“Shoot everybody”: US contractors in San Diego court
By
Alia Brahimi
In Season 2, Episode 16 of the Guns for Hire podcast, host Alia Brahimi is joined by Daniel McLaughlin, an international lawyer and Legal Director of the Centre for Justice and Accountability (CJA), a California-based legal nonprofit working on behalf of victims of torture and other atrocity crimes. Daniel and CJA are leading a civil suit in San Diego against a Delaware-registered PMC, Spear Operations Group, for war crimes in Yemen. They represent the Yemeni parliamentarian Anssaf Ali Mayo, who was one of the targets of an alleged hit-squad in Yemen. Daniel talks us through the facts of the case, how it ended up in a California courtroom ten years later, and which US and international laws were ostensibly broken by the PMC. He also argues forcefully that the US government has a duty to regulate how former members of its military use their training and know-how.
