PAK PREDATOR STRIKE

“The killing of a sus­pected oper­a­tive of Al Qaeda in Pakistan eight days ago by a mis­sile launched from a remotely con­trolled Central Intelligence Agency air­craft was the lat­est such strike in a shad­owy effort that both Pakistani and American offi­cials have sought to hide,” the Times reports.

The killing of the sus­pected oper­a­tive, Haitham al-Yemeni, was first reported Friday night by ABC News, but it was denied the next day by Pakistan’s Information Ministry. The C.I.A. has declined to con­firm or deny the reports.
But an account pro­vided by for­mer coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cials said the strike occurred May 7 in the Pakistani province of North Waziristan, in tribal areas near the bor­der with Afghanistan. The mis­sile was fired by a Predator air­craft oper­ated by the C.I.A. from a base hun­dreds of miles from the tar­get, the offi­cials said.

“The U.S. team was hop­ing Haitham al-Yemeni would lead them to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden,” the Washington Post notes. “But after Pakistani author­i­ties early this month cap­tured another al Qaeda leader, Abu Faraj al-Libbi, CIA offi­cials became con­cerned that al-Yemeni would go into hid­ing and decided to try to kill him instead.”

The CIA and U.S. mil­i­tary Special Operations forces have been oper­at­ing inside Pakistan for more than two years with the knowl­edge of Pakistani author­i­ties. But the U.S. pres­ence is highly con­tro­ver­sial with the largely Muslim Pakistani pub­lic, which is gen­er­ally sym­pa­thetic to bin Laden and al Qaeda. For that rea­son, Pakistani offi­cials rou­tinely play down U.S.-Pakistani coop­er­a­tion…
Al-Yemeni’s death is one of only a hand­ful of known inci­dents in which the CIA has fired the remote-controlled, missile-equipped Predator to kill an al Qaeda mem­ber. In November 2002, the CIA used a Predator fit­ted with a five-foot-long Hellfire mis­sile to kill a senior al Qaeda leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, as he was rid­ing in a car in the Yemeni desert…
The CIA is per­mit­ted to oper­ate the lethal Predator under pres­i­den­tial author­ity pro­mul­gated after the Sept. 11 attacks. Shortly after the attacks, Bush approved a “pres­i­den­tial find­ing” that allowed the CIA to write a set of highly clas­si­fied rules describ­ing which indi­vid­u­als could be killed by CIA offi­cers. Such killings were defined as self-defense in a global war against al Qaeda ter­ror­ists…
The Predator drone’s pri­mary mis­sion has been to sup­ply real-time intel­li­gence, sur­veil­lance and recon­nais­sance. But it has proved highly suc­cess­ful as a bat­tle­field weapon as well.
According to pre­vi­ously reported Pentagon doc­u­ments, over the next five years the Air Force plans to pur­chase 24 Predators [wrong; it’s more like 144 — ed.] and 35 Predator Bs, which will be armed with as many as 3,000 pounds of precision-guided bombs or mis­siles, and sen­sors to locate and strike mov­ing tar­gets on the ground.
“Some of our great­est suc­cesses against al Qaeda have been through the use of the Predator, both in terms of rec­og­niz­ing tar­gets and actual strikes,” said Roger Cressey, a for­mer Clinton admin­is­tra­tion coun­tert­er­ror­ism offi­cial. “It’s the area where the CIA has done an extremely good job.”

May 16th, 2005 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.