A.K. Pritchard
CIA Told to Do 'Whatever Necessary' to Kill Bin Laden
Sun Oct 21 12:31:49 2001


[Note: Cheney stated "It is different than the Gulf War was, in the sense
that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime". This is what I
fear, a never ending war. Those who read Orwell's fictional but almost
frighteningly forward looking book, and recall, war was never ending and
used as one means to control the population, this war of ours is sounding
more and more Orwellian as time passes. While I believe that these acts of
war against our nation must be answered, and treated as acts of war, I
begin to suspect that the previous acts of war were tolerated and treated
as mere criminal acts with the intent to bring us to a point of a never
ending war that strips away our rights. I have no proof that the
government in guilty of this, and from what I have read no one else does
either, my suspicions would be towards those behind the scenes who
manipulate and attempt to shape events to their own ends. - Tony]
therepublican@ideasign.com
===============================

CIA Told to Do 'Whatever Necessary' to Kill Bin Laden
Agency and Military Collaborating at 'Unprecedented' Level;
Cheney Says War Against Terror 'May Never End'

By Bob Woodward
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 21, 2001; Page A01

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27452-2001Oct20.html


President Bush last month signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to
undertake its most sweeping and lethal covert action since the founding of
the agency in 1947, explicitly calling for the destruction of Osama bin
Laden and his worldwide al Qaeda network, according to senior government
officials.

The president also added more than $1 billion to the agency's war on
terrorism, most of it for the new covert action. The operation will include
what officials said is "unprecedented" coordination between the CIA and
commando and other military units. Officials said that the president,
operating through his "war cabinet," has pledged to dispatch military units
to take advantage of the CIA's latest and best intelligence.

Bush's order, called an intelligence "finding," instructs the agency to
attack bin Laden's communications, security apparatus and infrastructure,
senior government officials said. U.S. intelligence has identified new and
important specific weaknesses in the bin Laden organization that are not
publicly known, and these vulnerabilities will be the focus of the lethal
covert action, sources said.

"The gloves are off," one senior official said. "The president has given
the agency the green light to do whatever is necessary. Lethal operations
that were unthinkable pre-September 11 are now underway."

The CIA's covert action is a key part of the president's offensive against
terrorism, but the agency is also playing a critical role in the defense
against future terrorist attacks.

For example, each day a CIA document called the "Threat Matrix," which has
the highest security classification ("Top Secret/Codeword"), lands on the
desks of the top national security and intelligence officials in the Bush
administration. It presents the freshest and most sensitive raw
intelligence on dozens of threatened bombings, hijackings or poisonings.
Only threats deemed to have some credibility are included in the document.

One day last week, the Threat Matrix contained 100 threats to U.S.
facilities in the United States and around the world -- shopping complexes,
specific cities, places where thousands gather, embassies. Though nearly
all the listed threats have passed without incident and 99 percent turned
out to be groundless, dozens more take their place in the matrix each day.

It was the matrix that generated the national alert of impending terrorist
action issued by the FBI on Oct. 11. The goal of the matrix is simple: Look
for patterns and specific details that might prevent another Sept. 11.

"I don't think there has been such risk to the country since the Cuban
missile crisis," a senior official said.

During an interview in his West Wing office Friday morning, Vice President
Cheney spoke of the new war on terrorism as much more problematic and
protracted than the Persian Gulf War of 1991, when Cheney served as
secretary of defense to Bush's father.

The vice president bluntly said: "It is different than the Gulf War was, in
the sense that it may never end. At least, not in our lifetime."

Pushing the Envelope

In issuing the finding that targets bin Laden, the president has said he
wants the CIA to undertake high-risk operations. He has stated to his
advisers that he is willing to risk failure in the pursuit of ultimate
victory, even if the results are some embarrassing public setbacks in
individual operations. The overall military and covert plan is intended to
be massive and decisive, officials said.

"If you are going to push the envelope some things will go wrong, and
[President Bush] sees that and understands risk-taking," one senior
official said.

In the interview, Cheney said, "I think it's fair to say you can't predict
a straight line to victory. You know, there'll be good days and bad days
along the way."

The new determination among Bush officials to go after bin Laden and his
network is informed by their pained knowledge that U.S. intelligence last
spring obtained high quality video of bin Laden himself but were unable to
act on it.

The video showed bin Laden with his distinctive beard and white robes
surrounded by a large entourage at one of his known locations in
Afghanistan. But neither the CIA nor the U.S. military had the means to
shoot a missile or another weapon at him while he was being photographed.

Since then, the CIA-operated Predator unmanned drone with high-resolution
cameras has been equipped with Hellfire antitank missiles that can be fired
at targets of opportunity. The technology was not operational at the time
bin Laden was caught on video. The weapons capability, which was revealed
last week in the New Yorker magazine, was developed specifically to attack
bin Laden, the officials said.

In addition, with the U.S. military heavily deployed in some nations around
Afghanistan, commando and other units are now available to move quickly on
bin Laden or his key associates as intelligence becomes available.

U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies recently received an
important break in the effort to track down terrorist leaders overseas,
according to officials.

The FBI and CIA have been given limited access in the last several weeks to
a top bin Laden lieutenant who was arrested after Sept. 11 and is being
held in a foreign country. The person, whose various aliases include "Abu
Ahmed," is "a significant player," in the words of one senior Bush
official. Ahmed was arrested with five other members of al Qaeda. He is
believed by several senior officials to be the highest-ranking member of al
Qaeda ever held for systematic interrogation.

Though Ahmed has not given information about future terrorist operations,
he has provided some details about the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole
in a Yemeni port, when 17 sailors were killed. One source said he also has
information about the planned terrorist attacks in the United States that
were disrupted before the millennium celebrations in December 1999.

The New Normalcy

When specific facilities or locations are threatened, as they have been
repeatedly in the last month, the FBI informs local law enforcement
authorities or foreign intelligence services that are supposed to increase
security and take protective measures.

The Threat Matrix lists where the intelligence comes from -- intercepted
communications, walk-in sources, e-mails, friendly foreign intelligence
services, telephone threats, and FBI or CIA human sources.

The public is not informed except when the threat is considered highly
credible or specific, as it was on Oct. 11 when the FBI issued its
nationwide alert.

In the interview, Cheney said that deciding when to go public and when to
withhold threat information is one of the most difficult tasks the
administration faces.

"You have to avoid falling into the trap of letting it be a cover-your-ass
exercise," Cheney said. "If you scare the hell out of people too often, and
nothing happens, that can also create problems. Then when you do finally
get a valid threat and warn people and they don't pay attention, that's
equally damaging."

He also noted, "If you create panic, the terrorist wins without ever doing
anything. So these are tough calls."

Making details from the Threat Matrix public could result in chaos, several
officials said. Literally hundreds of places, institutions and cities from
across the country have been on the list.

"It could destroy the livelihood of all those organizations and places
without a bomb being thrown or a spore of anthrax being released," another
senior Bush official said. The official was asked what would happen if
there was a major terrorist incident and many were killed at one of the
facilities or places on the Threat Matrix and no public warning had been
issued.

"Then they would have our heads," the official said.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies attempt to run every threat to
ground to see if it is genuine, officials said. The results at times have
been unexpected. In early October, a woman called authorities to say it was
her patriotic duty to report that her husband, who is from the Middle East,
was planning an attack with eight or nine friends on Chicago's Sears Tower.

The woman sounded credible and her allegations were reported in the Threat
Matrix. The FBI then detained her husband and friends. On the next Threat
Matrix the CIA reported that the FBI might have broken up an al Qaeda cell.

Upon further investigation, the FBI learned that the woman was furious with
her husband, who had a second wife. Her allegations had no merit, but the
bureau discovered that some of the people were involved in an
arranged-marriage scheme.

"Instead of terrorism," one official said, "we found an angry wife."

Another senior official said, "There can be a problem in a marriage and it
results in, you know, an allegation that shows up in the Threat Matrix."

During the interview in his West Wing office, Cheney, with a large map of
Afghanistan on an easel near his desk, spoke of life post-Sept. 11.

"The way I think of it is, it's a new normalcy," he said. "We're going to
have to take steps, and are taking steps, that'll become a permanent part
of the way we live. In terms of security, in terms of the way we deal with
travel and airlines, all of those measures that we end up having to adopt
in order to sort of harden the target, make it tougher for the terrorists
to get at us. And I think those will become permanent features in our kind
of way of life."

New War, Old Problems

Though the new intelligence war presents the CIA with an opportunity to
excel, several officials noted that the campaign is also fraught with risk.

The agency is being assigned a monumental task for which it is not fully
equipped or trained, said one CIA veteran who knows the agency from many
perspectives. Human, on-the-ground sources are scarce in the region and in
the Muslim world in general. Since the end of the Cold War more than a
decade ago, the Directorate of Operations (DO), which runs covert activity,
has been out of the business of funding and managing major lethal covert
action.

The CIA has a history of bungling such operations going back to the 1950s
and 1960s, most notably when the agency unsuccessfully plotted to
assassinate Fidel Castro.

In one of the celebrated anti-Castro plots, a CIA agent code-named AM/LASH
planned to use Blackleaf-40, a high-grade poison, with a
ballpoint-hypodermic needle on the Cuban leader. The device was delivered
on Nov. 22, 1963, and a later CIA inspector general's report noted it was
likely "at the very moment President Kennedy was shot."

Though no connections were ever established between the Castro plots and
the Kennedy assassination, the CIA's reputation was severely tarnished.

The covert war in Nicaragua in the 1980s was another source of negative
publicity, as the CIA mined harbors without adequate notification to
Congress and published a 90-page guerrilla-warfare manual on the "selective
use of violence" against targets such as judges, police and state security
officials. It became known as the "assassination manual."

William J. Casey, President Ronald Reagan's CIA director from 1981 to early
1987, was mired in the disastrous outcome of the "off-the-books" operations
of the Iran-contra scandal. That scandal involved secret arms sales to Iran
and the illegal diversion of profits from those sales to the contra rebels
supported by the CIA in Nicaragua.

Reagan and Casey had trouble when they sought to punish covertly the
terrorists responsible for the 1983 truck bombing of the U.S. Marine
compound in Lebanon, which killed 241 American servicemen in the deadliest
terrorist attack on Americans before Sept. 11. Casey worked personally and
secretly with Saudi Arabia to plan the assassination of Muslim leader
Sheikh Fadlallah, the head of the Party of God or Hezbollah, who was
connected to the Marine bombing. The method of retaliation was a massive
car bomb that was exploded 50 yards from Fadlallah's residence in Beirut,
killing 80 people and wounding 200 in 1985. But Fadlallah escaped without
injury.

Since the Ford administration, all presidents have signed an executive
order banning the CIA or any other U.S. government agency from involvement
in political assassination. Generally speaking, lawyers for the White House
and the CIA have said that the ban does not apply to wartime when the
military is striking the enemy's command and control or leadership targets.

The United States can also legally invoke the right of self-defense as
justification for striking terrorists or their leaders planning attacks on
the United States.

Bush's new presidential finding differs from past findings against the
terrorists in a number of significant ways. First, it puts more military
muscle behind the clandestine effort to crush al Qaeda. Second, it is far
better funded. Third, senior officials said, it has the highest possible
priority and will involve better coordination within the entire national
security structure: the White House, the president's national security
adviser, the CIA, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the
departments of State, Defense and Justice.

On Friday, Cheney said the country had a sense of confidence in Bush's
team, which includes an experienced trio of advisers -- Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Cheney himself.
CIA Director George J. Tenet has developed an unusually close relationship
with the new president, becoming a regular during Camp David weekends and
briefing the chief executive most days.

"There's a lot of tough decisions that are involved here, and some of them
very close calls," Cheney said. "But if I had to go out and design a team
of people . . . this is it."

The vice president added that the war on bin Laden and terrorists in
general is going to be particularly difficult.

"They have nothing to defend," he said. "You know, for 50 years we deterred
the Soviets by threatening the utter destruction of the Soviet Union. What
does bin Laden value?

"There's no piece of real estate. It's not like a state or a country. The
notion of deterrence doesn't really apply here. There's no treaty to be
negotiated, there's no arms control agreement that's going to guarantee our
safety and security. The only way you can deal with them is to destroy
them."

'Smoke Them Out'

Six days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush publicly declared the intentions
of his administration with the statement that bin Laden was "Wanted: Dead
or Alive."

In those remarks at the Pentagon, he said that the new enemy, bin Laden and
other terrorists, liked "to hide and burrow in" and conceal themselves in
caves. He first mentioned "a different type of war" that would "require a
new thought process."

Two days later, Sept. 19, Bush made his first public mention of "covert
activities," noting that som


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