I’m not sure what’s more facepalm-y – Yemen’s President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi unequivocally praising U.S. drone strikes within his country, or Hadi simultaneously accepting a small fleet of unmanned aerial spy craft from the Americans.
It’s a telling bit of have-it-both-ways. This is Yemen, after all. The country of nearly 25 million has not only become the locus of the new robo-counterterrorism, with a recent uptick in Hellfire missile strikes that left 29 dead in eight days, but is also already home to some of the more notorious hits of America’s shadow wars. This is where the same December 2009 drone strike that knocked out Saleh Mohammed al-Anbouri, an al-Qaeda linked militant, also killed 41 civilians, 22 of which were children. This is also the site of last year’s hotly contested targeted drone killing of U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki, the late YouTube cleric for a burgeoning AQAP, or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Shortly after, of course, and with still no clear admission from the U.S., Abdulrahman, al-Awlaki’s teenaged son, likewise received the brunt of Hellfire. These are just a few instances that have many going so far as dubbing Obama’s the “lethal presidency”.
Videos by VICE
Hadi apparently has no qualms with it. The Yemeni president says he signs off on all U.S. strikes, true. But even still, he apparenty believes drones are more intelligent than humans: “The drone technologically is more advanced than the human brain,” Hadi told the Washington Post.
He wasn’t slipping up. “They pinpoint the target and have zero margin of error, if you know what target you’re aiming at,” Hadi said last week at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in D.C. And the U.S., he added, “helped with their drones because the Yemeni Air Force cannot carry out missions at night. The electronic brain’s precision is unmatched by the human brain.”
Hadi’s remarks seemed to have earned him the star treatment throughout his jaunt. President Obama spoke briefly with only several heads of state at a reception last week for the UN General Assembly meeting in New York. But he singled out Hadi for a proper meeting, and this after he just happened to swing through Hadi’s meeting with Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan.