Death from the air near Mosul

This story, which I wrote about extensively just below, gets stranger and stranger. The Washington Post, which does its best to hide the number of Iraqis murdered by the Americans by burying the information well down the article, reports this:

"The airstrike, by an F-16 fighter jet early Saturday on the village of Aaytha, 30 miles south of Mosul, was part of 'a cordon and search operation to capture an anti-Iraqi force cell leader,' the military said in a statement."

I'm no military scholar, but how exactly does one "search" for someone with the intent of "capturing" them by dropping bombs on houses?

In the meantime, lots of people are discussing the new Newsweek article which talks about Pentagon plans to create death squads in Iraq to assassinate suspected insurgents. From the reaction to that news, you'd think that the U.S. forces haven't been carrying out systematic assassinations in Iraq for months, in Fallujah and elsewhere; they just do it the coward's way, from the air, instead of from the ground. And without a peep from the "establishment". The ground has been so well paved by the Israelis, I'm sure it hardly seems remarkable to most people.