Over the past three days, more than 50 suspected members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula have been killed in a spate of mysterious attacks in Yemen. But what really happened? That very much depends on the news story you read.
The Guardian attributed the attacks to "several air strikes -- presumed to be carried out chiefly by U.S. drones." The Associated Press and Reuters both cited a statement from Yemen's Ministry of Defense announcing the attack before noting that the United States has been known to use drone strikes in the area targeted this weekend, but both stopped short of saying the attacks were carried out by drones. These and other news stories leave room for the possibility that the attacks were carried out by the Yemeni Air Force -- which is strange, given that Yemen has no credible way of carrying out such strikes with its crippled fleet of aircraft.
"The Yemenis were always big on the [drone] program and maintained the fiction for the longest time that it was the Yemeni Air Force that was doing it, these strikes," former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke told Foreign Policy in a recent interview.
The U.S. drone campaign in Yemen has been an open secret for years, despite the Yemeni government's efforts to take credit for the airstrikes and ...
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