Shuaib Almosawa, a freelance journalist in Yemen, has a must-read report up at Foreign Policy investigating a U.S. drone strike in Marib, Yemen on August 8, 2013. It must be read in full, but Noah Shactman, an editor at Foreign Policy, sums up the piece quite appropriately on Twitter.

These teenagers were out holiday shopping. Then they were droned and decapitated. http://t.co/vhHeTshU5z — Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) November 5, 2013

It really is as simple as that. Almosawa fills us in on the gory details of how the older brother of the three victims, aged 24, 17, and 16, found their bodies ripped to shreds amidst the mangled car that was hit by the drone.

Most importantly, the report uncovers a familiar pattern that has been identified through the drone war in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Specifically, that pattern goes like this:

Without offering any evidence, government officials say those targeted and killed were al-Qaeda terrorists; everybody blindly believes them; they are later proved false.

In the aftermath of the strike, everybody said these three young boys were militants. Almosawa reports:

According to the Yemeni government, the August 8 drone strike was successful in “killing three brothers and members of al Qaeda.” But locals, including the victims’ relatives, insisted that the three brothers had no affiliation with al Qaeda. They were only local boys returning from a holiday shopping trip in the city of Marib, the relatives insist. While governorate officials claim to know little about the three brothers why they were targeted, Marib locals and family members deny they had been engaged in any forms of militancy.

Rafiq ur Rehman, a Pakistani school teacher, came to Capitol Hill last week and retold a similar story. He said the government and the media said several militants were killed in an October 2012 drone strike in northwest Pakistan. In reality, Rehman’s 67-year old mother was killed as she was picking vegetables with her grandchildren.

Both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented several other cases that follow the pattern as well.

The pattern is so ubiquitous and recurring throughout Obama’s drone war, that one could spend a month cataloguing each case. The gullibility most Americans exhibit in accepting as fact government claims of killing militants and not civilians led me to some of my own tweets:

If you blindly believe it every time the gov't says their drones killed al-Qaeda militants, you are a sucker. — John Glaser (@jwcglaser) November 5, 2013