U.S. Eyed Use of Drones To Nab Bin Laden
How lethal can a UAV
be? The military thinks it can take out a high-profile target and
even considered doing so when it began hunting down Osama bin
Laden. The Associated Press reports US intelligence and military
officials intensely debated how far to go using an unmanned
aircraft to spy on — and perhaps attack — Osama bin
Laden in the year before Sept. 11, 2001.
According to preliminary findings of an independent commission
investigating the attacks, the discussions, which reached some of
the highest levels of government, centered on when and how to use
the Predator UAV. The small, unmanned aircraft was flown on 16
missions over Afghanistan in the fall of 2000, according to the
report released Wednesday. At least twice, a Predator spotted a
security detail around a tall, robed man, believed to be bin
Laden.
At about the same time, Clinton administration counter terrorism
adviser Richard Clarke and other officials learned that the Air
Force had undertaken a "promising and energetic" effort to arm the
Predators with missiles, according to the report. That gave
officials hope that rather than just spotting targets, the aircraft
might also be able to launch an attack without putting an American
pilot at risk. The question became whether to keep flying the
planes on reconnaissance missions over Afghanistan or wait until
the armed version was ready.
With the planes grounded due to harsh winter weather, CIA
Director George Tenet and military officers in the Joint Chiefs of
Staff wanted to postpone reconnaissance missions until the armed
drone was ready. They worried about tipping the U.S. hand to the
Taliban. Tenet and others also feared one of the valuable drones
could be shot down, and wanted to keep enough at home for testing
with the missile capability, according to the staff report.
When the weather broke,
Clarke and one of Tenet's deputies wanted to get the drones flying
so they collect intelligence and possibly work with the military in
a strike. According to Tenet's testimony, problems including the
missile's fusing occurred during testing in May and June 2001.
Air Force officials told the commission staff that policy
debates did not slow the program. Instead, the report said, Air
Force officials were tossing out the normal rules in order to get
the project done. "A program that would ordinarily have taken years
was, they said, finished in months," the report said.
Technical issues were still being resolved on Sept. 11, 2001.
But one Air Force program manager told the commission, "We just
took what we had and deployed it." On Oct. 7, 2001, weeks after
al-Qaida's attack on the United States, one country gave approval
to fly the Predator's first armed mission, Tenet said. It was flown
that day.
Since then, Predators armed with Hellfire missiles have been
used several times. They were credited with airstrikes that killed
al-Qaida members including Mohammed Atef, the terror network's
military chief. In November 2002, a Predator strike in Yemen killed
another top al-Qaida operative.