By a Drone

Another rockin' musical satire "...no tall man with a beard is safe anywhere in Southwest Asia." (a CIA agent)
In February, 2002, along the mountainous eastern border of Afghanistan, a Predator reportedly followed and killed three suspicious Afghans, including a tall man in robes who was thought to be bin Laden. The victims turned out to be innocent villagers, gathering scrap metal.
"The optics were not great, but it was him," Henry Crumpton, then the C.I.A.'s top covert-operations officer for the region, told Time. But two other former C.I.A. officers, who also saw the footage, have doubts. "It's like an urban legend," one of them told me. "They just jumped to conclusions. You couldn't see his face. It could have been Joe Schmo. Believe me, no tall man with a beard is safe anywhere in Southwest Asia."

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the local informants, who also serve as confirming witnesses for the air strikes, are notoriously unreliable. A former C.I.A. officer who was based in Afghanistan after September 11th told me that an Afghan source had once sworn to him that one of Al Qaeda's top leaders was being treated in a nearby clinic. The former officer said that he could barely hold off an air strike after he passed on the tip to his superiors. "They scrambled together an élite team," he recalled. "We caught hell from headquarters. They said 'Why aren't you moving on it?' when we insisted on checking it out first." It turned out to be an intentionally false lead. "Sometimes you're dealing with tribal chiefs," the former officer said. "Often, they say an enemy of theirs is Al Qaeda because they just want to get rid of somebody. Or they made crap up because they wanted to prove they were valuable, so that they could make money. You couldn't take their word."

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/26/091026fa_fact_mayer

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