Pentagon Defends Missile Strikes on Afghan Complex
Feb. 12 -- Under intense pressure from reports that the victims of a CIA missile attack in southeastern Afghanistan were innocent villagers, the Pentagon asserted that casualties in the attacks were not civilians.
"Initial indications would seem to say that these are not peasant people up there farming," Pentagon spokesman Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem told reporters in Washington Monday during a grueling round of questioning about last week's missile strikes.
"The indicators were there that there was something untoward that we needed to make go away," he said.
A team of 50 U.S. investigators at the Zawar Kili complex gathered body parts as well as weapons, communications systems and documents in English including applications for credit cards and airline schedules, said Stufflebeem. Indications, he maintained, that "something untoward" was happening at the site.
A carrying case for an expensive satellite phone was also reportedly found at the site.
"There are no initial indications that these were innocent locals," he said. "And I base that on the fact that this team, in addition to just looking at the site where the strike occurred, also did some exploration in the surrounding area to include some caves, a nearby village and talking to locals. So I think that puts us in a comfort zone right now that these were not innocents."
Stufflebeem's comments followed a report in The Washington Post Monday that villagers in the area had provided the identities of some of the victims of the attack and told reporters they were locals collecting scrap material from the site.
A Washington Post reporter told ABCNEWS: "All of whom [the locals], to a person, identified the three victims of the attack as three local peasants who were collecting scrap metal ... and I've spoken to relatives of the three men today and all them say that's exactly what they were ... and they certainly were not Osama bin Laden and they were not al Qaeda."
The missile strike was conducted by an unmanned CIA Predator drone last Monday following intelligence reports that a group of people had gathered at the Zawar Kili complex, which had been the target of intense U.S. strikes in January.
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