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November 9th,
2008 - Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid Al Qaeda |
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Secret Order Lets U.S. Raid
Al Qaeda By Eric Schmitt & Mark Mazzetti New York Times November 9, 2008 Washington - The United
States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly
a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants
in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials. These military raids,
typically carried out by Special Operations forces, were authorized by a classified
order that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004
with the approval of President Bush, the officials said. The secret order
gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network
anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in
countries not at war with the United States. In 2006, for example, a Navy
Seal team raided a suspected militants’ compound in the Bajaur region of
Pakistan, according to a former top official of the Central Intelligence
Agency. Officials watched the entire mission - captured by the video camera
of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft - in real time in the C.I.A.’s
Counterterrorist Center at the agency’s headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles
away. Some of the military
missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according
to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special
Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos
acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations. But as many as a dozen
additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the
dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said
senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions
were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient
evidence. More than a half-dozen
officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials
as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the
2004 military order on the condition of anonymity because of its politically
delicate nature. Spokesmen for the White House, the Defense Department and
the military declined to comment. Apart from the 2006 raid
into Pakistan, the American officials refused to describe in detail what they
said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say
they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries. They made
clear that there had been no raids into Iran using that authority, but they
suggested that American forces had carried out reconnaissance missions in
Iran using other classified directives. According to a senior
administration official, the new authority was spelled out in a classified
document called “Al Qaeda Network Exord,” or execute order, that streamlined
the approval process for the military to act outside officially declared war
zones. Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval for missions on
a case-by-case basis, which could take days when there were only hours to
act, the new order specified a way for Pentagon planners to get the green
light for a mission far more quickly, the official said. It also allowed senior
officials to think through how the United States would respond if a mission
went badly. “If that helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target,” a
former senior military official said, “the American response would not have
to be worked out on the fly.” The 2004 order was a step in
the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda
terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had
already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly
detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct
warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications. Shortly after the Sept. 11
attacks, Mr. Bush issued a classified order authorizing the C.I.A. to kill or
capture Qaeda militants around the globe. By 2003, American intelligence
agencies and the military had developed a much deeper understanding of Al
Qaeda’s extensive global network, and Mr. Rumsfeld pressed hard to unleash
the military’s vast firepower against militants outside the combat zones of
Iraq and Afghanistan. The 2004 order identifies 15
to 20 countries, including Syria, Pakistan, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and several
other Persian Gulf states, where Qaeda militants were believed to be
operating or to have sought sanctuary, a senior administration official said. Even with the order, each
specific mission requires high-level government approval. Targets in Somalia,
for instance, need at least the approval of the defense secretary, the
administration official said, while targets in a handful of countries,
including Pakistan and Syria, require presidential approval. The Pentagon has exercised
its authority frequently, dispatching commandos to countries including
Pakistan and Somalia. Details of a few of these strikes have previously been
reported. For example, shortly after
Ethiopian troops crossed into Somalia in late 2006 to dislodge an Islamist
regime in Mogadishu, the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command quietly
sent operatives and AC-130 gunships to an airstrip near the Ethiopian town of
Dire Dawa. From there, members of a classified unit called Task Force 88
crossed repeatedly into Somalia to hunt senior members of a Qaeda cell
believed to be responsible for the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Kenya
and Tanzania. At the time, American
officials said Special Operations troops were operating under a classified
directive authorizing the military to kill or capture Qaeda operatives if
failure to act quickly would mean the United States had lost a “fleeting
opportunity” to neutralize the enemy. Occasionally, the officials
said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the strikes’
results. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near
the Kenyan border, and within hours, American commandos and Ethiopian troops
were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaeda operatives had been
killed. But even with the new
authority, proposed Pentagon missions were sometimes scrubbed because of bad
intelligence or bureaucratic entanglements, senior administration officials
said. The details of one of those
aborted operations, in early 2005, were reported by The New York Times last
June. In that case, an operation to send a team of the Navy Seals and the
Army Rangers into Pakistan to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top
deputy, was aborted at the last minute. Mr. Zawahri was believed by
intelligence officials to be attending a meeting in Bajaur, in Pakistan’s
tribal areas, and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command hastily put
together a plan to capture him. There were strong disagreements inside the
Pentagon and the C.I.A. about the quality of the intelligence, however, and
some in the military expressed concern that the mission was unnecessarily risky. Porter J. Goss, the C.I.A.
director at the time, urged the military to carry out the mission, and some
in the C.I.A. even wanted to execute it without informing Ryan C. Crocker,
then the American ambassador to Pakistan. Mr. Rumsfeld ultimately refused to
authorize the mission. Former military and
intelligence officials said that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who recently
completed his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, had
pressed for years to win approval for commando missions into Pakistan. But
the missions were frequently rejected because officials in Washington
determined that the risks to American troops and the alliance with Pakistan
were too great. Capt. John Kirby, a
spokesman for General McChrystal, who is now director of the military’s Joint
Staff, declined to comment. The recent raid into Syria
was not the first time that Special Operations forces had operated in that
country, according to a senior military official and an outside adviser to
the Pentagon. Since the Iraq war began,
the official and the outside adviser said, Special Operations forces have
several times made cross-border raids aimed at militants and infrastructure
aiding the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq. The raid in late October,
however, was much more noticeable than the previous raids, military officials
said, which helps explain why it drew a sharp protest from the Syrian
government. Negotiations to hammer out
the 2004 order took place over nearly a year and involved wrangling between
the Pentagon and the C.I.A. and the State Department about the military’s
proper role around the world, several administration officials said. American officials said
there had been debate over whether to include Iran in the 2004 order, but
ultimately Iran was set aside, possibly to be dealt with under a separate
authorization. Senior officials of the
State Department and the C.I.A. voiced fears that military commandos would
encroach on their turf, conducting operations that historically the C.I.A.
had carried out, and running missions without an ambassador’s knowledge or
approval. Mr. Rumsfeld had pushed in
the years after the Sept. 11 attacks to expand the mission of Special
Operations troops to include intelligence gathering and counterterrorism operations
in countries where American commandos had not operated before. Bush administration
officials have shown a determination to operate under an expansive definition
of self-defense that provides a legal rationale for strikes on militant
targets in sovereign nations without those countries’ consent. Several officials said the
negotiations over the 2004 order resulted in closer coordination among the
Pentagon, the State Department and the C.I.A., and set a very high standard
for the quality of intelligence necessary to gain approval for an attack. The 2004 order also provided
a foundation for the orders that Mr. Bush approved in July allowing the
military to conduct raids into the Pakistani tribal areas, including the
Sept. 3 operation by Special Operations forces that killed about 20
militants, American officials said. Administration officials
said that Mr. Bush’s approval had paved the way for Defense Secretary Robert
M. Gates to sign an order - separate from the 2004 order - that specifically
directed the military to plan a series of operations, in cooperation with the
C.I.A., on the Qaeda network and other militant groups linked to it in
Pakistan. Unlike the 2004 order, in
which Special Operations commanders nominated targets for approval by senior
government officials, the order in July was more of a top-down approach,
directing the military to work with the C.I.A. to find targets in the tribal
areas, administration officials said. They said each target still needed to
be approved by the group of Mr. Bush’s top national security and foreign
policy advisers, called the Principals Committee. Copyright 2008 The New York
Times Company External link: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/washington/10military.html |