The family of two U.S. drone victims is refusing to keep their pain silent as they seek an official apology by U.S. President Barack Obama for the deaths of their kin.
In a CNN op-ed published on Friday, Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni civil engineer, issued a public challenge to the U.S. leader—who recently made public statements about the deaths of two westerners killed by U.S. drone strikes, but has refused to acknowledge Yemeni civilian casualties.
"What is the value of a human life?" Jaber asks.
In the column, Jaber describes how following the August 2012 strike that killed Waleed and Salem bin Ali Jaber, the family had to identify them "from their clothes and scraps of matted hair."
And how in the wake of the strike, while the family awaited an official apology, they were instead presented with "$100,000 in sequentially-marked U.S. dollars in a plastic bag."
Jaber writes: "A Yemeni security service official was given the unpleasant task of handing this over. I looked him in the eye and asked how this was acceptable, and whether he would admit the money came from America. He shrugged and said: 'Can't tell you. Take the money.'"
"The secret payment to my family represents a fraction of the cost of the operation that killed them," he continues. "This seems to be the Obama administration's cold calculation: Yemeni lives are cheap. They cost the President no political or moral capital."
The full article is available here
