Mick Smith - Times Online - WBLG

The Dangers of Working with Delta

When the SAS go into battle in Iraq, they tread very carefully, merging into the background in battered locally purchased cars and wearing clothes bought from Baghdad’s markets. They know that at any point they might be attacked by insurgents, or as happened on one occasion by the Iraqi police, apparently a mistake. They also know that – like any British soldier - if they open fire and kill someone without due cause, they will be investigated and in all probability court-martialled. All well and good you say. That’s how British troops should operate, according to international law, the Blair government after all signed up to the International Criminal Court. If we don’t keep our troops in line, then the court could step in and put them on trial.

Donald Rumsfeld's New Killer Elite

Exclusive extract from Michael Smith's new book Killer Elite: America's Most Secret Special Operations Team, published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Donald Rumsfeld was never a man for diplomatic language. On July 1 2002, in the early months of the global war on terror, the American defence secretary sent a two-line memo to Doug Feith, his under-secretary for policy, asking: “How do we organize the department for manhunts? We are obviously not well organized at the present time.” Rumsfeld was sick of being told that US forces could not go after terrorists because of a lack of “actionable intelligence”. His fury was fuelled by a secret inquiry he had commissioned into America’s failure to “take out” Al Qaeda before the attacks of September 11, 2001. It had found that the US joint chiefs of staff were so opposed to special operations missions, such as seizing Osama Bin Laden, that they insisted on failsafe requirements — principally that nobody should be killed. Rumsfeld now gave his special operations teams new orders. They were “to capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them, not to arrest them in a law enforcement exercise.” He also persuaded President Bush to sign a presidential finding authorising the military “to find, fix and finish” terrorist targets. He had created a Killer Elite.