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.

FMI: www.af.mil