Phones and lasers

While we're not yet ready to embrace some of the weirder speculation about what really happened to al-Zarqawi, there's an interesting inconsistency relative to previous accounts of the activities of senior al Qaeda figures in this excerpt from a story in Sunday's New York Times:

The general [American command's chief spokesman, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell] gave no details, but accounts circulating in Baghdad in recent days, citing unnamed Iraqi officials, have said that Mr. Rahman [al-Zarqawi's adviser], apparently wary of using a cellphone because of American monitoring, relied on a Thuraya hand-held satellite telephone when calling Mr. Zarqawi. One of the features of satellite phones is that a caller usually has to be outside a car or building when he makes the calls, in order for the handset to have a direct line to the satellite.

Here's the problem: a key anecdote used by the White House to attack media reports of National Security Agency warrantless wiretaps, claiming that the reporting was alerting terrorists to NSA methods, was that Osama Bin Laden had stopped using his satellite phone in 1998 when the media reported on it. We've already noted that this account doesn't square with events in Afghanistan in 2001. Apparently the close links between al Qaeda in Iraq and al Qaeda didn't include tips on avoiding surveillance. In fact, the vulnerability of Thuraya phones also surfaced in the early days of the invasion in 2003, when the US military used signals from the phones to guide weapons, a method that appears not to have been successful. But again, the persistence of the phone despite this apparently public knowledge of its downsides seems puzzling.

Speaking of targeting, one other minor issue. A film that we've mentioned before -- Clear and Present Danger -- once again stands out as getting the tech side of military operations completely right: sometimes Hollywood knows what it's doing. One sequence in the film features a laser guided missile attack on a summit of Colombian drug barons; since the attack is being mounted by clandestine US forces, it has to be made to look like a car bomb. The secret US ground forces establish a vantage point and shine a laser on a pick-up truck in front of the house, and coordinate the firing of the missile with a fighter plane miles away, out of eye and earshot. The plan works fine, except that Jack Ryan and his nemesis, reasoning from different evidence, figure out that it had to be a laser guided bomb. This puzzle about who provided the targeting is present in al-Zarqawi's case too:

[An] aerial drone appeared to have provided the geographic coordinates that were crucial to the bombing, and possibly the laser beam that guided the first bomb. General Caldwell said that the first bomb dropped by the F-16 pilot was a GBU-12 laser-guided bomb, and that it was guided to the target by a laser beam that was independently directed at the house.

The second bomb, which the general identified as a GBU-38, was guided to the target by pinpoint coordinates that the pilot had to program into his weapons system, and the generals said these coordinates came from an "overhead asset," apparently the drone.

The general said that the delay between the first and second bombs was 96 seconds, the time it took for the pilot to plug in the coordinates, and that the pilot's orders were to drop both bombs.

That vague first paragraph leaves open the possibility that it was a Clear and... style hit, with a ground team guiding the first bomb. But there's still the puzzle of why they would have needed coordinates for the second bomb when presumably they had a direct hit from the first one -- unless something happened to the beam. At this point, we emphasize, a loose end rather than something truly fishy.