Intel Committee Chair: U.S. Drones 'Flown Out Of A Pakistani Base'
By James Gordon Meek
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s new chairman, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), raised a few eyebrows on Thursday during a hearing by bringing up the diplomatically sensitive matter of Pakistan’s cooperation with U.S. missile strikes on its soil.
Here’s the setup: Feinstein raised a recent National Public Radio report about the success of the CIA-led offensive in Pakistan’s tribal areas - which the New York Daily News's Mouth of the Potomac Blog exclusively reported last month (and mirrored here on the CT Blog) has zapped at least eight mid-level Al Qaeda leaders since July. The NPR report said the missile strikes by remotely-piloted drones had decimated Al Qaeda and brought it to the edge of extinction.
Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair disagreed with such rosy assessments, remarking, “I have no idea why people would talk in those terms when the facts as I know them are not that optimistic.”
“I don’t know whether you’d care to comment on this, but I also notice that [special U.S. envoy Richard] Holbrooke in Pakistan ran into considerable concern about the use of the Predator strikes in the FATA area of Pakistan, and yet as I understand it these are flown out of a Pakistani base,” Feinstein said next.
Blair did not comment. But some veteran intelligence officers told me yesterday that they were taken aback, since the Predator bases located inside Pakistan are part of a classified covert action program.
Spokesmen for the longtime lawmaker insisted Feinstein wasn’t divulging any secrets she’s been briefed on as the top intelligence oversight official in Congress. They said she was simply referring to an article she read in the Washington Post last March, which cited “Predator strikes launched from bases near Islamabad and Jacobabad in Pakistan.”
“The first question was based on an NPR story. The second was based on the Washington Post story,” Feinstein spokesman Gil Duran told me late Thursday in response to an inquiry. “She did not cite the story in her question, but it ran on [Page] A1 and was the source of the question.”
CIA had no comment.
