British reporter Iona Craig went to the al Ghayil, the Yemeni town stormed by Navy SEALs in the raid that President Trump says was a great success even as it claimed the life of the operator whose widow was honored at his joint address to Congress.

Her reporting for The Intercept, assisted by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, would appear to demolish the Trump claims. At bare minimum, it's what Kellyanne Conway might call "alternative facts" to those her boss has proffered.

"With the SEALs taking heavy fire on the lower slopes, attack helicopters swept over the hillside hamlet above," writes Craig, formerly the Yemen correspondent for The Times of London and editor of the Yemen Times. "In what seemed to be blind panic, the gunships bombarded the entire village, striking more than a dozen buildings, razing stone dwellings where families slept, and wiping out more than 120 goats, sheep, and donkeys."

Craig, a onetime serious horse racer, was one of the last correspondents accredited in Yemen and has snuck into the country on occasion. This time she talks to many villagers and, combining those accounts with insight from current and former military officials, concludes it was not the “highly successful” operation Trump claims, "from the description of an assault on a fortified compound — there are no compounds or walled-off houses in the village — to the 'large amounts of vital intelligence' the president said were collected.”

And this: "According to a current U.S. special operations adviser and a former senior special operations officer, it was not intelligence the Pentagon was after but a key member of al Qaeda. The raid was launched in an effort to capture or kill Qassim al Rimi, the leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, according to the special operations adviser, who asked to remain anonymous because details behind the raid are classified."

As for the women killed, this casts doubts on the Pentagon claim that some were armed and fought U.S. forces from “pre-established positions.” But all witnesses interviewed for this piece call that balderdash, "citing a culture that views the prospect of women fighting as ‘eib’ — shameful and dishonorable — and pointing out the practical implausibility of women clutching babies while also firing rifles. A CENTCOM spokesperson refused to provide any details about female fighters to support its assertion."

The Intercept's nexus with the Pulitzer Center is revealing. The latter funds top-notch overseas journalism and has partnered with an A-list of media, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The NewsHour on PBS and The Washington Post, among many others. Its track record is impressive.

This effort concludes with a tribesman who underscored that, once again, we haven't made many new friends in the region.

As he and Craig finished a chat at dusk, he declared, “If they (the SEALs) come back, tell them to bring their caskets. From now we are ready for any fight with the Americans and the dog Trump.” (The Intercept)

Bidding for Time

"A group that includes Jahm Najafi, chief executive of private investment firm Najafi Cos., and private-equity firm Pamplona Capital Management, has emerged as a bidder for Time Inc., according to people familiar with the matter." (The Wall Street Journal)

Joe Ricketts does some editing

"After online local news outlet DNAinfo announced Wednesday it was buying Gothamist LLC, the parent company that owns the Chicagoist and runs four other similar news websites across the country, some media observers noticed something was missing from the archives of the newly acquired sites: A number of negative stories about Joe Ricketts, DNAinfo's owner and patriarch of the family that owns a controlling interest in the Chicago Cubs, had been deleted." (Patch)