Hi-Tech Drones Aid Terror Hunt – Al Qaeda ‘Alarmed’

A new online video reveals alarm and concern from Al Qaeda leaders over unmanned missile drones launched by the CIA to strike against suspected terrorists. David Martin reports from the Pentagon.

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U.S. Drone Strike Said to Kill 60 in Pakistan

An airstrike believed to have been carried out by a United States drone killed at least 60 people at a funeral for a Taliban fighter in South Waziristan on Tuesday, residents of the area and local news reports said.

Family members mourned Mr. Zainuddin, a tribal leader, on Tuesday in Abbotabad.

Details of the attack, which occurred in Makeen, remained unclear, but the reported death toll was exceptionally high. If the reports are indeed accurate and if the attack was carried out by a drone, the strike could be the deadliest since the United States began using the aircraft to fire remotely guided missiles at members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The United States carried out 22 previous drone strikes this year, as the Obama administration has intensified a policy inherited from the Bush administration.

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Homeland Security Drone Patrolling New York

A monitor inside an operations trailer shows a close-up view of a boat skimming across the water on Lake Ontario.

The image was taken from an unmanned aircraft more than three miles away.

A Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) has been temporarily based at Fort Drum since early June in an experiment by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office.

The Department of Homeland Security is using the extensive restricted air space over Fort Drum to test whether the drone could be a good fit along this stretch of the northern border.

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Al-Qaeda No. 4 Killed In Pakistan

A missile attack from a U.S. drone aircraft is believed to have killed Khalid Habib, an Egyptian who is described by the CIA as the No. 4 in the Al-Qaida hierarchy, according to a former member of a militant group in the region.

The attack, on the village of Taparghai in Pakistan’s volatile tribal region bordering Afghanistan, killed four people, some of them Arabs, according to initial Pakistani intelligence reports on Thursday. Habib was in a parked Toyota pickup, the favored vehicle of insurgents, when he was hit by the missile.

U.S. Presses The Search For Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden and other al Qaeda high value targets are almost certainly feeling the squeeze of an expanded effort by US forces to hunt them down. Excellent write up in the National Post on the ’surge’ in Pakistan, to capture bin Laden.

The hunt for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s top terrorists has gone into overdrive in Pakistan’s wild and desolate northwest frontier.

On the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, U.S. Special Forces, working in “fusion cells” that blend human and signals intelligence with rapid reaction special forces and squadrons of heavily armed remote-controlled Predator drones, Read more

Drone Missile Strike In Pakistan Kills Six

A missile fired from an unmanned aircraft hit a house in a restive Pakistani tribal area on Sunday, killing six.

No word yet if this was a strike on HVT, high value targets.

The attack took place in the village of Tappi, located about 10 kilometres (six miles) southeast of Miranshah, the main town in volatile North Waziristan on the Afghan border.

“The death toll has risen to six and eight others are injured,” a security official told AFP, updating an earlier toll.

“Most of the dead are foreign militants including Arabs and Uzbeks,” he said, but later added that those killed included a woman and a young girl who lived nearby and had been hit by shrapnel caused by the strike.

Residents said the missile was fired from a pilotless aircraft and that the house belonged to a local tribesman who had rented it out to militants.

There has been a series of missile strikes on militants in Pakistan in recent weeks attributed to US-led coalition forces or CIA drones based in Afghanistan.