligence find.
Pentagon spokesman Jeff Davis, however, was a lot more defensive, insisting it “does not matter” that the video was old, because it’s still illustrative of the sort of thing al-Qaeda is about.
The weekend raid, the first of the Trump Administration, killed an estimated 57 people, overwhelmingly civilians, and destroyed most of a village.
The raid was presented by the Pentagon initially as targeting “al-Qaeda headquarters,” though officials have since admitted it simply was an attack on the home of a suspected al-Qaeda collaborator, and one carried out with a paucity of intelligence.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
