U.S. says confident CIA missile strike hit its mark

By Jim Wolf

Tuesday February 12, 12:50 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon said on Monday it was confident a CIA-fired missile hit its intended target in Afghanistan a week ago, despite reports innocent peasants had been killed, not al Qaeda leaders.

Defense Department spokeswoman Victoria Clarke also said the investigation into a fatal assault on Afghans possibly mistaken by U.S. forces as al Qaeda and Taliban fighters was being expanded to look at charges that detainees were beaten while in U.S. custody several weeks earlier.

"Everything we know says it was the target that we expected," Clarke said of the Hellfire missile strike carried out by a CIA-run Predator drone at the Zhawar Khili cave complex in southeastern Afghanistan last Monday night.

She said she had difficulty specifying precisely who or what the target had been because it was picked by the CIA, not the Pentagon. But she added there had been "a great deal of coordination" in Afghanistan between the Defense Department and the U.S. spy agency.

On Wednesday, U.S. officials said the missile fired by remote control from the pilotless CIA aircraft had hit what was believed to be a group of senior al Qaeda members, killing at least one of them.

TEAM RECOVERS SOME REMAINS

Clarke said a U.S.-led search team of about 50 had recovered some documents, ammunition and weapons and "some small pieces of bone and human flesh" from the spot where the missile struck.

The team turned up a missile fin that had been buried in about 3 feet of snow. The recovered material was being sent back to the United States for further analysis, Clarke said.

Echoing other reports that those killed in the blast were villagers and not al Qaeda leaders, The Washington Post reported Monday from Zhawar Khili that locals said a relatively tall man identified as Mir Ahmad and two other men had been gathering scrap metal when they were supposedly killed by the missile strike.

U.S. officials had said the suspected al Qaeda figure believed killed last week was taller than those surrounding him. That notion fed speculation that Osama bin Laden -- the al Qaeda chief who was a key target of the war launched Oct. 7 -- might have been killed in the raid.

Bin Laden, whose height is estimated on the FBI's most wanted terrorist list to be 6 feet 4 inches to 6 feet 6 inches (193 cm to 198 cm), is blamed by the United States for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States that killed more than 3,000 people.

U.S. officials believed the target was an al Qaeda leader because of the deferential manner of his comrades.

The Post said U.S. soldiers, dispatched to the region to determine who was killed, barred access to the village where the three reported victims had lived.

Clarke said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Central Command commander Gen. Tommy Franks asked for the additional investigation after published reports said Afghan villagers in Uruzgan -- home province of Afghanistan's interim leader, Hamid Karzai -- had been beaten, kicked and imprisoned in what the purported victims described as a wood-barred cage at a U.S. base in Kandahar.

"Right now, there's nothing that leads us to believe anything like that happened," Clarke said.

Several of the 27 former prisoners, who were released on Wednesday, said the U.S. soldiers treated them so harshly that two men lost consciousness during the beatings while others suffered fractured ribs, loosened teeth and swollen noses, The Washington Post reported.

The 27 were picked up in an early morning attack January 24 at a local school and a district government office that Pentagon officials described as outposts for al Qaeda and Taliban holdouts. A total of 21 other villagers were reportedly killed in the assault and one U.S. soldier was wounded. The CIA reportedly has begun paying reparations to victims of the raid.