-Caveat Lector-
http://www.sltrib.com/11082002/nation_w/14666.htm
U.S. Citizen Killed in CIA Strike
Friday, November 8, 2002
BY DANA PRIEST
THE WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- A U.S. citizen was among the people killed in the
pilotless missile strike on suspected al-Qaida terrorists in Yemen on
Sunday, administration officials confirmed Thursday, adding a new element
to an attack that reflects the evolving nature of the U.S. war on
terrorism around the world.
Ahmed Hijazi and five other suspected al-Qaida operatives were killed
by a 5-foot-long Hellfire missile shot from a remote controlled CIA
Predator aircraft as they rode in a vehicle 100 miles east of the Yemeni
capital, Sanaa.
Hijazi held U.S. citizenship and was also a citizen of an unidentified
Middle Eastern country, a senior administration official confirmed. He was
not born in the United States, but resided here for an unknown period of
time, the official said.
With him in the vehicle, said Yemeni and U.S. government officials,
was a senior al-Qaida leader, Abu Ali al-Harithi, who is suspected of
masterminding the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole.
In some cases since Sept. 11, American citizens have been arrested and
afforded traditional legal rights in the criminal justice system. In
others, they have been captured and held indefinitely in military brigs as
"enemy combatants." Now, at least in Hijazi's case, a citizen has been
killed in a covert military action. What's more, Hijazi was killed in a
country considered at peace with the United States.
It was unclear whether the CIA operatives who fired the missile from
hundreds of miles away knew that an American citizen was among their
targets. It also was unclear whether that would have made any difference.
The administration, working with the authority of a presidential
finding that permits covert actions against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida
terrorist network, considered al-Harithi and his traveling party a
military target -- "combatants" under international law.
Officials further contend Sunday's missile strike was an act of
self-defense, also permitted under the international laws of war, because
al-Harithi already had allegedly attacked the United States in October
2000 when he helped blow up a U.S. warship, killing 17 U.S. sailors.
Administration officials, intelligence operatives and military
analysts frustrated with the slow, torturous pace of locating and
capturing individual terrorists in lawless areas of countries such as
Yemen, praised the CIA strikes as an innovative way to get the job done.
"This is an extraordinary change of threshold," said one former
intelligence operative who praised the tactic as particularly effective.
The CIA strikes are also a reflection, they say, of how slow the U.S.
military, even its special operations forces, have been to adapt to the
nimble, ever-changing tactics of smaller and smaller cadres of terrorists
now operating without much of a command structure. The CIA, in fact, has
become a much more central, tactical military tool in the terrorism war
than in any previous conflict, largely because it has a much less
cumbersome bureaucracy.
The CIA's separate targeting process, which was used in Sunday's
Predator strike, is quicker, more fluid and involves fewer decision-makers
in its "trigger-pulling" chain of command than even the nimblest military
operation, intelligence experts said.
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