Posted on 03/19/2003 8:06:00 PM PST by NormsRevenge
ELITE teams of US Delta Force commandos have been inside Iraq for weeks and are preparing to descend on Baghdad with the objective of capturing or killing President Saddam Hussein, US defence officials said yesterday. Small, highly mobile units picked from the US Army’s most revered and secretive fighting force have been assigned a key mission of the war: to hunt down Saddam, his two sons and at least a “dirty dozen” of Iraq’s top military and civilian leaders. The Delta Force, the US equivalent of the British SAS, has 306 men. It has been training for several years with the CIA for the specific mission of hunting down the Iraqi leader, officials said. Last night they were being mobilised to infiltrate Baghdad and Saddam’s home city of Tikrit to begin the hunt. As plans were revealed to drop the commandos from Black Hawk helicopters to sites outside Baghdad, it became clear that, if US forces locate Saddam, the likelihood is that they will kill him and his closest henchmen rather than capture them. “The expectation is to kill him within days (of the start of the war),” a Pentagon official said.“It’s what Delta has been training 24/7 to do.” Assassinating a foreign leader runs counter to a 1976 order signed by President Ford. But White House officials cite international law, which states that, once a war begins, there are no limits on military actions against enemy leaders. Saddam, as Commander-in-Chief of Iraq’s Armed Forces, is a legitimate target, they say. CIA operatives have been photographing and spying on Saddam’s numerous presidential compounds, while US spy satellites take daily pictures of the Iraqi leader’s suspected hideouts. Some of the most detailed information on his possible whereabouts, Pentagon officials said, has come from Jordanian intelligence. Saddam will prove a highly elusive prey, however. During the 1991 Gulf War, allied aircraft bombed 260 “leadership targets”, including underground bunkers, command centres and offices, but failed to touch him. The Iraqi leader, who has at least three surgically enhanced body doubles, spent 38 nights of Operation Desert Storm hiding in the homes of ordinary families, never staying in the same place twice, a tactic that he is likely to repeat. He also claims to have more than 400 hideouts in Baghdad, homes and apartment buildings indistinguishable from ordinary Iraqi residences. The US commandos are preparing to conduct house-to-house searches for him, officials said. In Baghdad, a city of more than five million people, Saddam has a dozen presidential compounds, connected with tunnels built by Yugoslav experts who built a network of underground hideouts for Marshal Tito during the Cold War. Saddam also has several unmarked lorries in which he can live for days at a time. The Iraqi leader views himself as an indefatigable survivor, having emerged unscathed from at least seven domestic assassination attempts, a CIA-sponsored coup attempt and the 1991 Gulf War. The first job of Delta Force commandos will be to isolate Saddam from his military commanders. They plan to hack into and shut down Iraq’s communications and power facilities using laptop computers. They hope to prevent Saddam from communicating with senior officers who might help him to escape or might be awaiting orders to use chemical or biological weapons. Pentagon officials concede that the best chances of finding him lie with informants. “We’ve been trying to track Saddam down since the beginning of the Gulf War, without success,” retired Marine Lieutenant Gregory Newbold said. If Saddam is captured, he will be tried for war crimes, although the forum has not yet been decided on.
I haven't heard on the winner of the pool.
With the cloudy conditions we saw in Baghdad, they couldn't use laser targeting...so I believe it was GPS targeting.
the tomahawk is gps
clouds were low, could affect laser guideds, not tomahawks / gps-guided weaponry
I've also heard "bunker buster" referred to as being used ..I hope both types flew straight and true to their targets.
MSCASEY won with this guess, which was vague but nonetheless what happened was closer to "late night" than 10 or 11am.
Unless the F-117s were flying below the cloud cover ( which I doubt),"painting" the targets would not have worked.
The weapons cannot see laser painted targets through clouds.
We need to remove the head of the snake.
I hate collateral damage as much as the next fella but this regime just does not need to have WMDs.
It's like letting Hitler have nuclear capabilities.
How hard could it be? All they needed to do is track him leaving the Dan Rather interview.
I have always believed the government should drug major anchors and correspondents and implant micro-GPS devices under their skin or muscle tissue to allow precise theatre-level tracking of their whereabouts so that their interview guests' location could be known with accuracy.
Preemption works!
Another approach is old, but effective. And it's dramatically enhanced by new technologies. Triangulation, for example, not only offers redundancy, but also provides for a variety of data, can be used with small, shirt-pocket, radios to precisely target--by a three-way vector--deadly, indeed.
Exactly. That is why GPS works when laser painting doesn't.
Another approach is old, but effective. And it's dramatically enhanced by new technologies. Triangulation, for example, not only offers redundancy, but also provides for a variety of data, can be used with small, shirt-pocket, radios to precisely target--by a three-way vector--deadly, indeed.
Would this then require several people on the ground transmitting coordinates? Sounds fascinating. I love military technology. It's a good thing.
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