The American and Pakistani intelligence services credit U.S. unmanned aircraft with decimating the ranks of terrorist and insurgent operatives in Pakistan. “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting and trying to disrupt the Al Qaeda leadership,” CIA director Leon Panetta said in May.The Taliban are claiming that the US is paying informants to drop infrared beacons near houses where militants are located.
But how the killer drones find their targets has been a matter of some dispute...
Here's one informant they claimed to catch:
In April, 19 year-old Habibur Rehman made a videotaped “confession” of planting such devices, just before he was executed by the Taliban as an American spy. “I was given $122 to drop chips wrapped in cigarette paper at Al Qaeda and Taliban houses,” he said. If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars.”Now, it's fair to point out that this confession was likely beaten out of this man - and that his captors have every motivation to discredit US efforts in the region - but really:
But Rehman says he didn’t just tag jihadists with the devices. “The money was good so I started throwing the chips all over. I knew people were dying because of what I was doing, but I needed the money,” he added. Which raises the possibility that the unmanned aircraft — America’s key weapons in its covert war on Pakistan’s jihadists and insurgents — may have been lead to the wrong targets.
Given how badly paying bounties for Al Qaeda members played out in the past, you have to wonder: What kind of verification are they getting for these strikes?
How certain are they that their informants are targeting bad guys? At least with detainees, you get time to fix your mistakes.
(H/t Danger Room)
3 comments:
people are dumb as a container ship full of hammers. 1. people with the power to denounce others, or to be rewarded for their deaths, may finger a few of the 'guilty' -- but will absolutely always focus on people they just don't like. finger always point wrong way. and 2. people don't seem to *get* that if the not-guilty are put away, then the guilty are still out there running around.
stupid. humanity needs to quit whacking its head every time it gets out of the car.
sincerely,
thorn
Agreed.
In fairness, I'm not sure of the best way to get the locals to bring you the right bad guys - but surely accepting whoever they bring you at face value seems to have gotten us into a very big mess.
Informants who finger people for assassination aren't likely to be pious and upright - but once again - some sort of verification might be in order before we send missiles into another wedding party.
well. and how do we know we're not paying *the bad guys* for the information? how do we know *anything*? i have little confidence in our government's ability to gather good intel in that part of the globe.
of course, i also have no idea how to identify the truly guilty. evidence would be the obvious means; but gathering that evidence presents special challenges, in the world of a terror strategy which dictates that terrorists be, literally, one-hit-wonders. identify people in financial trouble and figure out how shaky their ethics are? identify people whose ethics are shaky, and look into their finances? and how *do* you do that with a population that's essentially living off the grid, or using only disposable cell-phones? infiltrating the phone manufacturers and planting 'forwarding' code into their os or some such would cast far too wide a net... wouldn't it?
sincerely,
more thorn.
Post a Comment