| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| US lawmaker defends drone killing of Hakimullah Mehsud |
| 2013-11-04 |
| [Dawn] A US politician whose committee oversees the intelligence community on Sunday defended the drone strike that killed a Pak Taliban leader and said it would help keep American troops safe. Representative Mike Rogers, who chairs the House of Representatives' permanent intelligence committee, said the slain bully boy, Hakimullah Mehsud, was a "bad guy" who was connected to attacks against Pak soldiers and to the Taliban in Afghanistan, which has forced closures of many schools for girls. "This was a bad guy," Rogers said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "There's some information recently that concerned us about the safety of our troops. I feel a little better for our troops today than I did before this event happened." Mehsud, who took over as the leader of the al Qaeda-linked Pak Taliban in 2009, was killed on Friday, along with three others, in a US drone strike in northwest Pakistain. The Pak government denounced the killing as an attempt by the United States to interfere with peace talks between Pakistain's government and the Taliban. Pak officials said they would review ties with Washington and some politicians there called for blocking critical US military supply lines into Afghanistan. The Pak Taliban has beheaded Pak soldiers and orchestrated suicide kabooms that have killed thousands of civilians. Rogers also said Mehsud had ties to a failed attempt Curses! Foiled again! to bomb New York's Times Square in 2010. He said US intelligence agencies, including the embattled National Security Agency, collect and contribute the kinds of information that make such strikes possible. "We deal with these threats every single day, and they are big, they are real and they affect real people," Rogers said. |
| Posted by:Fred |