Bombs away! Decapitation attacks are supposed to be precise and discrete. So how come the U.S. military keeps blowing up houses and wedding parties?

Mother Jones, March-April, 2008 by David Case

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In 2004, when an American missile fired from a Predator drone killed Taliban leader Nek Mohammed an observer told a journalist that the bombing was so exact it didn't damage any of the buildings around the lawn where Mohammed was seated." It was an endorsement, if ever there was one, of the Bush administration's post-9/11 efforts at assassinations using what are known as decapitation attacks.

The practice, which is shrouded under a veil of intense secrecy, is generally regarded as warfare's answer to laser surgery: clean and accurate, cheaper than waging a protracted ground battle, and less risky for American troops. But in reality, these premeditated and narrowly focused air bombings often fail to kill their intended foe and hit civilians instead. "It's much more difficult to hunt people with a 2,000-pound bomb than people realize," says Marc Garlasco, who until 2003 was one of the Pentagon's leading analysts of air strikes, including assassinations.

During the invasion of Iraq, Garlasco's job was to analyze targets with an eye toward minimizing collateral damage using a software program called Bugsplat. Days after Baghdad fell, Garlasco, intent on examining firsthand the military's success or failure in sparing civilians, accepted a position with Human Rights Watch (HRW) and traveled to Iraq to do just that. Among the sites he studied was a Basra neighborhood where the United States dropped bombs meant for Lt. General Ali Hassan al-Majid--nicknamed Chemical Ali because of his role in gassing tens of thousands of Kurds. Garlasco had watched the bull's-eye attack live on video transmitted from a Predator drone. "We cheered when the bomb went in," he says.

But Chemical Ali survived, and witnesses told Garlasco that they'd never seen him in the targeted location. As part of his investigation for HRW, the analyst met a 50-year-old laborer whose home was destroyed in the attack, killing seven family members. He found that 10 neighbors had also died. "When I stood in the crater and I was talking to the survivors," Garlasco says, "it wasn't so cool anymore."

Assassinations by air are a relatively new tactic in warfare. Only in the past quarter century has the United States developed munitions accurate enough to attempt a surgical strike against a target as small and mobile as a person. "Fire and forget" laser-guided Hellfire missiles were first used by the American military in Panama in 1989; JDAMs, or guidance kits that convert regular bombs to smart bombs, weren't employed until 1999 during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia; armed MQ-l Predator drones came online in 2002 as part of Operation Southern Watch in Iraq. And of course, recent decades have brought dramatic advances in computer, satellite, and GPS technologies.

In the past, legal restrictions also prevented decapitation attacks. Since 1976, when it was revealed that the CIA had made repeated attempts on the life of Fidel Castro, every American president has issued an executive order banning political assassinations. This ban, however, never applied to leaders with whom the United States is at war, and so the military has launched strikes against Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and Osama bin Laden, among others.

In his first speech after 9/11, President Bush promised to hit terrorists with "dramatic strikes visible on TV and covert operations secret even in success." Since then, the administration has argued that the war on terror's battlefield is global, and it has expanded decapitation strikes accordingly-aiming them at targets across the Muslim world.

VIRTUALLY ALL ASPECTS of the assassination program are classified, and so information about it has emerged only in bits and pieces. In January 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that unnamed officials had confirmed that Predator drones bearing Hellfire missiles-the preferred weapon in decapitation bombings--had hit "terrorist suspects overseas" at least 19 times since 9/11. "The Predator strikes have killed at least four senior Al Qaeda leaders," according to the Times sources, "but also many civilians, and it is not known how many times they missed their targets."

There have been media accounts of at least nine other such strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, where members of A1 Qaeda are thought to be hiding. Dozens more have been conducted in Afghanistan, according to William M. Arkin, a military expert and author of the Washington Post's Early Warning blog. In Iraq, the military claims, more than 200 Al Qaeda operatives have been eliminated by air strikes, be they targeted killings or broader-based attacks.

"The sense in the military and in Washington, D.C., is that U.S. efforts to hunt Al Qaeda are succeeding," says Congressman Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the chair of the House subcommittee responsible for unconventional warfare and special operations. "Most people understand that there are risks-of collateral damage or [retaliation]." The upside, he says, is the degree to which targeted bombings disrupt Al Qaeda's operations. "They can't just pick up the phone. They can't do a wire transfer without thinking, 'Is this going to be something that they're going to pick up on?' There have been a number of these guys just walking down the street, and BOOM! They didn't know we knew them, and we wiped them out. That puts Al Qaeda's supporters back on their heels."