So We Killed Mr. Muhammad and perhaps other people for Pakistan? That was the deal? that we worked it out with them? Pakistan to us - Yes, you can use drones, as long as you now & then kill who we want you to ? . .Mr. Muhammad was not our enemy. .He was Pakistans enemy? ...As the battles raged in South Waziristan, the station chief in Islamabad paid a visit to Gen. Ehsan ul Haq, the ISI chief, and made an offer: If the C.I.A. killed Mr. Muhammad, would the ISI allow regular armed drone flights over the tribal areas? ... Should we laugh or cry? America .. Pakistan and jeez maybe Yeman's hit man! ....I guess because they are our allies now.
There are three basic categories of targets who might find their way onto a kill-list: (1) Targets who fall within the AUMF, and its associated forces interpretations [AUMF Targets], (2) targets who fall within the terms of a covert action finding [Covert Action Targets], and (3) targets provided by allies in a non-international armed conflict in which the U.S. is a participant. [Ally Targets or derisively “side payment targets.”] These categories will oftentimes overlap, however there also may be circumstances where a target rests exclusively within one category. How to categorize a particular target will depend on detailed legal, factual, and diplomatic analysis conducted on a case-by-case basis by bureaucrats. Who specifically should be killed? And if multiple people are to be killed, how can the military and the CIA sort out the key targets from the less important ones? How does the United States ensure that killing someone will have an impact on the terrorist organization? What about the political and diplomatic consequences that might flow from a targeted killing? Who approves adding names to a kill-list and by what criteria? These questions are answered in a heavily bureaucratized target development process that I’ll explain over the course of my next few posts.
Then he points out that we have been doing this same thing with bombs since WWI ...
IT TAKES A BUREAUCRACY TO MAKE A KILL LIST
It is not surprising that the creation of kill-lists is a matter of popular debate and scholarly commentary. Since World War I, military and civilian personnel have compiled target lists for bombing. And since the inception of airpower, various theorists have argued over what type of target is proper, oftentimes debating the second and third order effects of striking certain targets. Thus while controversy over targeting decisions is not new, what is new are the levels of precision and accuracy now possible in modern air strikes. New technology has created an expectation about accuracy and has led to the politicization of air delivered weapons. Concomitantly, as the accuracy of weapons has increased, the demand for intelligence and for accountability with regard to intelligence based decisions has also dramatically increased.
It is in this context that the United States government has created kill-lists. And because killing the wrong person may lead to serious consequences, these lists are vetted through an elaborate bureaucratic process that allows for verification of intelligence information prior to the placement of a person on a kill list. The United States government’s decision that killing terrorists is one way of achieving some of the nation’s counterterrorism goals raises a host of questions. Who specifically should be killed? And if multiple people are to be killed, how can the military and the CIA sort out the key targets from the less important ones? How does the United States ensure that killing someone will have an impact on the terrorist organization? What about the political and diplomatic consequences that might flow from a targeted killing? Who approves adding names to a kill-list and by what criteria? These questions are answered in a heavily bureaucratized target development process that I’ll explain over the course of my next few posts.
What irony, We can thank drones for stopping our torturing__
A New Direction
As the negotiations were taking place, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, had just finished a searing report about the abuse of detainees [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/us/politics/23cia.html ] in the C.I.A.’s secret prisons. The report kicked out the foundation upon which the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program had rested. It was perhaps the single most important reason for the C.I.A.’s shift from capturing to killing terrorism suspects.
The greatest impact of Mr. Helgerson’s report was felt at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, or CTC, which was at the vanguard of the agency’s global antiterrorism operation. The center had focused on capturing Qaeda operatives; questioning them in C.I.A. jails or outsourcing interrogations to the spy services of Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt and other nations; and then using the information to hunt more terrorism suspects.
Mr. Helgerson raised questions about whether C.I.A. officers might face criminal prosecution for the interrogations carried out in the secret prisons, and he suggested that interrogation methods like waterboarding, sleep deprivation and the exploiting of the phobias of prisoners — like confining them in a small box with live bugs — violated the United Nations Convention Against Torture.
“The agency faces potentially serious long-term political and legal challenges as a result of the CTC detention and interrogation program,” the report concluded, given the brutality of the interrogation techniques and the “inability of the U.S. government to decide what it will ultimately do with the terrorists detained by the agency.”
The report was the beginning of the end for the program. The prisons would stay open for several more years, and new detainees were occasionally picked up and taken to secret sites, but at Langley, senior C.I.A. officers began looking for an endgame to the prison program. One C.I.A. operative told Mr. Helgerson’s team that officers from the agency might one day wind up on a “wanted list” and be tried for war crimes in an international court.
The ground had shifted, and counterterrorism officials began to rethink the strategy for the secret war. Armed drones, and targeted killings in general, offered a new direction. Killing by remote control was the antithesis of the dirty, intimate work of interrogation. Targeted killings were cheered by Republicans and Democrats alike, and using drones flown by pilots who were stationed thousands of miles away made the whole strategy seem risk-free.
Before long the C.I.A. would go from being the long-term jailer of America’s enemies to a military organization that erased them.
Not long before, the agency had been deeply ambivalent about drone warfare.
The Predator had been considered a blunt and unsophisticated killing tool, and many at the C.I.A. were glad that the agency had gotten out of the assassination business long ago. Three years before Mr. Muhammad’s death, and one year before the C.I.A. carried out its first targeted killing outside a war zone — in Yemen in 2002 — a debate raged over the legality and morality of using drones to kill suspected terrorists.
A new generation of C.I.A. officers had ascended to leadership positions, having joined the agency after the 1975 Congressional committee led by Senator Frank Church, Democrat of Idaho, which revealed extensive C.I.A. plots to kill foreign leaders, and President Gerald Ford’s subsequent ban on assassinations. The rise to power of this post-Church generation had a direct impact on the type of clandestine operations the C.I.A. chose to conduct.
........never in my wildest dreams would I have ever thought of that .. never.
Instead, he contributed a new and bizarre chapter to the country’s political turmoil on Thursday, fleeing the halls of the High Court after a judge ordered his arrest. Speeding away in a convoy of black S.U.V.’s as a crowd of lawyers mocked him, he hurried to his fortress compound outside the capital, where he was later declared under house arrest.
Less than five years after wielding absolute power, the retired four-star general has become the latest example of the Pakistani judiciary’s increasing willingness to pursue previously untouchable levels of society — even to the top ranks of the powerful military.
Never before has a retired army chief faced imprisonment in Pakistan, and analysts said the move against Mr. Musharraf could open a new rift between the courts and the military.
All this comes at a delicate moment for Pakistan, with elections near and only a temporary caretaker government at the helm. Though army commanders have sworn to stay on the sidelines in this election, there is fear that any tension over Mr. Musharraf’s fate could make the military more politically aggressive.
It was perhaps with that potential conflict in mind that the country’s Supreme Court was reported by Mr. Musharraf’s aides to have designated his luxury villa — secured by both retired and serving soldiers — as a “sub-jail” late Thursday night rather than demanding that he appear outside the compound’s walls for arrest.
The tight security at his home, ringed by guard posts and barbed wire, was at first a reflection of repeated Taliban threats to kill the former general. But for now, the imminent danger to Mr. Musharraf, who ruled Pakistan between 1999 and 2008, stems from the courts.
At Thursday’s hearing, the High Court judge, Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui, refused to extend Mr. Musharraf’s bail in a case focusing on his decision to fire and imprison .. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/world/asia/25pakistan.html .. the country’s top judges when he imposed emergency rule in November 2007.
Resentment toward the former army chief and president still runs deep in the judiciary, which was at the center of the heady 18-month protest movement that led to his ouster in 2008.
Mr. Musharraf’s All Pakistan Muslim League party hit back at the court, describing the order as “seemingly motivated by personal vendettas,” and hinted at the possibility of a looming clash with the military, warning that the order could “result in unnecessary tension among the various pillars of state and possibly destabilize the country.”
Mr. Musharraf’s lawyers immediately lodged an appeal with the Supreme Court, which rejected it. The legal team said it would try again on Friday.
The court drama represents the low point of a troubled homecoming for the swaggering commando general, who had vowed to “take the country out of darkness” after returning from four years of self-imposed exile in Dubai, London and the United States.
But instead of the public adulation he was apparently expecting, Mr. Musharraf has been greeted by stiff legal challenges, political hostility and — perhaps most deflating — a widespread sense of public apathy.
Pakistan’s influential television channels have given scant coverage to Mr. Musharraf since his return, and his party has struggled to find strong candidates to field in the general election scheduled for May 11. On Tuesday, the national election commission delivered another blow, disqualifying Mr. Musharraf .. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/17/world/asia/musharraf-is-disqualified-from-pakistani-elections.html .. from the election.
The army, once the source of Mr. Musharraf’s power, has offered little in the way of succor, apart from some armed security.
Meanwhile, Mr. Musharraf faces criminal charges in three cases dating to his period in office — the one related to firing judges and two others related to the deaths of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, a Baloch tribal leader. Attempts by some critics to charge Mr. Musharraf with treason have not succeeded.
At times, the self-described elite soldier seemed bent on shooting himself in the foot. In an interview with CNN last week, he admitted to having authorized American drone strikes in the tribal belt — a statement that contradicted years of denials of complicity in the drone program, and which was considered politically disastrous in a country where the drones are widely despised.
In returning home in such an apparently ill-considered manner, Mr. Musharraf has placed himself at the mercy of some of his most bitter enemies.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is led by his sworn enemy, Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, whom Mr. Musharraf fired and placed under house arrest in 2007. Justice Siddiqui, who refused him bail on Thursday, is considered a conservative who has been hostile to the military.
Last week, another judge placed Mr. Musharraf on the Exit Control List, which means that he cannot leave the country until a court gives him permission.
In his 2006 memoir, “In the Line of Fire,” Mr. Musharraf wrote: “It is not unusual in Pakistan for the general public and the intelligentsia to approach the army chief and ask him to save the nation.” But as the events of Thursday suggested, it is the former army chief who may need saving this time.
Salman Masood contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on April 19, 2013, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Musharraf Flees Court in Pakistan After Judge Orders His Arrest.
Market Data 
Markets 
AI
