They got Al-Zawahiri?!

[Diomedes]

Looks like they didn't get him, judging by his most recent music video.

Also, Ted Rall and I agree:

DEATH FROM ABOVE Tue Jan 17, 8:11 PM ET



U.S. Drone Planes Have a Nearly Perfect Record of Failure

NEW YORK--In the dark, pre-dawn hours of Friday, the thirteenth of January, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, the buzz of an unmanned robot plane broke the silence. Half a world and 12 and a half time zones away, someone on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters keyed a command into a computer. The digitized message, relayed through the building's circuitry and transmitted skyward, bounced along an array of aircraft and satellites before arriving at the RQ-1 Predator drone plane hovering above the Bajaur region of Pakistan's Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA). Four AGM-114N Hellfire II missiles, each purchased by American taxpayers from Lockheed Martin at a cost of $45,000, streaked off toward the hamlet of Damadola, five miles into Pakistan.

The four missiles, each carrying enough explosives to take out an armored vehicle, slammed into three local jewelers' houses at 950 miles per hour, nearly twice the speed of a passenger jet at cruising altitude. "The houses have been razed," reported a neighbor, a member of the Pakistani parliament. "There is nothing left. Pieces of the missiles are scattered all around. Everything has been blackened in a 100-yard radius." The target of this latest assassination attempt via missile strike, Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri, wasn't there. At least 22 innocent civilians, including five women and five children, were killed. "They acted on wrong information," a Pakistani intelligence official said of the Americans.

The political fallout is devastating. The Pashtun tribesmen of FATA, still enraged at the militarization of an autonomous region that regular Pakistani army troops first invaded in 2004, are threatening a general uprising. As tens of thousands of people chanted "death to America" at protest marches across Pakistan, the regime of U.S. puppet dictator General Pervez Musharraf--weakened by the West's failure to provide earthquake aid in Kashmir--was pushed to the brink of collapse. After Musharraf: the first civil war in a nuclear power.

This was only the latest botched U.S. attack. Eight days earlier, another attempt to kill al-Zawahiri failed when a missile blew up a house in the Saidgi area, also in the FATA, based on another incorrect report. Eight innocent civilians died.

If insanity is repeating an action in expectation of different results, the assassination-by-joystick squad at Langley is clearly nuts. How many must die before they notice that precision airstrikes are anything but?

In the wake of 9/11 the Pentagon went gaga over unmanned aerial vehicles. "These systems...park over the bad guys, watch them continually, never give them a break," said Dyke Weatherington, UAV chief in Donald Rumsfeld's office, in 2002. "The other aspect is that we're doing that without putting service members at risk." But history belies Rumsfeld's assurance that the Predator-Hellfire program has a "darned good record."

On February 4, 2002 a Predator fired a Hellfire missile at three men, including one nicknamed "Tall Man" who was mistaken by CIA operators for the 6'5" Osama bin Laden, near Zhawar Kili in Afghanistan's Paktia province. "The people who have the responsibility for making those judgments made the judgments that, in fact, they were Al Qaeda," said Rumsfeld. They were not. The victims were desperately poor civilians gathering scrap metal from exploded missiles to sell for food. The U.S. has not apologized.

On May 6, 2002 a Predator fired a missile at a convoy of cars in Kunar province in an attempt to assassinate Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hektmatyar because he opposes puppet ruler Hamid Karzai. Hekmatyar wasn't there. At least ten civilians were blown to bits. Hektmatyar, understandably perturbed, has since declared himself and his militia our mortal enemies. No apology there either.

And now the massacre in Pakistan.

Mishaps are unavoidable due to the Predator's design limitations. Image resolution is too fuzzy to make out much of anything at 10,000 feet up. Fly the drone lower than that and it becomes vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire. Assassinations by unmanned aircraft seem doomed to failure--out of thousands of sorties, the Defense Department can only point to a single success, the alleged Hellfire killing of Al Qaeda's supposed "number five guy" in Pakistan last year. But it's not just drone planes. Attempted assassination bombings attempted by flesh-and-blood pilots haven't fared better.

Ronald Reagan ordered an airstrike on Libyan leader Moammar Khadafi's home in Tripoli. Khadafi survived, but his baby daughter and 37 others were killed. In 1998 Bill Clinton ordered Tomahawk cruise missiles fired at Osama bin Laden's training camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Bin Laden wasn't there, but dozens of others died; the Sudanese facility turned out to be an innocuous aspirin factory. At the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq George W. Bush ordered 40 cruise missiles fired at a Baghdad restaurant where Saddam Hussein was reported to be eating dinner. He wasn't. No Baathist officials died. Fourteen members of two Christian families, mostly women and children, did.

Incompetence and poor intelligence are not exclusive to us. Though brutal, the 9/11 attacks fell far short of their planners' immediate goals. Tens of thousands would have died at the World Trade Center had the hijackers known that New Yorkers start work at nine. And even if one of the two Washington-bound planes had struck the White House, Bush was in Florida at the time.

Targeted killing by aerial bombardment, whether it's carried out by pilots, hijackers or computer-guided drones, is an inherently flawed concept--too easy to contemplate, too hard to carry out, and too ham-fisted to execute without also killing civilians. Intelligence is faulty, guidance systems fail, imagery is fuzzy. When the target of an assassination is present, small bombs can't ensure success and big bombs invariably result in "collateral damage." Technology hasn't changed everything. You can't know what's going on on the ground from the air.

Civilized nations should band together to renounce and outlaw these sloppy and obscene aerial assassination attempts, which send the terrifying message that killing civilians is acceptable in the pursuit of justice. But if the international community can't go that far, they can at least ban the use of unmanned vehicles like the Predator. Murder by mistake is bad enough when a human being can be held accountable.

[phillymic2000]

Ronald Reagan ordered an airstrike on Libyan leader Moammar Khadafi's home in Tripoli. Khadafi survived, but his baby daughter and 37 others were killed. In 1998 Bill Clinton ordered Tomahawk cruise missiles fired at Osama bin Laden's training camp in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. Bin Laden wasn't there, but dozens of others died; the Sudanese facility turned out to be an innocuous aspirin factory. At the start of the 2003 invasion of Iraq George W. Bush ordered 40 cruise missiles fired at a Baghdad restaurant where Saddam Hussein was reported to be eating dinner. He wasn't. No Baathist officials died. Fourteen members of two Christian families, mostly women and children, did.

What slanted view this guy has, when Reagan, or either bush orders something, it's detailed numbers and  it's innocent people, women and babies. When he mentions Clinton its, dozens others died and a "innocuous" or harmless attack. Priceless

[mussa]

so we're farged up for killing innocent civilians...but they surround themselves with civilians also.  this is a tactic the terrorist have been using now for awhile.  this is an intelligence failure with the drones.  i am not sure of what the CIA is doing now, and what kind of relationship they have with pakistani intell., but we need to get highly trained special forces, afghan and pakistani commandos to help weed out the terrorists on the ground.  if we keep up the unmanned bullshtein, we look just as spineless as they do.  they can't fight us face to face on our grounds, but why not send our best guys in take them on face to face.  i thought thats what we are doing, but i guess we don't have enough special forces, reliable intelligence to be doing it. 

it pisses me off when innocent civilians die, but the terrorist are the ones who are inflicting this damage to the people.  they want us to take them on and so they surround themselves with civilians and promise martyrdom through suicide missions.  these arabs don't even have countries they represent, they have all been kicked out or go seeking martyrdom by fighting muslims and non-muslims.  they are a sick group of fanatics who care nothing about the people in afganhistan or iraq.  some people might say that america is that, but what are we supposed to do as a country to stop this from happening again and again. are we supposed to let these groups go and let them re-group or form other groups.  are we supposed to keep our nose out of the middle east?  are we supposed to wait til they aquire some serious weapons? no farg that. i understand u can kill the terrorist, but not the movement.  but if we keep killing them and keeping them down, we win.  so in that case civilians will die, here and everywhere, thats life.  mistakes happen, we are not a perfect species.  as long as man is in power, this world will be at war with each other. 

[Phanatic]

Someone in the election cycle last year suggested that the military expand the number of special forces units and operatives. I thought the idea had merit at the time. As Mussa said this Arab threat doesn't have a country to go pound. The military needs to get more surgical on the ground, not just in the air.

I would love to say that there is no need for war, but throughout human history that is just not the case. There's always some idiot who wants what you got, or they want you to think the way they do. War by default means civilians will suffer. It doesn't matter how it is fought.

[Seabiscuit36]

I think its hilarious that Al Zawaahiri is whining about killing innocent pakistanis who had just assisted terrorist.  The simple fact is Bin Laden/Al Zawahiri orderd planes into the WTC and killed 3 thousand people.  They were more innocent than those who just had terrorsist over for dinner

[phillymic2000]

they can't fight us face to face on our grounds, but why not send our best guys in take them on face to face. 

Even in that case, they will hide in the general population and take cheap shots, then scream "butchers" when we fire back at then. Civilians know that we are hunting the terrorists, why hang out with them? it makes no sense.

[mussa]

because alot of them are forced to "hang out" with them. promised money, probably even given money.  these people are desparate and poor and hungry.  they will do anything to be in a better position.

[MadMarchHare]

Hope, Mussa.  You want to end suicide bombings?  Give them some farging hope.  You got people who are dirt poor, living in substandard conditions in some of the richest countries in the world (per capita), who can't find meaningful employment or feed their families.  Then some guy comes up and tells you, "Hey, if you strap 30 sticks of dynamite to your chest and kill some Isrealis/Americans/Iraqi troops, we'll make sure you wife and kids have enough money to eat every day and a nice place to live."  What do you think he's gonna say?  He ain't got much (nee anything) to lose.

[mussa]

exactly, oh you forgot the 60 some virgins waiting for him in never never land. 

[rjs246]

I would gladly suicide bomb you all for 60 filthy sluts. You can keep your stinking virgins they don't know what the farg to do anyway.

[Butchers Bill]

exactly, oh you forgot the 60 some virgins waiting for him in never never land. 

Its not about money or poverty, its about religous fundamentalism.  You don't see people in Africa, China, Russia, or South America blowing themselves up.

[rjs246]

If it was presented to them as a reasonable and honorable option, you can bet you ass they would be.

[Butchers Bill]

If it was presented to them as a reasonable and honorable option, you can bet you ass they would be.

Exactly.  So you agree that if they were religous fundamentalists (specifically Islam in this case) they would see it as a reasonable and honorable option.

[MadMarchHare]

Two edged sword.  Outside of Islam, you see anyone paying for suicide bombings?

In Africa they kidnap children and force them into militias.  To my mind that's no different.

I don't see the virgins as the bait.  It's the we'll take care of your family that does it for the majority.

There are fundamentalists in every religion, and they need to be eliminated in no uncertain terms (Pat Robertson, Farrakhan, Osama, Stilloncrack, they're all the same).  But you don't see any of the "fundamentalists Islamics" blowing themselves up - it's dirt poor bastiches with nothing else to hope for (one exception - the pilots on 9/11;  evidence suggests the rest of 'em didn't know what the true mission was).  The best solution is to remove the majority of people from their situation, where these lunkheads can influence them.

[LBIggle]

exactly, oh you forgot the 60 some virgins waiting for him in never never land. 

Its not about money or poverty, its about religous fundamentalism.  You don't see people in Africa, China, Russia, or South America blowing themselves up.

that's because they are perfect. we should all hope to be so lucky.