The CIA's bald assassination-by-drone of a top Al Qaeda official this week marks a new aggressiveness in the war on terror and crosses a threshold in the tactics the US is willing to use.

While the US has used unmanned aircraft to strike Al Qaeda operatives in the past, this marks the first use of the tactic outside Afghanistan – and one carried out notably by the CIA and the Pentagon.

It signals the seriousness of the Bush administration to hunt down and root out Al Qaeda members, wherever they are. More important, it marks a new willingness to take preemptive strikes against suspected terrorist cells.

As such, it raises new questions about the accuracy of US intelligence and the legal and moral underpinning for such attacks in a war that is already amorphous and ill-defined by its very nature.

In the strike, Abu Ali al-Harithi, the alleged leader of a Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda, was killed along with five other Al Qaeda members. They died when a Hellfire missile was launched from an unmanned Predator drone operated by the CIA. "I think we've learned that the old notion of deterring these people doesn't work anymore," says Arthur Hulnick, a former senior CIA official. "If they're suicide bombers, they can't be deterred. What you can do is preempt them by hitting them before they strike."

That appears – at least on the surface – to be what was done in this case. Administration and CIA officials aren't commenting on the assassinations.

Harithi was suspected of being one of the planners in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, in which 17 US service members were killed.

Yemen had tried once before to apprehend him, and his small band of followers. This past December, Yemen's president, Ali Abdallah Saleh, sent troops and helicopters to Marib, 75 miles east of the capital Sana, to capture Harithi and the other Al Qaeda members traveling with him. But al-Harithi and his comrades killed 18 Yemeni soldiers and escaped.

Afterward, President Saleh requested help from the US. And the Pentagon complied – it sent in a contingent of US Special Forces with CIA operatives, similar to the makeup of what was in Afghanistan, to help the Yemenis combat Al Qaeda.

The Predator used in this week's operation can fly in under 15,000 feet. It's equipped with a camera so that controllers – who can be hundreds of miles away – can see the targets in real time and fire a missile. "The Predator allows you to get in on the deck at a low level and see what you're shooting at," says Michael Corgan, a retired naval commander. "It's below most radar search envelopes, and it moves quite fast over the ground, so it's hard to hit with gunfire."

Mr. Corgan, who now teaches international relations at Boston University, says it changes the art of warfare in that it lessens the need to put US troops at risk. "Remember," he says, "the Predator can be satellite-controlled too – it's really quite a sophisticated system."

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