Monday, May 16, 2005
CIA and US Special Forces active in Pakistan: WP
By Khalid Hasan
Washington: “The CIA and US Military Special Operations forces have been operating inside Pakistan for more than two years with the knowledge of the Pakistani authorities,” the Washington Post said in a report published on Sunday.
The report by correspondent Dana Priest also said that Haitham Al-Yemeni, the Al Qaeda figure killed last week by a missile fired from Predator, a CIA-operated aerial drone, had been under surveillance for more than a week by US intelligence working along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
Sources told the newspaper that the Predator, operated from a secret base hundreds of miles from the target (did not say where), located and fired on al-Yemeni late on Saturday night in Toorikhel, Pakistan, a suburb of Mirali in North Waziristan. This would mean that al-Yemeni was killed in Pakistan and not Afghanistan.
The Pakistani information minister has denied that any such incident took place, but if the Post report is true, his denial would stand discredited.
The report said “US presence is highly controversial with the largely Muslim Pakistani public, which is generally sympathetic to Bin Laden and al Qaeda.. For that reason, Pakistani officials routinely play down US Pakistani cooperation.”
The CIA, the newspaper said, is permitted to operate the lethal Predator under presidential authority promulgated after the September 11 attacks. Shortly after the attacks, Bush approved a “presidential finding” that allowed the CIA to write a set of highly classified rules describing which individuals could be killed by CIA officers. Such killings are defined as self-defence in a global war against Al Qaeda terrorists.
The rules have been vetted by the White House, State Department and CIA lawyers. They allow CIA counterterrorism officials in the field to decide much more quickly when to fire, according to former intelligence officials involved in developing the rules.
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