On March 29, 2018, a Toyota Land Cruiser carrying five members of the Al Manthari family was travelling through the Yemeni province of Al Bayda, inland from the Gulf of Aden. The family were heading to the city of al-Sawma’ah to pick up a local elder to witness the sale of a plot of land. At two in the afternoon, a rocket from a US Predator drone hit the vehicle, killing three of its passengers. A fourth later died. One of the four men killed, Mohamed Saleh al Manthari, had three children aged between one and six. His father, Saleh al Manthari, says Mohamed was the family’s only breadwinner.
The US took responsibility for the strike, claiming the victims were terrorists. Yet Yemenis who knew the family claim otherwise. “This is not a case where we’re just taking the community’s word for it – you’ve had verification at every level,” says Jen Gibson, an attorney with legal organisation Reprieve, which represents the Al Manthari family. “You've got everyone up to the governor willing to vouch for the fact that these guys were civilians.” The US Central Command (CENTCOM) has in the past few weeks opened an investigation – a “credibility assessment” – into the circumstances of the strike, which lawyers describe as unusual.
The Al Mantharis’ lawyers worry their clients may have been killed on the basis of metadata, which are used to select targets. Such data is drawn from a web of intelligence sources, much of it harvested from mobile phones – including text messages, email, web browsing behaviour, location, and patterns of behaviour. While the US army and CIA are secretive about how they select targets – a process known as the kill chain – metadata plays a role. Big data analytics, business intelligence and artificial intelligence systems are then used to spot the correlations that supposedly identify the target. “We kill people based on metadata,” said the former head of the CIA Michael Hayden in 2014.
To read more, click here.