`Bush, Rumsfeld gave secret orders for strikes in Pak, Syria`

New York, Nov 10 (PTI) Bush administration had given secret orders to US military to carry out attacks against al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, a media report said on Monday, citing senior American officials.

The US military since 2004 has used this secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen undisclosed attacks against al Qaeda. These were authorised by a classified order that Defence Secretary Donald H Rumsfeld signed in the spring of 2004 with the approval of President Bush, the New York Times said quoting the officials said.

The secret order gave the military new authority to attack the Qaeda terrorist network anywhere in the world, and a more sweeping mandate to conduct operations in countries not at war with the United States, the report said.

In 2006, a Navy Seal team raided a suspected militants' compound in the Bajaur region of Pakistan, the paper said quoting a former top official of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.).

Officials watched the entire mission — captured by the video camera of a remotely piloted Predator aircraft — in real time in the C.I.A.'s Counter-terrorist Center at the agency's headquarters in Virginia 7,000 miles away, the paper said.

Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., American officials told the paper. In others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on October 26 this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations.

But as many as a dozen additional operations have been
cancelled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials told the paper.

They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence.

More than a half-dozen officials, including current and former military and intelligence officials as well as senior Bush administration policy makers, described details of the 2004 military order, the paper said.

Spokesmen for the White House, the Defence Department and the military declined to comment. Apart from the 2006 raid into Pakistan, the paper said the American officials refused to describe in detail what they said had been nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks, except to say they had been carried out in Syria, Pakistan and other countries.

They made clear that there had been no raids into Iran
using that authority, but they suggested that American forces
had carried out reconnaissance missions in Iran using other
classified directives, the Times said.

A senior administration official reportedly said that
the new authority was spelled out in a classified document
called "Al Qaeda Network Exord," or execute order, that
streamlined the approval process for the military to act
outside officially declared war zones.

Where in the past the Pentagon needed to get approval
for missions on a case-by-case basis, which could take days
when there were only hours to act.

It also allowed senior officials to think through how
the US would respond if a mission went badly. "If that
helicopter goes down in Syria en route to a target," the
official said, "the American response would not have to be
worked out on the fly."

The 2004 order was a step marking the evolution of how
the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda
terrorists around the world.

It was issued after the Bush administration had
already granted America's intelligence agencies sweeping power
to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in
overseas prisons and to conduct warrant-less eavesdropping on
telephone and electronic communications. PTI