Kennedy: Destroy Iraqi leadership from top down
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Retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy
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SPECIAL REPORT
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(CNN) -- U.S. strikes on the Iraqi leadership continued Tuesday, a day after four 2,000-pound bombs were dropped on a Baghdad residential building suspected to contain Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his two sons.
CNN Anchor Paula Zahn talked Tuesday with retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Claudia Kennedy, a CNN military analyst, about the impact of the bombing and the role of intelligence in the strike.
KENNEDY: Those bombs were very powerful. They created a 60-foot crater, destroyed about four buildings, and I'm sure it was an enormous explosion.
ZAHN: Now officials are telling us [Tuesday] that this site was based on time-sensitive intelligence. How quickly do you think Special Operations forces had to react in order to strike and get that information to the bombers overhead?
KENNEDY: These reports are believed to have come from Special Operations units who have been building relationships with people on the ground and who may have had some observation of the pattern of travel of this leadership. And so, it sort of depends on how quickly they thought the change in location might take place. I understand that it was about a 25-minute time interval between the time the information was developed and reported until the time the bombs landed.
ZAHN: Is that sort of the narrowest of margins you can work by? Or was the "decapitation strike" an even tighter margin the first night of the war?
KENNEDY: I don't know what the timeline was in that decapitation strike earlier, and I think it must have been a very hastily developed bit of information.
It's so important for us to go ahead and act as soon as we get these reports, because really it's impossible to know with complete certainty that someone enters a building will be out in how much time. It's just impossible to know that sort of thing.
ZAHN: Now, the one point [CNN National Security Correspondent] David Ensor has been making [Tuesday] morning is that because coalition forces aren't in control of that particular residential neighborhood, they can't confirm whether Saddam has been killed or not. If he has been killed though, how will that affect ongoing military strategy?
KENNEDY: I think that the strategy will remain stable because it's a strategy that's based on a degree of agility about reacting to developments as they occur on the ground.
So once you have decapitated the top-level leadership, you go to the next level, and much of that next level may already have been destroyed, but there are core commanders out there who do have the authority to use chemical weapons, and there are other people in the cabinet around Saddam Hussein that need to be dealt with.
Lt. Gen. Claudia J. Kennedy, former U.S. Army deputy chief of staff for intelligence, is the first and only woman to have received this flag rank in the U.S. Army. She is one of CNN's military analysts.
EDITOR'S NOTE: CNN's policy is to not report information that puts operational security at risk.
