CIA Paying Poverty-Stricken Pakistanis to Place Drone Targets

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KF17Df01.html

A paper published last week by the influential pro-military Center for a New American Security (CNAS) criticizing the Obama administration's use of drone attacks in Pakistan said US officials "vehemently dispute" the Pakistani figures but offers no further data on the program.

In an interview with IPS, Nathaniel C Fick, the chief operating officer of CNAS, who co-authored the paper, said Pentagon officials claim privately that 300 al-Qaeda fighters have been killed in the drone attacks. However, those officials refuse to stipulate further just who they have included under that rubric, according to Fick, and have not offered any figure on civilian deaths.

What is needed is "a strict definition of the target set" and "a definition of who is al-Qaeda", said Fick.

Press reports that the CIA is paying Pakistani agents to identify al-Qaeda targets by placing electronic chips at farmhouses supposedly inhabited by al-Qaeda officials so they can be bombed by predator planes has raised new questions about whether the CIA and the Obama administration have simply redefined al-Qaeda in order to cover up an abusive system and justify the program.

The initial story on the CIA payments for placing the chips by Carol Grisanti and Mushtaq Yusufzai of NBC News, which ran on April 17, was based on a confession by a 19-year-old in North Waziristan on a video released by the Taliban. In his confession, the young man said, "I was given US$122 to drop chips wrapped in a cigarette paper at al-Qaeda and Taliban houses. If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars."

He goes on to say, "I thought this was a very easy job. The money was so good so I started throwing the chips all over. I knew people were dying because of what I was doing, but I needed the money."

The video then shows the man being shot for being a spy for the United States.

A US official told NBC news that the video was "extremist propaganda", but a story in The Guardian on May 31 said residents of Waziristan, including one student identified as Taj Muhammad Wazir, had confirmed that tribesman have been paid to lay the electronic devices to target drone strikes.

The knowledgeable Washington source told IPS the Guardian article was consistent with past CIA intelligence-gathering methods in Afghanistan and elsewhere. "We buy data," he said. "Everything is paid for."

The implication of the system of purchasing targeting information for drone strikes is that there is "no guarantee" that the people being targeted are officials of al-Qaeda or allied organizations, he said.

Fick, who is a veteran of the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan and the early phase of the Iraq war, said that kind of intelligence for targeting is "intrinsically problematic"