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Senior US Officials Say They're Unaware of Any Intelligence Benefit from the Yemen Raid

Last month's terror raid resulted in the death of one Navy SEAL, multiple civilians, and destroyed a $70 million aircraft.
Photo by DANIEL SLIM/AFP/Getty Images

Senior government officials said they were "unaware" of any significant intelligence results from the military raid in Yemen that left Navy SEAL Ryan Owens dead, NBC reports. The officials' statements contradict the Pentagon and Sean Spicer who have said that the terror raid brought in "actionable intelligence" that could "prevent the potential deaths or attacks on American soil."

At the beginning of February, the Pentagon released a video it claimed was recovered from the raid—which also killed Yemeni civilians and children and wounded three other SEALs—only to pull it offline after BuzzFeed News pointed out that the video has been available since 2007.

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The father of the SEAL who died in the raid, Bill Owens, spoke out against the military action in an interview with the Miami Herald last weekend after refusing to meet President Trump.

"Why at this time did there have to be this stupid mission when it wasn't even barely a week into his administration? Why?" Owens said. "For two years prior, there were no boots on the ground in Yemen—everything was missiles and drones—because there was not a target worth one American life. Now, all of a sudden we had to make this grand display?"

The White House, which initially touted the raid as a success and show of strength from Trump's administration, has backpedaled somewhat following Owens's statements. Sean Spicer admitted Monday that the raid was not "100 percent successful" because of the SEAL death, and Trump tried to blame the whole thing on Obama during a Tuesday interview on FOX & Friends.

"This was a mission that was started before I got here," Trump told FOX & Friends. "This was something that was, you know, just—they wanted to do. And they came to see me, and they explained what they wanted to do, the generals, who are very respected… And according to General Mattis, it was a very successful mission. They got tremendous amounts of information."

Apparently some senior officials would disagree.