So, what credibility does Govt of Pakistan have now?
Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
US drones fly from base in Pakistan?
- Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein expresses surprise at Pak opposition to Predator-launched strikes
- Ex-intelligence officials confirm senator’s account as accurate
Daily Times Monitor
WASHINGTON: CIA’s unmanned Predator aircraft striking terrorist targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas are flown from an airbase inside Pakistan, a senior US lawmaker said on Thursday.
The disclosure by Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, marked the first time a US official had publicly commented on where the Predator aircraft patrolling Pakistan take off and land.
At a hearing, Feinstein expressed surprise at Pakistani opposition to the ongoing campaign of Predator-launched missile strikes. “As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base,” she said.
The CIA declined to comment, but former US intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that Feinstein’s account was accurate.
A spokesman for Feinstein said her comment was based solely on previous news reports that Predators were operated from bases near Islamabad.
Many counter-terrorism experts had assumed that the aircraft were operated from US military installations in Afghanistan, and remotely piloted from locations in the United States.
“If accurate, what this says is that Pakistani involvement, or at least acquiescence, has been much more extensive than has previously been known,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “It puts the Pakistani government in a far more difficult position [in terms of] its credibility with its own people.”
Feinstein’s disclosure came during testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee by US Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair. Blair did not respond directly to the remark, except to say that Pakistan is “sorting out” its cooperation with the United States.
Pakistani officials have long denied that they ever granted the United States permission to fly the Predator planes over Pakistani territory, let alone to operate the aircraft from within the country.
The new government has gone to significant lengths to distance itself from the Predator strikes and regularly lodges diplomatic protests against the strikes as a violation of its sovereignty.
The CIA which has been working to step up its presence in Pakistan in recent years now has nearly 200 people in Pakistan, one of its largest overseas operations outside of Iraq.