When I blogged about Friday’s missile strike targeting chief al Queda lieutenant Ayman al-Zawahiri, I hedged that reports of his demise may be premature again. Indeed, that appears to be the case.
Does that mean the strike was failure of intelligence or a bloody, tragic mistake? Not according to Bob Owens at Confederate Yankee, who points readers to a couple of stories saying the strike was based upon, of all things, a dinner invitation [emphasis in original].
Terrorists were targeted at these locations by what appears to certainly be human intelligence working in conjunction with aerial surveillance and targeting. Only a human source (or communications monitoring—perhaps by NSA?) would be able to find out that al-Zawahiri was invited to dinner at this home, and it is reasonable for a circling drone or any operators on the ground to surmise that a small ground of armed men arriving at the specified location at the specified time might very well contain their target. This was not a case of an intelligence failure, but a case of one fewer terrorists showing up for dinner.
There is, in every war, the tragic loss of innocents. At other times, those labeled as innocent sometimes are not as they appear.