Manhunting
On Sunday, 3 November, an unmanned American Predator reconnaissance aircraft fired a missile at a car in Yemen that was believed to be carrying Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, an Al Qaeda leader. Al-Harethi and his five companions in the vehicle were killed.
The incident kicks off "Manhunt", a thought-provoking article by Seymour Hersh in the current issue of the New Yorker. The subtitle of Hersh's piece is "The Bush Administration's new strategy in the war against terrorism". And what a dramatic new strategy it is, for it means the return of selective killing as part of United States foreign policy. As Hersh points out, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order in 1976 banning political assassination, and that order remains in force, but in the aftermath of 11 September the Bush Administration has come to regard the targeting and killing of individual Al Qaeda members without juridical process as justifiable military action. This is a new kind of war, says Washington, involving international terrorist organizations and unstable states. According to Hersh, Defense Department lawyers have concluded that the killing of selected individuals would not be illegal under the Army's Law of War if the targets were "combatant forces of another nation, a guerrilla force, or a terrorist or other organization whose actions pose a threat to the security of the United States."
Those who've read Hersh know that there's more to his stories than warmed-up history and, sure enough, it doesn't take long before the money graf arrives:
"Nonetheless, many past and present military and intelligence officials have expressed alarm at the Pentagon policy about targeting Al Qaeda members. Their concerns have less to do with the legality of the program than with its wisdom, its ethics, and, ultimately, its efficacy. Some of the most heated criticism comes from within the Special Forces."
Tensions within the Bush administration, unease among the military, international queasiness, the problems of controlling "killer teams" and the dangers of backlash are all parts of the complicated picture Hersh paints. He makes the most of the dynamic and when the article needs a glint of steel, he calls on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who doesn't disappoint:
"In recent months, some of Rumsfeld's most trusted aides have staged private meetings with past and present military and intelligence officials to discuss the expanding war on terrorism. 'There are five hundred guys out there you have to kill,' a former C.I.A. official said. 'There's no way to sugarcoat it ? you just have to kill them. And you can't always be one hundred per cent sure of the intelligence. Sometimes you have to settle for ninety-five per cent.'"
As Portia says in The Merchant of Venice: "If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces."
