Donald Trump’s administration is trying to close the book on its first major military operation — a botched Navy SEAL raid in Yemen that turned into a village-wide massacre, killing as many as 25 people, including 10 children. But the ACLU, which made a Freedom of Information Act request in March, has just filed a lawsuit to force the government to open its files.
When the residents of al Ghayil village in central Yemen heard gunfire the night of January 29, they returned fire, thinking that they were under attack by a local party in Yemen’s civil war. U.S. forces then strafed the village with helicopter gunfire, killing villagers, damaging a dozen buildings, and wiping out the village’s livestock.
The raid, which Trump reportedly authorized over dinner, also resulted in the death of a Navy Seal, William “Ryan” Owens, and the destruction of a $70 million Osprey helicopter. The raid did not kill its intended target — a senior Al Qaeda leader — and villagers denied that Al Qaeda had a presence in the village.
President Trump has insisted the raid was “highly successful,” but his administration has provided very few details about how the raid was authorized and who was killed. On Monday, the ACLU filed suit against the Trump administration to try and uncover basic information about the raid — who was killed, how the raid was approved, and its legal basis.
When the ACLU filed its FOIA request in March, the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, and Justice Department all issued administrative responses acknowledging that they received the request, but none of the agencies have provided any documents. Hina Shamsi, the director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, said that internal documents are essential to understanding the real story behind how the military decided to attack the village, without White House spin.
“We have seen that this White House cannot be trusted to give the public accurate information, which is especially critical when the president authorizes military action that kills civilians,” said Shamsi, director of the ACLU National Security Project. “The administration’s explanations have little credibility, and the documents we seek are essential for public accountability when civilians are killed in the name of our national security.”
The Trump administration has been reluctant to share details about the raid. The Pentagon conducted three internal reviews, looking into the death of Owens, the loss of the Osprey, and civilian causalities. But Gen. Joseph Votel, the Pentagon’s top commander in the Middle East, told Congress that there were no signs of “poor decision-making or bad judgment,” and dismissed the need for any other investigations.
The White House took it a step further and tried to shame the raid’s critics into silence. White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer told reporters that “anyone who undermines the success of that raid owes an apology and [does] a disservice to the life of Chief Owens.” The next day, Trump tweeted that criticism from Sen. John McCain, R.-Ariz., “emboldens the enemy.”
The ACLU is looking for information about how the White House is loosening civilian casualty rules put in place by President Obama in 2013, when he adopted guidelines requiring “near certainty non-combatants will not be injured or killed” before conducting drone strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia. After the Obama administration mistakenly bombed a wedding procession later that year in Yemen, human rights groups expressed concern the guidelines weren’t being followed.
The Trump administration has reportedly exempted parts of Yemen from those rules entirely, in an effort to bomb Al Qaeda more aggressively. According to the New York Times, the Trump administration “temporarily” designated parts of Yemen “areas of active hostilities” — a war zone like Iraq or Afghanistan, where the Pentagon can conduct operations with fewer layers of approval.
The move has allowed Trump to dramatically increase the pace of bombing. So far, the Trump administration has conducted drone strikes in Yemen at a rate five times higher than Obama.
A month after the botched SEAL raid, U.S. Apache helicopters descended on al Ghayil again and carried out “indiscriminate shelling,” according to a local resident. The Pentagon later announced that it had carried out airstrikes across three Yemeni provinces, including al Bayda province, where the village is located.
The Intercept published its own expose of the first raid based on local eyewitnesses. One 5-year-old boy described how his mother was gunned down while trying to flee indiscriminate gunfire from a helicopter.
Top photo: A Yemeni man, at right, looks at the picture on Jan. 29 of 8-year-old Yemeni girl Nawar al-Awlaki, who was killed in the January U.S. raid.
Good expose…
Watch “Good Kill” on NetFlix.
It’s not a “Trump problem.” It’s much more serious than that.
9 civilians in a nearby village (5 of which were children) were killed in their homes during Trump’s attack with tomahawk missiles on Syria early in April. I read the 4 page White House report and it gives us, the U.S. citizens, absolutely NO proof Assad was behind the Sarin attack in Idlib.
That said, will the ACLU be filing FOIA requests for that attack since their reasoning from this article of filing in this attack is that “the documents we seek are essential for public accountability when civilians are killed in the name of our national security.”
Thank you for this story. You are doing what a real journalist is supposed to do.
There is nothing botched in yemen, it is very deliberate to place a Us foothold and presence in one od the most strategic lan
Ds of the world– who controls Yemen controls the enitre southern hemisphere of the globe. Grow up now!
It looks like the guy on the left in the top picture is watching Dragon Ball Z.
This is why I don’t donate to the ACLU. They spend their resources on illegal immigrants and political witch hunts instead of protecting average Americans. Chemtrails and flouride in the drinking water are the real civil liberties violations.
They also defend pretty despicable people, because civil liberties are civil rights.
Nothing wrong in holding the Trump admin responsible, because, as we all know, the raid was not “highly successful.”
If your post is saying that the real civil liberties violations are Chemtrails, and fluoride in the drinking, you are surely listening to too much Alex Jones or Breitbart or Rush L., Get serious and open your eyes.
Chemtrails are a fantasy but combustion engine exhaust is not.fluoride does more good for all– donot mock british or other countries’ bad teeth deficiencies. Fluoride in toothpaste saves your dentition.
This story provides an important reason to support the ACLU. Who else is drawing attention to this?
The U.S. government–the number one terrorist organization on the planet!
They must all be removed from power!
robertsrevolution.net
Hmm… Navy’s SEAL Team 6 … where have I heard them mentioned before. Oh, that’s right, they are the elite group who crashed a H-60 Blackhawk stealth helicopter in Abbottabad during a raid that purportedly resulted in the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Oh, and then there was the ill fated crash of a Boeing CH-47 Chinook military helicopter (code name: extortion 17) in Afghanistan six months later that claimed the lives of those very same Seals. Oh, and lets not forget the Seal Team six mission that was code-named Objective Bull wherein two Chinook Helicopters were used to rain down death upon a convoy of civilians that was wrongly suspected of carrying Osama bin Laden. In keeping with the axiom that “dead men tell no tales”, the Seal Team cleaned up that scene by first killing all survivors and then mutilating their bodies before burying them. I guess that they were forced to dispense with the formality of burying the dead at sea because…
I don’t think it was botched at all. An overkill, maybe, but they were successful in killing their main target. Nawar al-Awlaki.
I find it interesting that there’s no moral outrage when the US murders children even when one was a US citizen and there’s been tens of thousands in this century alone. Also never mentioned are the monetary costs of these botched raids and expensive displays of ‘impressive US ordinance’ in a show of force to impress someone, like say, Brian Williams. The ACLU is doing the best they can against overwhelming odds to get some real information out and let folks know what their government is up to. Is any of this carnage necessary to insure national security? No, it’s not, but will continue as long as no one is held accountable, either individuals or the leaders that commit these war crimes. I would like these senseless act to cease but they probably won’t, in my lifetime anyway.
Calling Yemen villagers “open season” for killing does nothing to make America safe from terrorism here or abroad. Yemen is in civil war between various radical factions and only affects US interests, except to a threat to oil and mercantile shipments in that area. Killing a bunch of civilians under the erroneous belief they may be hiding a few Islamist militants is foolish and counterproductive.
If you want to irritate spies, just say/write: long live ACLU :)
there is no surprise the Gov/DoD hide documents, they want to hide from the public how much they are dirty.
Considering Yemen, the CIA/DoD kill civilians because they want to produce more jihadists and terrorists, to manufacture the war and profit for the US military industrial complex, owned by investment companies who hide who invest in military industry (the same those who supplied lockheed, halliburton, caci, titan, with the Gov contracts: Rumsfeld and Cheney).
They let Taliban to recapture Afghanistan, they bomb civilians in Yemen = they prolong the war in Afghanistan and they manufacture the war in Yemen. In the name of profit.
yup
creating perpetual enemies = perpetual war = perpetual profits
wars”R”us
Yes, we are under the control of the corporate elites in the military industrial complex. War is all about money and profits. General Electric, Boeing, Raytheon systems, etc…..are the big money makers and war is our main export. As long as we have these powerful corporations, there will be wars, death, and destruction.
If not for WW 2, and the hundreds of other wars to follow, including the fake Cold War, the US economy would still be mired in the Great Depression.
I think Trump should be impeached as soon as possible, HOWEVER, it’s not the President’s job to micro-manage the details of every raid the military undertakes. If the enemy is hiding behind civilians, the deaths are their fault, as they are heartless cowards.
The ACLU is way off base on this one…
if the enemy is behind civilians, you postpone the action, you don’t kill civilians, it was not a hostage situation in New York. They had time. aclu is doing great job for all of us.
I’m sorry but that is just nonsense. No, it wasn’t a hostage situation in New York. It was a military raid that had the opponents shooting from behind human shields. Even in the Geneva Conventions its allowed to shoot back at them.
Civilian deaths are regrettable but that’s war is not a clean business. It never has been and thinking it will be is delusional. Wars kill people and break things.
Yes of course they do, but the question is why Yemen? They’ve done nothing against the US and are certainly no threat to us being one of the poorest nations on the planet. They’re embroiled in a civil war and being bombed to hell by the Saudis as it is, why did we need to involve ourselves?
Should we feel safer that some rando terrorist is dead along with scores of civilians? If you answer yes I think you ought to have your head examined.
We still haven’t come to the realization that the government can make up any excuse for war and the media feeds the lie to the public which laps it up like honey. So, America can go to war anytime it wants. The only requirement is to convince the public that war is in their best interests and the media can do that.
Yes, civilian deaths are “regrettable” unless your intent is to deliberately target civilians, to kill terrorists families, and to show strength while being massively stupid.
Thing is, we haven’t declared war in/on Yemen.
“It was a military raid that had the opponents shooting from behind human shields.”
So now we’re tarring these militants (who were fighting on the Saudi/US side, btw) for living with their own families? Instead of, you know, doing the decent thing and living in compounds comprised entirely of hardened, evil combatants so that they are more easily slaughtered without making anyone feel bad about themselves?
There was no “the enemy” hiding behind civilians; this village was in support of the government in Yemen who we support. They were, according to our policies, on our side.
But what you suggest is a complete abandonment of the Geneva accords which make it very clear and explicit that civilians are to be protected in combat.
The thousands of Muslims who died under Obama are just as dead as the Muslims who die under Trump. But the ACLU didn’t care for 8 years.
ACLU: You are a joke, which is a shame. If you actually followed principles instead of partisanship you could be a very important organization.
What makes you think the ACLU did nothing about bad/unconstitutional decisions occurring under the Obama administration?
It took me two seconds to search for the following link. It’s one of several showing the ACLU caring “for 8 years.”
Odd how you partisans so often jump into comments at The Intercept making the assumption that you’re talking to and about partisans.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/16/aclu-files-new-lawsuit-over-obama-administration-drone-kill-list
“The Trump administration has reportedly exempted parts of Yemen from those rules entirely, in an effort to bomb Al Qaeda more aggressively. According to the New York Times, the Trump administration ‘temporarily” designated parts of Yemen “areas of active hostilities…'”
Such verbal sleight-of-hand to try and palm off the Shia Houthi rebels as Sunni Al Qaeda. Apparently, either they , the administration and its advisors don’t understand the difference or they think the public doesn’t. Either way, the ignorance or ignorance spreading is shameful. But not as shameful as killing people in one of the poorest countries in the world who never did anything to harm the US.