Administration expanding secret drone missile program
WASHINGTON – Despite protests from other countries, the United States is expanding a top-secret effort to kill suspected terrorists with drone-fired missiles as it pursues an increasingly decentralized al-Qaida, U.S. officials say.
The CIA’s failed attempt to assassinate al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri in Pakistan on Jan. 13 was the latest strike in the government’s “targeted killing” program, a highly classified initiative that officials say has broadened as the terrorist network splintered into smaller cells and fled its haven in Afghanistan.
The al-Zawahri strike killed as many as 18 civilians, many of them women and children, and triggered widespread protests in Pakistan. Similar U.S. attacks using Predator unmanned aircraft equipped with Hellfire missiles have angered citizens and political leaders in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen.
Little is known publicly about the targeted-killing program. The Bush administration has refused to discuss how many strikes it has made, how many people have died, or how it decides whom to target. No U.S. officials were willing to speak about it on the record because the program is classified.
Although it is unknown how many times the targets have been missed, several U.S. officials confirmed at least 19 occasions since Sept. 11, 2001, in which Predators successfully fired Hellfire missiles on suspected terrorist leaders overseas, including 10 in Iraq in one month alone last year. The Predator strikes have killed at least four senior al-Qaida leaders, but also many civilians.
Critics dispute the program’s legality under U.S. and international law, and say it is administered with little oversight outside the CIA. U.S. intelligence officials vehemently insist it is one of their most tightly regulated, carefully vetted programs.
Lee Strickland, a former CIA counsel who retired in 2004 from the agency’s Senior Intelligence Service, confirmed that the Predator program has grown to keep pace with the spread of al-Qaida commanders, who the CIA believes are branching out in an effort to gain converts, financing and influence.
Many groups of Islamic militants are believed to be operating in lawless pockets of the Middle East, Asia and Africa where it is perilous for U.S. troops to try to capture them, and difficult to discern who the leaders are.
“Paradoxically, as a result of our success the target has become even more decentralized, even more diffused and presents a more difficult target, no question about that,” said Strickland, director of the Center for Information Policy at the University of Maryland. “It’s clear that the U.S. is prepared to use and deploy these weapons in a fairly wide theater.”
Current and former intelligence officials said they could not disclose which countries might be subject to Predator strikes. But al-Qaida or its affiliates have been documented in Somalia, Morocco, Indonesia and dozens of other nations.
High-ranking U.S. and allied counterterrorism officials said the expansion is not merely geographic. They said it has grown from targeting a small number of senior al-Qaida commanders after the Sept. 11 attacks to a more loosely defined effort to kill potentially scores of suspected terrorists depending on where they are found and what they are doing.
“We have the plans in place to do them globally,” said a former counterterrorism official who worked at the CIA and State Department, which coordinates efforts with other governments. “In most cases we need the approval of the host country to do them. However, there are a few countries where the president has decided that we can whack someone without the approval or knowledge of the host government.”
The CIA and the Pentagon have deployed at least several dozen of the Predator drones throughout Iraq, Afghanistan and along the borders of Pakistan, U.S. officials confirmed. The CIA also has sent the remote-controlled aircraft into the skies over Yemen and some other countries believed to be al-Qaida havens, particularly those without a strong government or military that the United States can work in tandem with, said a current U.S. counterterrorism official. Such incursions are highly sensitive because they could violate the sovereignty of those nations and anger U.S. allies, the official said.
The Predator, built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. of San Diego, looks like a mosquito with a 49-foot wingspan. It makes an easy-to-detect buzzing sound, can hover above a target for many hours and flies as low as 15,000 feet to get good reconnaissance footage. And they are often operated by CIA or Pentagon officials at computer consoles in the United States.
The drones were designed to provide aerial surveillance and have been used for that purpose since at least the mid-1990s, beginning with the conflict in the Balkans. After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush ordered a rapid escalation of a project to arm the Predators with missiles, an effort that had been mired in bureaucratic infighting and technical glitches.
Now the Predator is an integral part of the military’s counterinsurgency effort, especially in Iraq. But the CIA also maintains a more secretive – and more controversial – Predator program that targets suspected terrorists operating outside combat zones.
The CIA does not even acknowledge that a targeted-killing program exists, and some attacks have been explained away as car bombings or other incidents. It is not known how many militants or innocent bystanders –”collateral damage,” in military parlance – have been killed by Predator strikes, but anecdotal evidence suggests it is significant.
Nor is it known how many missiles have missed their targets altogether. In some cases, the destruction has been so complete that it was impossible to establish who was killed, or even how many people.
Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA’s special unit hunting Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, said he was aware of at least four successful targeted killing strikes in Afghanistan alone by November 2004, when he left the agency.
Even today, documents and interviews suggest that the U.S. policy on targeted killings remains a work in progress.
Some critics, including a U.N. human rights watchdog group and Amnesty International, have urged the Bush administration to be more open about how it decides whom to kill and under what circumstances.
A U.N. report in the wake of the 2002 Yemen strike called it “an alarming precedent (and) a clear case of extrajudicial killing” that was in violation of international laws and treaties. The Bush administration, which did not return calls seeking comment for this story, has said it does not recognize the mandate of the U.N. special body in connection with its military actions against al-Qaida, according to Amnesty International.
“Zawahiri is an easy case. No one is going to question us going after him,” said Juliette N. Kayyem, a former U.S. government counterterrorism consultant and Justice Department lawyer. “But where can you do it and who can you do it against? Who authorizes it? All of these are totally unregulated areas of presidential authority.”
The Sept. 11 Commission investigating the attacks on New York and Washington concluded that vaguely worded laws and policies gave little reassurance to those responsible for pulling the trigger that they would not face disciplinary action – or even criminal charges.
Although Presidents Ford and Reagan issued executive orders in 1976 and 1981 prohibiting U.S. intelligence agents from engaging in assassination, the Bush administration claimed the right to kill suspected terrorists under war powers given him by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks.
It is the same justification Bush has used for a recently disclosed domestic spying effort in which the National Security Agency is eavesdropping on some U.S. citizens without warrants, and a CIA “rendition” program to seize suspected terrorists overseas and transport them to other countries where they are allegedly tortured.
In deciding when a strike is justified, current and former U.S. officials said, the CIA’s lawyers play a central role.