Rumsfeld fumes as lawyers stop air strike on Taliban leader: New Yorker
Legal officials of the US military stopped an airstrike on a building outside Kabul where Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar was hiding, a report said today, adding that the move infuriated US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
A Predator reconnaissance aircraft identified a convoy of vehicles containing Omar fleeing the Afghan capital on the first night of the US-led airstrikes on October 7, said the report to be published in tomorrow's edition of the the New Yorker.
It said the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was controlling the aircraft and did not have the authority to fire its anti-tank Hellfire missiles, so it requested an air strike on a building where Omar and some 100 guards had taken cover.
But the report, quoting intelligence sources, said Central Command (CENTCOM) in Florida vetoed the attack on legal grounds.
It said CENTCOM commander General Tommy R. Franks was told the Judge Advocate General (JAG), the military's legal branch, "doesn't like it".
The article, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, said the Predator was told to fire a missile at the vehicles in front of the building to see who came out. ;)))
However the report said after some vehicles were obliterated nobody emerged.
It said an intelligence operative on the ground (!)confirmed Omar was in the building and that he escaped a short time later, just before the building was eventually flattened by an airstrike.
The report said intelligence officials were "seething" about the incident and it quoted a senior military officer as saying it was a result of "political correctness" taking over the system.
The officer described Rumsfeld as "kicking a lot of glass and breaking doors" after Omar got away. Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke declined to comment on the report.
Washington accuses Omar's Taliban regime of giving shelter to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, which has been blamed for the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
