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| Afghanistan |
| Imagery prompts review of Afghan air strike: Pentagon |
| 2008-09-08 |
| The Pentagon said Monday that newly obtained imagery prompted a review of a US investigation into an air strike in Afghanistan that found that only five to seven civilians were killed, not 90 as the Afghan government found. General David McKiernan, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, said in a statement Sunday that he had asked the US Central Command to appoint a general to review the investigation in response to "emerging evidence." "There is some evidence to suggest that the evidence the United States military used in the conduct of its investigation may not have been complete," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said on Monday. Whitman said the evidence was "imagery," but would give no details. A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul said it was cellphone imagery taken by a villager. The military investigated the incident after the Afghan government and UN investigators charged that some 90 civilians were killed by an air strike called in by US and Afghan forces in the village of Azizabad in western Afghanistan. A US military investigation concluded that five to seven civilians were killed along with 30 to 35 Taliban fighters, a conclusion that the military has emphatically stood by until now. "In this particular incident we put out the best information we had on that particular incident, and we conducted an investigation," Whitman said. "While we attempt to do very thorough and comprehensive investigations, we also try to do them in an expeditious fashion, particularly in this case because it had a lot of interest and there were some conflicting reports," he said. Rest at link |
| Posted by:ed |