[A-List] US military: learning from Israel

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The name of the game is assassination

The Pentagon has learned from Israel's policy of 'targeted killings'

Tony Geraghty and David Leigh
Thursday December 19, 2002
The Guardian

Israeli hardliners had the pleasure this week of seeing their controversial
tactic of "targeted killing" of their enemies vindicated by being imitated.
For it has emerged that their close allies in the US administration have now
drawn up a target list for a systematic policy of assassination against
those they call terrorists.

Considering the closeness of the Israeli right and the hawks at the
Pentagon, this development should come as no surprise. The US has borrowed
not just their policy, but their techniques too. It was Israel that
pioneered the use of the Hellfire missile for summary executions such as the
US carried out last month in Yemen.

Developed as a tankbuster during the cold war, Hellfire hits its target at
950mph. On November 3, a Landcruiser with an alleged al-Qaida leader and
five other men was stalked from the air by a pilotless Predator controlled
by a US team in Djibouti, 150 miles away. The Hellfire it carried enabled
them to kill their prey from the comfort of an office chair.

A decade earlier, another terrorist, Sheik Abbas Moussawi, leader of
Lebanon's fundamentalist Hizbollah group, was stalked from the air in this
way. On February 16 1992, he was vaporised by an Israeli helicopter armed
with Hellfire.

In biblical times, David made do with just one missile to cut down Goliath.
But since Moussawi's Mercedes was in a guarded convoy, he got five. His wife
Siham and their son Hussein, aged five, were killed with him.

Israel's defence minister, Moshe Arens, rejoiced over "a message to all
terrorist organisations... whoever opens an account with us, we will close
the account with them".

Three years later, Israel assassinated another Hizbollah leader, Rida
Yassin, in a similar way as he drove along a road east of Tyre. Two Cobra
helicopter gunships fired the radar-guided missiles, again believed to be
Hellfires. One reportedly exploded inside the vehicle, burning Yassin and an
aide alive. The other set fire to trees and bushes, hindering rescue
workers.

The US's recent technical contribution has been to marry Israel's novel use
of Hellfire with unmanned drones. The Predator was conceived in 1994 as a
spy plane, operated from a safe position by a member of the "joystick
generation" - and three others managing cameras and communications.

Airforce chiefs then transformed it into a tankbuster. The first successful
test was in Nevada on February 21 2001. Air combat command moved on to try
satellite links against the harder challenge of a moving target.

Al-Qaida's attack on the twin towers soon afterwards dramatically changed it
targets - to "take out" not tanks, but individuals.

In this, it seems clear the Pentagon drank at the well of Israel's
experience as a "laboratory for fighting terror". This May, Douglas Feith,
the Pentagon's hawkish undersecretary for policy, went to Tel Aviv to talk
to Ariel Sharon and his defence minister, Binyamin Ben Eliezer. The Israeli
paper Ha'aretz said they discussed "war games, intelligence sharing and
other cooperation".

Feith is such an enthusiast for the Israeli right that the reactionary
Zionist Organisation of America describes him approvingly as "the noted
pro-Israel activist".

Four weeks later, Israel's top two security chiefs went to Washington to
propose a new US-Israeli office specifically to combat terrorism. Brigadier
General David Tzur and Uzi Landau, minister of interior security, met Feith
on June 27.

The joint office, to be based in Washington, would involve a communications
link between the proposed US department of homeland defence and the Israeli
government, it was explained. Visa policies, terrorist profiles and other
internal security data - except classified intelligence - would be swapped
by computer, fax and telephone. The topic of the US-Israeli meeting was
confirmed as "homeland security". Mr Landau said: "Israel is a laboratory
for fighting terror."

It was only a matter of days after those talks that defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld drafted a secret directive. It is reported he ordered Air force
General Charles Holland on July 22 "to develop a plan to find and deal with
members of terrorist organisations".

"The objective is to capture terrorists for interrogation or if necessary to
kill them, not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise," he
wrote.

Following the Yemen attack - what the Pentagon apparently hopes was the
first of many successful operations - the third of the Pentagon's trio of
hawks, deputy secretary Paul Wolfowitz, told CNN the killing was regarded as
"a very successful tactical operation".

That opinion seems likely to be cheered to the echo in an embattled Israel.
But others will regard with profound alarm this latest systematisation of
murder.