{"id":1319,"date":"2006-01-15T22:28:01","date_gmt":"2006-01-16T04:28:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/?p=1319"},"modified":"2006-01-15T22:28:53","modified_gmt":"2006-01-16T04:28:53","slug":"zawahiri-apparently-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/?p=1319","title":{"rendered":"Zawahiri Apparently Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I <a href=\"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/?p=1317\">blogged<\/a> about Friday&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Does that mean the strike was failure of intelligence or a bloody, tragic mistake?  Not according to Bob Owens at <a href=\"http:\/\/confederateyankee.mu.nu\/\">Confederate Yankee<\/a>, who points readers to a couple of stories saying the strike was based upon, of all things, a <a href=\"http:\/\/confederateyankee.mu.nu\/archives\/151748.php\">dinner invitation<\/a> [emphasis in original].<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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\u00e2\u20ac\u201dperhaps 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. <em>This was not a case of an intelligence failure, but a case of one fewer terrorists showing up for dinner<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There is, in every war, the tragic loss of innocents.  At other times, those labeled as innocent sometimes are not as they appear.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I blogged about Friday&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-central-asia","category-war-on-terror"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/targetcentermass.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}