LOS ANGELES, 13 August — The United States is considering a radical plan to use elite military units to track down and kill Al-Qaeda leaders around the world, a policy that would break with all previous tradition and raise major questions of American compliance with international law.
The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, wants to involve Special Operations forces in covert operations to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenants, no matter where they might be in the world, according to the leaks.
Special Operations units could get more deeply involved in long-term covert operations in countries where the United States is not at war and, in some cases, where the local government is not informed of their presence, according to the plan disclosed by three senior government officials and reported in yesterday’s New York Times.
Traditionally, covert operations of this kind have been conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency, something that has generated enormous controversy even without the participation of the military.
Rumsfeld, however, is reported to be dissatisfied with the speed with which the CIA can move once it receives intelligence about an Al-Qaeda operative’s location and believes the military could act faster and more efficiently.
The Pentagon thinks it can overcome the legal obstacles to such a policy by arguing that military assassinations are part of “preparation of the battlefield” in the open-ended war on terror, according to the New York Times.
The notion of endless war is, however, highly controversial. The fact that the report is the latest in a flurry of high-level leaks of classified information suggests the Bush administration is deeply divided on the so-called “war on terrorism” and that some members feel unable to keep quiet.
Meanwhile Newsweek magazine said yesterday that Osama Bin Laden and a thousand Al-Qaeda operatives slipped through the fingers of the US military deployed in Afghanistan and may become even more dangerous, .
“Our operational evaluation today is that the threat is a lot greater than it was in December,” a European counterterrorist investigator told the news magazine. “That is to say: The worst is ahead of us, not behind us.”
“Criticism is deemed to be almost unpatriotic,” the news weekly said. Tora Bora’s altitude, the choice to bomb the wrong escape route and an attack on the Indian Parliament all contributed Al-Qaeda’s escape from Afghanistan, said the weekly.
However, the military has not captured its main target, Bin Laden. As US bombers bombed the route from Tora Bora to the Afghan city of Khost, hundreds of Al-Qaeda were escaping through the White Mountain route to Pakistan, Newsweek said. (The Independent)
