General defends deadly U.S. raid

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The U.S. commander of the war in Afghanistan defended the actions of American soldiers in a January raid that killed 16 Afghans later determined to be friendly forces.

Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command, said Monday there had been no intelligence failure in the raid, even though those killed and captured turned out not to be the hostile forces that the U.S. soldiers had been told were there. He disputed suggestions that the U.S. troops had erred.

“The one mistake that I know was made was when people shot at American forces doing their job on the ground in Afghanistan,” he said in a videoconference from Tampa, Fla., with reporters at the Pentagon.

During the night of Jan. 23, two teams of U.S. Army special forces soldiers conducted simultaneous raids on two compounds north of the city of Kandahar. Franks said intelligence gathered over an extended period suggested that members of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida terrorist network were in the compounds. He said a decision was made to send special forces troops in on the ground to confirm that information, rather than send warplanes to bomb the site.

“Intelligence failure? No,” Franks said, adding that it had been adequately investigated. He said he intended to take no disciplinary action against any U.S. forces involved.

In other developments Monday related to the Sept. 11 attacks:

Embassy officials discovered a hole large enough to crawl through in a tunnel adjacent to the U.S. Embassy in Rome. They said water pipes leading to the building were circled on a map seized along with a cyanide compound in a raid last week on a Rome apartment.

Interim Afghan leader Hamid Karzai spoke to the Iranian parliament and thanked the nation for helping Afghanistan fight terrorism and throw off the yoke of Soviet occupation more than a decade ago. Karzai praised Iran for taking in some 2 million Afghan refugees over the years.

Three human rights organizations – the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School and the Center for Justice and International Law – filed a petition with the Organization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights challenging the detention of al-Qaida and Taliban suspects at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba without charges or prisoner of war protections.