Yemeni man denied apology from US for drone strike that killed his family

Spencer Ackerman in New York
Friday 2 October 2015 15.11 BST

Faisal bin Ali Jaber came to recognize that in his case, justice was not realistic. The most he could hope for from the American government that killed his family in a drone strike was an apology, much as the families of two wrongfully killed westerners received from Barack Obama.

But the answer came on Wednesday from the Justice Department: no.

Earlier this week, Jaber, a 57-year old Yemeni man, had offered to drop a federal lawsuit he filed in June, which sought to establish that the 29 August 2012 drone strike – which killed Jaber’s brother-in-law and nephew – was unlawful.

He already had reason to believe his family was collateral damage of US drone strikes in Yemen, the open secret of US counter-terrorism. He had received a cash payment of $100,000 in sequential bills from a Yemeni official – condolence payments that the US occasionally sends to relatives of people mistakenly killed.

Since the money didn’t come with any acknowledgement that the strike even occurred, let alone an apology, Jaber visited Washington in November 2013. He even got a meeting at the White House, as the Guardian reported at the time. Still, Jaber left without answers for his family’s deaths. A gambit in a German court to hold the US drone campaign’s foreign partners accountable also went nowhere.

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