Pentagon defends missile strike

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — U.S. soldiers who scoured the site of a CIA-directed missile attack in Afghanistan found evidence disputing claims that those killed were innocents, a senior Pentagon official said Monday.

Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said a team of more than 50 U.S. military personnel recovered ammunition, an empty box for a hand-held radio, English-language documents — including credit card applications and commercial airline schedules — and pieces of human remains.

They also checked in nearby caves and villages and talked with locals before leaving the area Monday, he said.

"These were not innocents," he said, while acknowledging that their identities are not known.

Villagers have said that the victims were peasants who were gathering scrap metal from the war when a Hellfire missile launched from a pilotless aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency shrieked out of the sky Feb. 4 and killed the men.

Responding to that report, Victoria Clarke, chief spokeswoman for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said, "We haven’t seen or heard anything that leads us to believe that it was anything other than what we thought the target was."

In other developments:

Rumsfeld has asked for an investigation into allegations that a group of Afghans mistakenly taken prisoner by U.S. Special Forces last month were beaten and mistreated, but senior Pentagon officials said Monday that so far there is no evidence that such abuse took place.

Yacine Akhnouche, a 27-year-old Frenchman who claims to have crossed paths in Afghanistan with key figures tied to the Sept. 11 attacks, a thwarted millennium plot on Los Angeles and other threats on American citizens is providing French authorities with a treasure-trove of information on al-Qaida, officials said Monday.

Opium vendors shut their open-air market in Kandahar on Monday under what they said were U.S. military orders, becoming first targets in a campaign against Afghanistan’s post-Taliban drug boom.