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February 04, 2006
"The president has decided that we can whack someone without the approval or knowledge of the host government"
We will shoot whomever, whenever, wherever. We won't even keep track of how many people or who we killed. We won't talk to the sovereign governments in question. We will then call ourselves civilized and others rogue states.
'Targeted killing' with missile-firing Predators is a way to hit Al Qaeda in remote areas, officials say. Host nations are not always given notice. ..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 Qaeda, U.S. officials say.
Several U.S. officials confirmed at least 19 occasions since Sept. 11 on which Predators successfully fired Hellfire missiles on terrorist suspects overseas, including 10 in Iraq in one month last year. The Predator strikes have killed at least four senior Al Qaeda leaders, but also many civilians, and it is not known how many times they missed their targets.
Critics of the program dispute its legality under U.S. and international law, and say it is administered by the CIA with little oversight. U.S. intelligence officials insist it is one of their most tightly regulated, carefully vetted programs.
...
High-ranking U.S. and allied counter-terrorism officials said the program's expansion was not merely geographic. They said it had grown from targeting a small number of senior Al Qaeda commanders after the Sept. 11 attacks to a more loosely defined effort to kill possibly scores of suspected terrorists, depending on where they were found and what they were doing.
"We have the plans in place to do them globally," said a former counter-terrorism official who worked at the CIA and State Department, which coordinates such 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."
Add that to the list of answers to "why do they hate us." We keep behaving like this all we are doing is increasing the number of people who hate us. And, again, even if we consider the question purely strategically --let alone the obvious immorality and the illegality of the program--, it is more than highly dubious. So what even if we kill one or two prominent members of Al-Qaeda? Which such behaviour on our parts, they will have no difficulty recruiting many, many more.
Also, check this out from Lee Strickland, "a former CIA counsel who retired in 2004 from the agency's Senior Intelligence Service":
Strickland, like some other officials, said the Predator program served as a deterrent to foreign governments, militias and other groups that might be harboring Al Qaeda cells."You give shelter to Al Qaeda figures, you may well get your village blown up," Strickland said. "Conversely, you have to note that this can also create local animosity and instability."
Mr. Strickland, that's called collective punishment and it is a war crime. But, hey, that doesn't apply to us now, does it.
Posted by zeynep at February 4, 2006 11:56 AM