Bush allows CIA to kill at will: New ‘hit list’ ready
By Our Correspondent
NEW YORK, Dec 15: The Bush administration has prepared a list of terrorist leaders the Central Intelligence Agency is authorized to kill, if capture is impractical and civilian casualties can be minimized, the New York Times said on Sunday quoting senior military and intelligence officials.
The previously undisclosed CIA list includes the names of key Al Qaeda leaders like Osama bin Laden and his chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, as well as other principal figures from Al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups, the officials told the paper.
The names of about two dozen terrorist leaders have recently been on the lethal-force list, officials said. “It’s the worst of the worst,” an official was quoted as saying.
The newspaper said that President Bush has provided written legal authority to the CIA to hunt down and kill the terrorists without seeking further approval each time the agency is about to stage an operation.
US Officials told the paper the terrorist list was known as the “high-value target list.” A spokesman for the White House declined to discuss the list or issues involving the use of lethal force against terrorists. A spokesman for the CIA also declined to comment on the list the paper said.
Bush issued a presidential finding last year, after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, providing the basic executive and legal authority for the CIA to either kill or capture terrorist leaders. Initially, the agency used that authority to hunt for Al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan. That authority was the basis for the CIA’s attempts to find and kill or capture Osama and other Al Qaeda leaders during the war in Afghanistan.
The creation of the secret list is part of the expanded CIA effort to hunt and kill or capture Al Qaeda operatives far from traditional battlefields, in countries like Yemen the paper said.
The NYT pointed out that in November, the CIA killed an Al Qaeda leader in a remote region of Yemen. A pilotless Predator aircraft operated by the agency fired a Hellfire antitank missile at a car in which Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, also known as Abu Ali, was riding. Mr Harethi and five other people, including one suspected Al Qaeda operative with United States citizenship, were killed in the attack.
Intelligence officials told the paper that the presidential finding authorizing the agency to kill terrorists was not limited to those on the list. The president has given broad authority to the CIA to kill or capture operatives of Al Qaeda around the world, the officials said. But officials said the group’s most senior leaders on the list were the agency’s primary focus.
The list is updated periodically as the intelligence agency, in consultation with other counter-terrorism agencies, adds new names or deletes those who are captured or killed, or when intelligence indicates the emergence of a new leader the paper said.
The precise criteria for adding someone to the list are unclear, although the evidence against each person must be clear and convincing, the officials said. The list contains the names of some of the same people who are on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s list of most wanted terror suspects, although the lists are prepared independently.
Officials said the CIA, working with the FBI, the military and foreign governments, will seek to capture terrorists when possible and bring them into custody.
The report said that the new emphasis on covert action is an outgrowth of more aggressive attitudes regarding the use of lethal force in the campaign against terrorism.
Moreover, the paper said such operations have become easier to conduct because of technological advances like the development of the Predator, which has evolved from a camera-carrying surveillance drone into an armed robot warplane controlled by operators safely stationed thousands of miles away.
The development of the armed Predator drone has made it much easier for the CIA to pursue and kill terrorists in ways that would almost certainly not have been tried in the past for fear of the potential for American casualties the paper said.
