Free At Last! Yemeni Reporter Who Exposed U.S. Missile Strike Goes Home After 3 Years in Jail

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SURVIVOR MOTHER: [translated] At 6:00 a.m., they were sleeping, and I was making bread. When the missiles exploded, I lost consciousness. I didn’t know what happened to my children, my daughter, my husband. They all died. Only I survived, along with this old man and my daughter.

SURVIVOR DAUGHTER: [translated] Missiles attacked me and my brother Ibrahim and my mother. Their hands were cut.

JEREMY SCAHILL: The echoes of Gardez were everywhere, so many of the details repeating themselves. But there was one important difference: In Gardez, the American soldiers went to obscene lengths to cover up the killings; here in al-Majalah, despite the official denial, they had left their fingerprints strewn across the desert. Why would they deny something so obvious, when anyone who visited the bomb site would see the truth? But maybe that was the point. There was no declared war in Yemen. Out here, in the middle of the desert, no one was looking.

AMY GOODMAN: An excerpt from Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars. Jeremy, you were at al-Majalah.

JEREMY SCAHILL: And, in fact, what I say right after that is that the one local journalist who had investigated the reporting—the bombing had disappeared.

You know, I mean, what I felt there when I was talking to those survivors is that the only Americans they will ever meet are cruise missiles, that took their—the lives of their family members. And, you know, being there with them and listening to this woman who had lost so many members of her family, and this tribal leader, Muqbal, who was there—he was spared from that attack only because he was running an errand that day, and he returned back to find his village completely blown up. And I talked to tribal leaders who went there within 24 hours of the strike, and they described a scene where livestock and humans—the flesh of livestock and humans was melted together, and they couldn’t determine if it was goats or sheep or human flesh, and they were trying to figure out how to even bury the dead. And, you know, we have video that’s extremely graphic of infants being pulled from rubble, you know, children. I mean, 21 children were killed in that attack, and 14 women. And they claimed it was an al-Qaeda strike, but then when the Yemeni Parliament went to investigate it, they determined that that was a total lie.

And why is it that the Obama administration has never had to publicly state why they killed 14 women and 21 children in the first strike that President Obama authorized? And, you know, cruise missiles are a devastating weapon, and cluster bombs, which are banned internationally—the United States is one of the only nations on earth that continues to use cluster bombs. These are like flying land mines that shred people into ground meat. That’s why the tribal leaders were saying, "We couldn’t tell if it was the flesh of goats or sheep or humans." I mean, I’ve seen in Yugoslavia and elsewhere the aftermath of cluster bombs, but to use these on a Bedouin village—I mean, this White House should have to explain why that strike was in the interest of U.S. national security.

AMY GOODMAN: You talked about the White House’s response now, that Shaye should have had to serve out his full term. Also talk about President Obama’s phone call to the dictator, Saleh.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Yeah, in—well, what happened is that—you know, so, Shaye is convicted in this kangaroo court, and then, in February of 2011, the Saba News Agency, the official Yemen news agency, did a report saying that Ali Abdullah Saleh, the dictator of Yemen, was going to pardon Abdulelah Haider Shaye. You have to understand, at the time, there were posters put up all throughout the Yemeni capital demanding his freedom. There was huge tribal pressure. The human rights organization HOOD, which was representing him—huge pressure. Rooj and other activists, other people in Yemen, there was massive pressure on that dictatorship to release him. Everyone knew it was a sham, and everyone in Yemen knows about the bombing of al-Majalah. It is—you see postcards with it at demonstrations, demanding accountability from the United States. And he’s the guy who exposed it, so people knew who he was.