A "Hellfire" missile no less. That must make them quake in their boots. Oh, kat, don't be so cynical!

Thanks for posting this, Ebbie. Apparently this is nothing new. This is from a more extensive AP article:

Since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, the CIA has used remotely operated Predator drone aircraft to make pinpoint strikes on al-Qaida leaders and do reconnaissance.

Mohammed Atef, bin Laden's military chief and a Sept. 11 organizer, was killed in November near Kabul in a joint airstrike by a Predator and U.S. military aircraft.

A Predator targeted Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar at the start of the war on Afghanistan, but military lawyers could not decide whether he could be struck, officials have said. Its missiles were ultimately fired near him, but not to kill him.

In May, a CIA Predator attacked Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar near Kabul, missing him but killing some followers. Hekmatyar had offered rewards for those who kill U.S. troops. The former Afghan prime minister is said by U.S. counterterrorism officials to be loosely associated with al-Qaida.

Besides Yemen, other concentrations of al-Qaida operatives have emerged since the war in Pakistani cities and along a remote area of the Afghanistan-Pakistani border.

Of those, the only previously acknowledged U.S. successes against al-Qaida were in Pakistani cities. This year, al-Qaida's operations chief, Abu Zubaydah, and a Sept. 11 planner, Ramzi Binalshibh, were taken in raids conducted jointly by U.S. and Pakistani authorities. Both are in U.S. custody.

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Associated Press writers Robert Burns in Washington and Ahmed al-Haj in Marib, Yemen, contributed to this story.

© 2002 The Associated Press