Secret Details of Drone Strike Revealed As Unprecedented Case Goes to German Court

From the article linked in the OP:

On December 17, 2009, three days after the US State Department designated AQAP as a terrorist organization, up to five Tomahawk cruise missiles armed with cluster munitions struck the hamlet of al-Majalah in southern Abyan province.[230] Yemeni government officials initially described the strike as a Yemeni security force operation that killed 34 “terrorists” at a training camp stockpiled with weapons.[231]

In fact the missiles were launched by a US Navy vessel.[232] While the attack killed 14 alleged Al-Qaeda combatants, it also killed at least 41 civilians in a Bedouin camp, all from two extended families, according to a 2010 investigative report by Yemen’s parliament whose findings were accepted by the government.[233] Nine of the dead were women—five of them pregnant—and 21 were children.[234] At least 4 more civilians were killed and 13 others wounded after the strike when they handled the cluster munition remnants.[235]

AQAP was committing violence against the Yemeni government at the time of the 2009 attack, and its predecessor, AQY, had claimed responsibility for attacks such as the deadly suicide bombing of the US Embassy in Sanaa in 2008. However, the hostilities at the time were not considered to have reached the intensity of an armed conflict necessary for the applicability of the laws of war.[236] Thus this attack may more properly be viewed as a violation of international human rights law. However, even within a laws-of-war analysis, the attack used indiscriminate cluster munitions, and caused indiscriminate and possibly disproportionate civilian casualties.

Two classified diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the United States engaged with Yemen in a concerted effort to conceal the US role.[237] The United States has never publicly acknowledged its role in the attack.

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