This man is suing the US government for a drone strike that murdered his family

In 2012, an errant drone strike from a US-planned attack murdered two innocent men: Ahmed Salem Bin Ali Jaber and Waleed Bin Ali Jaber.  The men were railing against the atrocities of Al Qaeda before attending a meeting where the drone struck.

Now, a family member of the victims, Faisal bin Ali Jaber, has approached a U.S. appellate court to demand an apology from the American government for his family members’ deaths.

“It was something impossible to imagine for a person,” Jaber explained to ABC News, recounting the event. “I stood on body parts of people. The smell was very strange. I don’t know what was mixed with what — blood, mixed with the smell of ammunition. I think I lost consciousness, I imagined that nothing had happened and went back to smiling.”

According to Reprieve, the UK-based human rights organization backing Jaber’s suit, this marks the “first ever US appellate court hearing in a case brought by a civilian victim of the covert drone program.”

An attorney with Reprieve described it as “a last resort to get something that should be very simple: an acknowledgment that his relatives were wrongly killed, and a public apology for their tragic deaths.”

In a letter to President Obama sent on the eve of this week’s appearance in the appellate court, Jaber wrote:

The only thing that can prevent the mistakes of the past from repeating themselves in the future is accountability. True accountability does not come from policy documents absent facts. Nor does it come from numbers, like those you released in July, which tell us nothing about who has been counted, and more crucially, who has not.

Jaber is hopeful, saying that “instead of paying money in a secret way, the U.S. could announce a project in [his family’s] name carried out by members of civil society in support of the village that was hit.”