Squabble Delayed Plan to Kill Osama

[Theresa]

WASHINGTON (June 25) - Prowling the skies over Afghanistan in the months before President Bush took office, unmanned and unarmed Predator drones proved to be one of America's major successes in its frustrating hunt for Osama bin Laden.

But the promising aircraft remained grounded under the new administration until after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, say current and former U.S. officials who describe a paralyzing internal debate over finances, arming the drones with deadly missiles and concern over who would take the blame if something went wrong.

As late as a week before the suicide attacks against New York and Washington, senior administration officials meeting at the White House had not yet resolved questions about plans to equip each Predator with as many as two Hellfire missiles to kill bin Laden, these officials told The Associated Press.

This came despite the remarkable successes in the fall 2000, including what many intelligence experts concluded were three separate sightings of bin Laden during a series of 11 Predator flights over the Afghan desert.

Unresolved issues at that Sept. 4 meeting included whether the CIA or Pentagon should operate newly armed Predators and whether its new missiles were sufficiently lethal to kill bin Laden, a designated terrorist already blamed for deadly attacks against two U.S. embassies in Africa and the USS Cole and the subject of at least three secret orders by President Clinton to have him captured or killed.

In the months preceding that White House meeting, the Pentagon and CIA successfully fired missiles from a loitering Predator on at least three occasions - including once when it destroyed a mock-up home built in Nevada's desert to resemble an Afghan structure bin Laden supposedly used, the officials said.

The disappearance during 2001 of Predators from Afghanistan - partly because of unfavorable seasonal weather patterns and fears that potential targets on the ground were learning to spot them - is discussed in classified sections of Congress' report on pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures and is expected to be examined by an independent commission appointed by the president and Congress, officials said.

The debate is newly significant because it centers on records of White House meetings and documents largely outside the scope of the earlier congressional investigation, which focused narrowly on intelligence mistakes and not policy choices.

The simmering debate within the Bush administration ended abruptly on Sept. 11, when the CIA sent armed drones into the Afghan skies within days of the attacks. Weeks later, in November, one Predator helped confirm a high-level al-Qaida meeting in Kabul and joined in an attack that killed bin Laden military chief Mohammed Atef, according to officials familiar with the operation.

Nearly a dozen current and former senior U.S. officials described to AP details of extensive discussions in 2000 and 2001 inside the Clinton and Bush administrations about using armed Predators to hunt bin Laden. Most spoke only on condition of anonymity, citing classified secrets. Two former national security aides also described some of the discussion inside the Bush White House in a recent book on terrorism.

Officials attribute some of the delays to uncertainties about arming the Predators with enough lethal force and resolving questions over which agency was legally and practically best equipped to carry out an attack.

Although CIA operated the unmanned Predators in Afghanistan in 2000, CIA Director George Tenet expressed strong reservations about operating the armed drones for an attack mission, suggesting it was the purview of the military, according to officials who witnessed or were briefed about the Sept. 4 meeting at the White House.

``Generally it was understood (inside CIA) that aircraft firing weapons is the province of the military. This was a discussion about what the appropriate agency was to carry out the mission, but it was not a matter of the technology,'' said one official familiar with Tenet's comments at the meeting.

Some U.S. officials worried in 2001 that a Hellfire anti-tank missile with just a 27-pound warhead might not be powerful enough to kill everyone inside a building, and the military worked to modify the warhead to be more lethal. Cruise missile warheads, by comparison, carry a half-ton of explosives, and traditional bombs typically range from 500 pounds to 2,000 pounds.

Another official said CIA was opposed in the interim to flying too many unarmed Predator missions in 2001 for fear it might lead Afghan and al-Qaida leaders to be on the lookout for them. During one mission, a Predator's cameras captured operatives at an al-Qaida training camp staring skyward and pointing directly at the drone, officials said.

``The agency wanted to keep it under wraps and catch them by surprise once they were armed,'' a U.S. official said.

During another flight, Afghanistan's Taliban government detected the Predator on radar and scrambled MiG jets to try to shoot it down. Startled U.S. officials watched on a television screen inside CIA headquarters as the Taliban pilots roared past the Predator's cameras, said a former administration official. The drone flew onward, undamaged.

The push to arm Predators and use them to hunt bin Laden was presented to the new Bush administration within days of its inauguration, when top counterterrorism official Richard Clarke cited the 2000 successes for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and showed videotapes from Predator cameras.

The drones were one component of a broader plan that Clarke, a career government employee, devised during the waning days of Clinton's presidency to go after al-Qaida. But Clinton officials decided just before Christmas to forward the plan to the incoming Bush administration rather than implement it during Clinton's final days, the officials said.

The Hellfires were attached to the drones after unarmed Predators flown by the CIA over the mountains from Uzbekistan into Afghanistan spotted a tall man that several U.S. intelligence analysts believed was bin Laden, or his distinctive Japanese truck, as many as three times during 11 successful flights in September and October 2000, officials said. But during each sighting, the United States was unable to launch a strike with submarine-based cruise missiles in time to kill bin Laden, officials said.

``Different people came to different conclusions. You couldn't see facial characteristics. But there were several who concluded it was bin Laden,'' one senior U.S. official said, explaining those assessments were based on size, clothing, a beard and human intelligence.

With powerful winter winds over the mountains affecting the flights, Predators were grounded after October 2000 and fitted with weapons. One was repaired after it crashed on landing, sparking debate whether CIA or the Pentagon would pay the damage. Officials anticipated putting Predators back into the air as early as March 2001 after the winds subsided.

But the Predators remained grounded until Sept. 11. Officials at the White House meeting the week earlier put off recommending flying armed Predators to hunt bin Laden. Instead, they finalized a series of other measures to rout al-Qaida from its base in Afghanistan, including rearming the rebel Northern Alliance.

Those recommendations were being forwarded from Rice to Bush when the Sept. 11 hijackers struck, officials said.

06/25/03 08:38 EDT

Copyright 2003 The Associated Press.

[Theresa]

^But honestly, if they had killed him before September 11th, what do you think the reaction would have been?

The big, bad US taking out some Middle Eastern guy. Because really, what danger could some guy in Afghanistan be? Apparently a hell of alot more than was thought.