Evil In The Cross Hairs

It must be one of the most repulsive home movies ever made. Osama bin Laden chuckles contentedly over slaughtering his own men along with several thousand Americans, while his flunkies kiss up to him like junior executives at bonus time. Except in the minds of Middle Easterners who preferred to fantasize about conspiracy theories, the dimly lit hourlong video, filmed on Nov. 9 and obtained in early December from a house in Jalalabad, left no doubt that bin Laden was behind the September 11 attacks. Family members of the victims said the grainy videotape made them too sick to watch. In the hearts of many Americans, bin Laden's smirking and gloating, at once evil and banal, inspired an overwhelming desire for revenge.

They may get it soon enough. Late last week bin Laden appeared to be staging his last stand. Afghan fighters, aided by Delta Force and other U.S. and British Special Forces, closed in on the Tora Bora caves, while U.S. warplanes rained down precision-guided bombs as well as a couple of massive 15,000-pound Daisy Cutters. Bin Laden may still slip out through the snowy mountain passes to Pakistan, but President George W. Bush vowed, "We'll get him." The only question, it appeared, was when.

Indeed, in Washington war councils and at U.S. military headquarters around the world, attention is already turning to the next targets in the global war against terrorism. Top officials were beginning to talk, with a certain studied circumspection, about using the U.S. military to track down and eliminate key terrorists among Al Qaeda's far-flung terror cells. With public anger surging again over the bin Laden tape and the president's approval ratings staying above 80 percent in the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, the Bush administration has, in essence, a political license to kill. Whether a policy of targeting individual terrorist leaders is ultimately wise or even practical is a different and harder question.

No one doubts the necessity of capturing or killing terrorists before they can kill more Americans, perhaps thousands more with nuclear or biological weapons. But identifying, tracking and eliminating specific individuals can be a difficult and dirty business. And history shows that a policy of assassination--or, to use the old CIA euphemism, "executive action"--may ultimately fail or backfire.

By executive orders dating back to the Gerald Ford administration, U.S. officials are banned from plotting assassinations. At National Security Council meetings, officials never use the word "assassinate" or explicitly discuss targeting individuals, according to a knowledgeable source. Instead, officials talk of taking out "command and control" elements, structures and nodes, and of striking "strategically decisive" blows. Administration lawyers have decided that assassination in peacetime as a tool of retribution is outlawed. But attacks on enemy leaders in wartime to pre-empt future attacks--that's fair game. Says a top U.S. official: "Go back to World War II. Didn't we target Yamamoto?" (In 1943 U.S. warplanes ambushed and shot down the Japanese fleet commander.) The United States has targeted terrorists before--including bin Laden, whose training camps were hit by cruise missiles in 1998.