U.S. COMMANDOS ACTIVE IN IRAQ
By Dana Priest
Washington Post
The covert teams, from the CIA's paramilitary division and the military's special-operations group, include snipers and demolition experts schooled in setting house and car bombs. They reportedly have killed more than a handful of individuals, according to one knowledgeable source. They have been in operation for at least a week.
The previously undisclosed operation suggests U.S. government efforts to destroy the government leadership are far more extensive than previously known and have continued since the March 20 airstrike on a residential compound in the suburbs of Baghdad. That attack was launched after CIA Director George Tenet presented President Bush with fresh intelligence that Saddam and his two sons, Qusay and Uday, were sleeping at the complex.
CIA officials declined to comment. Pentagon news officer Torie Clarke said, ``As we have said before, we have special forces in the north, west and south of the country.''
As conventional U.S. and British forces have encountered fiercer-than-expected Iraqi resistance, the CIA and the Pentagon's covert units are under increasing pressure to fire the ``silver bullet'' that will kill Saddam and bring down his government. The agencies have stepped up a fierce psychological-operations campaign to rattle key members of Saddam's government to get them to turn on the Iraqi leader.
CIA units and special-operations teams also are involved in organizing tribal groups to fight the Iraqi government from the north. They are secretly hunting for weapons of mass destruction and missile sites and are looking to interrogate Iraqi defectors and prisoners of war. The CIA, National Security Agency and foreign intelligence services cooperating with the agency are helping to identify so-called ``leadership'' targets: the homes, offices and other sites inhabited by the officials who make up the government's infrastructure.
Provided with a detailed account of the contents of this article, U.S. government officials made no request to the Washington Post to withhold any of the story's details from publication, as they have sometimes done in other cases involving ongoing covert operations.
Many of the missions performed by the CIA in Iraq integrate intelligence into battlefield operation -- through high-speed wireless data transmission. The covert killing teams are an example of what one source called the ``real-life stuff.''
Not all the explosions in Baghdad captured by Western television cameras are the result of aerial bombs and missiles, the source said, implying that some had been planted by the teams.
For decades, since the assassination scandals and consequent legal restraints of the 1970s, neither the CIA nor the military undertook such targeting of individuals.
But after the Sept. 11 terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the CIA in particular has been given the go-ahead to undertake much more risky and sensitive operations that do just that. The agency maintains a list of about 30 terrorists, the so-called ``high-value targets,'' and has assigned paramilitary teams to track down, capture or kill these individuals, most of whom are members of the Al-Qaida terrorist organization.
The CIA and the military derive their legal authority to carry out such operations from two classified legal memorandums, one written for President Clinton in 1998 and one written by Bush administration lawyers after the Sept. 11 attacks.
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/5511889.htm
Classified or kagaa,as long as it's assassination politics,I could give a shit.
