Seeking 'True Accountability,' First Civilian Drone Victim Appears in US Court

access_timePosted on by BLOGGERPARUNG

For the first time ever, a civilian survivor of a U.S. drone strike attended a hearing in U.S. court on Tuesday.

Faisal bin ali Jaber, a Yemeni environmental engineer who lost two innocent relatives to a 2012 covert drone strike, is seeking an official apology and declaration of error for the deaths of his brother-in-law, Salem, and nephew, Waleed. In September, three American ex-drone operators filed a legal brief supporting Jaber’s claim.

Ahead of Tuesday’s landmark hearing in Washington, D.C., Jaber wrote to President Barack Obama saying he would “happily drop the case in exchange for an apology” and acknowledgment that his relatives “were innocents, not terrorists.”

As ABC News reported Tuesday:

“True accountability comes from owning up to our mistakes,” he wrote to Obama.

SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT

Human rights group Reprieve, which is assisting Jaber in his case, noted that despite Obama recently “reaffirming his Executive Order to acknowledge and investigate civilian deaths by U.S. drones,” as he vowed to do in July, the administration planned to argue Tuesday “that the U.S. courts have no business deciding whether strikes are lawful—even where war crimes are alleged.”

“I will be in the courtroom as they make those arguments,” Jaber wrote. “I cannot be elsewhere. Salem did not want to ‘die silent.’ I owe it to him to be his voice. He and Waleed deserve the same acknowledgement as Warren Weinstein and Giovanni LaPorto,” he continued, referring to the American and Italian citizens killed in a 2015 strike whose families received a public apology from Obama last year. 

“Their lives mattered just as much,” Jaber said.

Furthermore, Reprieve warned: “If the Obama Administration wins with these arguments, it would give the Trump Administration remarkably free rein insofar as drone killing and the U.S. courts are concerned.”

Click Here: cheap sydney roosters jersey

As Reprieve staff attorney Jennifer Gibson said: “President Obama is right to be worried about what a Trump Administration might do with his secret drone program. But if he is serious about bringing it out of the shadows, he must stop fighting against accountability. He must own up to the hundreds of civilians that even the most conservative estimates say the program has killed, and apologize to those that have lost their loved ones.”

“Instead of fighting Faisal in court,” Gibson added, “President Obama should simply apologize, admit his mistake, and devote the rest of his time in office to building true accountability into a program hidden in the shadows for too long.”

Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

Leave a Reply