It has long been said that in war, "truth is the first casualty."
In a video message released on Sunday, a leader of al Qaeda in Yemen apologized for an attack on a hospital in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa earlier this month in which civilians were killed.
According to the al Qaeda leader, the attackers were targeting the Yemeni Ministry of Defense, but one fighter made a mistake and attacked a hospital inside the defense ministry: "We confess to this mistake and fault. We offer our apologies and condolences to the families of the victims," said the al Qaeda leader.
While al Qaeda has publicly apologized for killing civilians at the Yemeni hospital during the attack in Sanaa on December 5, at the same time American officials have said nothing publicly about a U.S. drone strike that took place a week later on a suspected convoy of militants in western Yemen on December 12.
The target of this strike turned out to be a wedding party and at least a half dozen civilians are reliably reported to have died.
This gets to a key problem of the secretive American drone program. Its clandestine and unaccountable nature means that when the U.S. does make a mistake, as it inevitably will, instead of apologizing and making some kind of compensation to the civilian victims of a botched strike -- a common practice when the U.S. military inadvertently kills civilians in wartime -- American officials instead say ... nothing.
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