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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Ahmadinejad to take oath in August

TEHRAN (AFP) – Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will take the oath of office before parliament in early August following his hotly-disputed re-election, the ISNA news agency reported on Tuesday.

The hardline Ahmadinejad will be sworn in as the 10th president of the Islamic republic between August 2 and 6 after being confirmed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and will then unveil his new cabinet, it said.

Ahmadinejad's victory in the June 12 presidential election unleashed a wave of protests unprecedented since the 1979 Islamic revolution, with his defeated rivals complaining that the vote was rigged.

However, his landslide win was ratified by the top electoral body the Guardians Council and backed by Khamenei, who has the final say on all matters of state in Iran.

During his first four-year term, Ahmadinejad put Iran on a collision course with the West over the country's nuclear drive and his frequent diatribes against Israel.

Iran hangs 13 members of rebel Sunni Muslim group

TEHRAN, Iran – Authorities in southeastern Iran on Tuesday hanged 13 members of a Sunni Muslim rebel group convicted of bombings and killings in the area, the official IRNA news agency reported Tuesday.

The report said Abdulhamid Rigi, brother of Abdulmalik Rigi, leader of the group known as Jundallah or soldiers of God, had been scheduled to be hanged along with the 13 men on Tuesday but his execution was postponed. It gave no reason for the postponement.

Earlier on Tuesday, state radio reported that Abdulhamid Rigi was one of 14 men hanged.

There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy.

The executions, according to the radio, took place in the city of Zahedan, some 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) southeast of Iran's capital Tehran and scene of some of the deadliest attacks blamed on Jundallah, which has carried out bombings, kidnappings and killings in the area in recent years.

IRNA also said that all 13 were supposed to be hanged in public but authorities changed their mind at the last minute and decided to execute them inside Zahedan's main prison. The state radio has earlier reported that that the executions took place in public.

The area in southeast Iran where Jundallah is active also is a key smuggling point for drugs — mainly opium — and is the scene of frequent clashes between police and traffickers.

Iran says Jundallah has close ties to "foreign forces" in neighboring Afghanistan, a possible reference to the al-Qaida terror network.

Iran has faced several ethnic and religious insurgencies that have carried out sporadic, sometimes deadly attacks in recent years — though none have amounted to a serious threat to the government.

The Sunni insurgency in southeastern Iran seems to be the more serious at present.

In May, a suicide bombing targeting a Shiite mosque in Zahedan killed 25 worshipers. In 2007, a car bomb killed 11 members of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards near Zahedan, capital of the large Sistan-Baluchistan province and home to about a million of Iran's five million Sunni Muslims.

The remainder of Iran's 70 million people are mostly Shiite Muslims.

SKorean police: Hackers extracted data in attacks

By JAE-SOON CHANG, Associated Press Writer

SEOUL, South Korea - Hackers extracted lists of files from computers that they contaminated with the virus that triggered cyberattacks last week in the United States and South Korea, police in Seoul said Tuesday.

The attacks, in which floods of computers tried to connect to a single Web site at the same time to overwhelm the server, caused outages on prominent government-run sites in both countries.

The finding means that hackers not only used affected computers for Web attacks, but also attempted to steal information from them. That adds to concern that contaminated computers were ordered to damage their own hard disks or files after the Web assaults.

Still, the new finding does not mean information was stolen from attacked Web sites, such as those of the White House and South Korea's presidential Blue House, police said. It also does not address suspicions about North Korea's involvement, they said.

Police reached those conclusions after studying a malicious computer code in an analysis of about two dozen computers — a sample of the tens of thousands of computers that were infected with the virus that triggered the attacks, said An Chan-soo, a senior police officer investigating the cyberattacks. The officer said that only lists of files were extracted, not files themselves.

"It's like hackers taking a look inside the computers," An said. "We're trying to figure out why they did this."

Extracted file lists were sent to 416 computers in 59 countries, 15 of them in South Korea. Police have found some file lists in 12 receiver computers and are trying to determine whether hackers broke into those systems and stole the lists, An said.

Investigators have yet to identify the hackers or determine for sure where they operated from. Dozens of high-profile U.S. and South Korean Web sites were targeted.

There have been no new Web attacks since the last wave launched Thursday evening.

South Korea's spy agency, the National Intelligence Service, lowered the country's cyberattack alert Monday as affected Web sites returned to normal.

North Korea is suspected of involvement. The spy agency told lawmakers last week that a North Korean military research institute had been ordered to destroy the South's communications networks, local media reported.

The agency said in a statement Saturday that it has "various evidence" of North Korean involvement, but cautioned it has yet to reach a final conclusion.

Seoul's state-run Korea Communications Commission said Tuesday that it has blocked an IP address in Britain following a report from a Vietnamese antivirus firm that the address was used to distribute last week's virus.

However, the identity of the IP address — the Web equivalent of a street address or phone number — does not clarify much. It is likely the hackers used the address to disguise themselves — for instance, by accessing the computers from a remote location. IP addresses can also be faked or masked, hiding their true location.

23 militants killed in clashes in Pakistan

By HABIB KHAN, Associated Press Writer

KHAR, Pakistan – Pro-government tribesmen killed 23 militants in clashes in Pakistan's northwest in the latest violence between tribal militias and Taliban insurgents, a government official said Tuesday.

Elsewhere in the volatile northwest, suspected militants attacked an oil tanker carrying fuel to NATO forces in Afghanistan, killing two people, an official said.

The clashes between militants and tribesmen took place in the village of Ambar in the Mohmand region, part of the lawless tribal belt along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan where top Taliban and al-Qaida leaders are believed to be hiding.

Syed Ahmad Jan, a senior regional administrator, said local tribal militia asked the militants to leave the area late Monday. The militants refused and opened fire, sparking a gun battle that was still raging Tuesday morning, Jan said. Four tribal militiamen were wounded in the fight.

Pakistan's government has encouraged tribesmen in the semi autonomous frontier region to form local militias — known as lashkars — to repel Taliban militants blamed for attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Such groups have been set up in several regions but face stiff Taliban resistance.

The ambush on the oil tanker took place in the nearby Khyber region, said Fazal Mahmood, a local government official.

The attackers opened fire on the truck, then fled when the security forces escorting the convoy returned fire, Mahmood said. The truck driver and a passer-by were killed. The tanker caught fire in the attack.

Taliban militants have frequently targeted NATO supply convoys in the region, home to the Khyber Pass, a major land transit route for U.S. and NATO supplies into Afghanistan.

Pakistan's military is readying its latest major offensive against Taliban fighters in the South Waziristan tribal region to the south. The U.S. strongly supports Islamabad's efforts and believes they could help the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan.

But Pakistan also has to grapple with a massive refugee crisis in the northwest sparked by another major offensive in the Swat Valley.

After weeks in sweltering camps, refugees from the valley began heading home Monday — the first day of the government's official repatriation program for those uprooted by fighting there. More were making the trip Tuesday.

Some refugees, however, have refused to go back, fearing for their safety and demanding aid promised by the government. Thousands more who tried to return without official permission were blocked by the military.

The repatriation program's sputtering start illustrates the Pakistani government's struggles to respond to one of the most challenging humanitarian crises in the country's history.

The government has sought to downplay the concerns.

Amir Haider Khan Hoti, the chief minister of the North West Frontier Province, assured refugees Monday the government was strengthening the police force to help keep out the Taliban. The army has already said it expects to stay in Swat for another year.

NATO: 6 killed in Afghanistan helicopter crash

By FISNIK ABRASHI, Associated Press Writer

KABUL – A helicopter contracted by the NATO-led force in Afghanistan crashed in southern Helmand province Tuesday, killing six civilians, an official said. Two U.S. Marines died in the same region.

The white helicopter crashed and caught fire around daybreak in Sangin district, said Fazel Haq, the top district official.

Six civilians on board were killed and an Afghan national on the ground was injured, said a spokesman for the NATO-led force, who could not be identified because he was not the media office's top spokesman.

Authorities were investigating the cause of the crash, he said. The nationalities of those killed were unknown.

Afghanistan's harsh mountainous terrain and lack of roads forces foreign troops to rely on helicopters for transportation and resupply missions. A lack of military helicopters has forced some NATO nations to contract with private companies.

The Taliban claimed to have shot down a helicopter with dozens of British troops aboard. However, the militant group frequently makes claims that turn out to be false, and the latest announcement appeared far out of line with what NATO officials say happened.

Elsewhere in the south, two U.S. Marines were killed in a "hostile incident" on Monday, said U.S. military spokeswoman Capt. Elizabeth Mathias. She did not provide any other details.

Some 4,000 Marines are pushing through Helmand province in the biggest U.S. military operation in Afghanistan since the ouster of the Taliban from power in 2001. The region is the world's largest opium poppy producing area and the Taliban's heartland.

Taliban fighters have planted dozens of roadside bombs in the region, one of the greatest threats to troops operating there. Militants have increased their attacks dramatically in the last three years.

The two deaths bring to 107 the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan so far this year, compared with 151 U.S. deaths in all of 2008. As of Monday, at least 660 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan since 2001, according to the Defense Department. Of those, the military says 492 were killed by hostile action.

Separately, a roadside blast Tuesday hit a civilian vehicle in Uruzgan, another southern province, killing three people and wounded six others, according to an Interior Ministry statement. It said all the victims were civilians.

Uighurs Lament Their Lost Homeland

As it did in Tibet, the Chinese leadership is harshly cracking down on unrest in Xinjiang. The region's Muslim Uighurs feel degraded and robbed of their culture while they suffer in their homeland under the dominance of the Han Chinese.

Hairegul is wearing a pink T-shirt with the word "Sunshine" printed on the front. Her fingernails are the same shade of pink, her eyelashes are painted with mascara, and she is adept at flipping her long black hair back and forth. Meanwhile, Wang Xiaomei's hair is pinned up and five rhinestone studs sparkle in her left ear. She is wearing a striped sweater and clunky, brightly colored plastic bracelets around her wrist.

Hairegul is a Uighur and Wang Xiaomei is Han Chinese. They are both daughters of affluent parents, 21 and in the middle of their semester exams at a teacher training college in Urumqi. The two women live in the same dormitory and are sitting in the same classroom. They are both studying music and want to be teachers. They have the same dream.

A light summer rainstorm is about to descend on Urumqi, the capital of China's western Xinjiang province. A few days earlier, clashes between Uighur and ethnic Chinese students resulted in bloodshed. "We don't dare go out into the streets," say Hairegul and Wang . "We don't know how we'll get home after the exams."

When a group of Uighur students tried to stage a protest march on Sunday, July 5, police broke up the gathering. Uighurs then began attacking Han Chinese in the streets, and some set fire to and looted shops. The ensuing massacre has since shaken the country and horrified the world. At least 184 people are believed to have been killed, including women and children, and more than 1,000 were injured. It is not yet known how many of the casualties could be attributed to beatings and how many to police bullets. President Hu Jintao took the unrest so seriously that he left last week's G-8 summit in Italy and quickly flew home.

Wang became caught up in the chaos by accident. "It was so horrible, the way they were beating people. I couldn't watch, and so I fled to a police station," she says, fighting back tears.

A Booming Economy

Xinjiang - "New Border" in Chinese - is an enormous region that connects China with Central Asia. Of Xinjiang's roughly 20 million inhabitants, about nine million are Uighurs, a Turkic ethnic group many of whom are Muslim. They want to hold onto their region and their culture, and they feel that the Han Chinese dominate them and treat them with contempt.

The name Xinjiang evokes images of the ancient caravans that once passed through the region, along the Silk Road. Even today, the landscape is dotted with oases surrounding earth-colored mosques, where old men in long beards, wearing traditional "dopa" hats on their bald heads, sit in front.

The central government in Beijing pumps billions into Xinjiang each year, transporting the abundant oil and natural gas into its booming eastern provinces. As a result, the economy in Xinjiang has grown faster than in many other Chinese provinces for many years.

Urumqi, the focus of the unrest, is a city that has plunged headlong into a new era. High-rise buildings dominate the downtown area and Western influences are evident in the city's Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, Max Mara boutiques and Adidas shops, and yet the romance of the Orient still exists alongside Urumqi's more contemporary elements. Uighurs can be seen selling melons and raisins in bazaars and vendors barbecue shish kebabs on street corners. Uighurs and Chinese normally live and work in relative harmony in Urumqi, even if relations between the two groups are not necessarily friendly.

Then the unrest broke out. At the beginning of last week, a crowd of Han Chinese suddenly appeared in the streets, seemingly out of nowhere. Wielding clubs, iron bars and spades, they were intent on avenging the Chinese who had died on that violent Sunday. "Kill, kill!" some of them, including young women, shouted. The crowd smashed the windows of Muslim shops and upended a car in front of a mosque across the street from the bus terminal.

"They killed four of us at the bazaar, just an hour ago," says a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf. She pulls out her mobile phone to show us photos of a man streaming with blood. "He is dead," she says.

'They Will Kill Us All Tonight'

Others fetch a video camera to show footage they filmed from a window, when police officers attempted to push away Han Chinese zealots who were throwing stones at the Uighurs. One of them was waving a Chinese flag. A large puddle of blood appears on the video. "A dead man was lying there. The government is not protecting us. They have announced that they will kill us all tonight," says a slender student.

In Urumqi's old Muslim neighborhood, in the shadow of the skyscrapers, people live in old apartment buildings and poorly constructed huts. The government is trying to renovate the district, and it has built hospitals, mosques and a new bazaar there in recent years. On one wall, there is even a drawing of Mao Zedong shaking hands with a bearded Uighur.
Residents look on with suspicion as a column of policemen dressed in black, wearing helmets and wielding batons, passes by. Armed policemen squat on the sidewalk in front of a bank, next to their shields and helmets. An officer is reading out loud from the People's Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, in which the lead article mentions "terrorists" and "separatists" - the official account of the turmoil.

The Communist Party leadership is trying to regain control over the city through sheer force of numbers. A kilometer-long convoy of the Armed People's Police enters the city from the south, along New China Street. The men stand in the trucks, their shields and guns at the ready. Following behind are water canons, armored personnel carriers, command centers, ambulances and SUVs.

Many are still wondering how this could have happened and why Uighurs and Han Chinese who, until now, have gotten along as neighbors, coworkers and fellow students, would suddenly start attacking each other with clubs, knives, spades and axes.

In an echo of its reaction to last year's unrest in Tibet, the Communist Party is once again looking abroad to assign the blame. This time it is not the Dalai Lama Beijing is blaming, but a relatively unknown Uighur businesswoman who wears her hair in long braids: Rebiya Kadeer, 62, who was imprisoned for six years "for leaking state secrets" before being permitted to leave the country and travel to the United States.

Journalists and academics appearing on state-controlled television are quick to offer conspiracy theories. As in the case of the Tibetans, they say, the Uighurs are backed by "certain" governments seeking to split China and stand in the way of its becoming a peaceful major power. They deliberately decline to mention which governments they are referring to.

'We Live From Hand to Mouth'
The spark for the current crisis began in a toy factory in the southern province of Guangdong. On June 26, violence erupted between Han Chinese and Uighur migrant workers at the factory, in the wake of a rumor that Uighurs had raped Han Chinese women. Two Uighurs were killed in the fighting.

The rumor was apparently false and now the Uighurs have become deeply mistrustful. "We don't believe the reports in the press," says Hairegul, the student in Urumqi. "We had heard that 200 people were killed, not two. That was why the students took to the streets."

Anyone who hopes to uncover the roots of the friction should travel to two Urumqi neighborhoods. One is the bitterly poor area along Dawan South Street, where men are slaughtering two sheep in a small market and where veiled women dart through narrow side streets.

The residents are from places like Kuqa, Aksu and small oases bordering the Taklamakan Desert, where they were no longer able to eke out an existence as farmers. Their world was turned upside down and factories now stand where they once tilled the land. Unable to make a living in the countryside, many have come to the capital to look for work - though their prospects are slim.

One vendor opened a small shop on one of the street corners a few weeks ago with his family's accumulated savings. He sells household goods, including pots, toothpaste and honey. A few telephones are displayed in his shop, in a place where no one can even afford to buy a mobile phone. A woman in a black caftan covering everything but her eyes sits at the cash register. The couple has a young son and the family lives behind a pink curtain in the shop. "We pay 600 yuan a month in rent, and then there are the expenses, but I haven't made a profit yet," says the shopkeeper. 600 yuan is about €60 ($84).

"Hardly any of us have work," says a tailor as he walks into the shop. "We live from hand to mouth. There are factories here with thousands of workers, and not one of them is a Uighur."

Two car dealerships across the street were burned down on Sunday. The owner is a Muslim, and so were the arsonists. For several days in a row, soldiers and policemen came to the neighborhood at night and dragged off dozens of men and adolescents.

'We Are Faster and Better Educated'

The second neighborhood is in the brown hills in the southern part of Urumqi, where large slums have sprung up in recent years. Some of the dwellings are nothing but crude wooden shacks. Uighurs from the oases and Chinese immigrants live in these crowded slums.

Uniformed men in steel helmets stand guard at the entrance to a small street market, where there have also been killings. Members of the two ethnic groups attacked one another, although no one knows who initiated the violence. Mrs. Tian is from Sichuan Province. She sells hard liquor from large clay jars, in a shop called "For Calming."

"The Uighurs complain that we took away their homeland," she says. "And they're right. Most of the vendors in this market are now Han Chinese. We are faster and better educated. The Uighurs have trouble with the Chinese language."

The Han Chinese make up about 92 percent of China's population, which also comprises 55 ethnic minorities, including the Muslim Uighurs, who feel marginalized.

Up to two million Han Chinese have moved to Xinjiang since the 1990s. For the new settlers, who see Xinjiang as simply another part of the People's Republic, this is perfectly normal. However, a Beijing observer characterizes the migration as a "Palestinization" of the region. The Han Chinese, he says, behave live colonial masters, forcing local residents to switch to Beijing time, even though the sun rises two hours later in faraway Urumqi.

Clamping Down on the 'Three Forces'

Fearing that Xinjiang could become a hotbed for Muslim terrorists seeking to use violence to secure independence for an "East Turkistan," the Communist Party has clamped down in the past few years, particularly with a recent campaign against what it calls the "three forces" - terrorism, separatism and religious extremism. Those who criticize the government risk being imprisoned on charges of separatism or terrorism.

In the modern city of Urumqi, more and more Uighur women have taken to wearing veils, even though this deprives them of any opportunity to find work. A woman, speaking flawless Chinese, says that she once worked in a telephone shop, until she was fired after being told to choose between her veil and her job.

Under these circumstances, the Muslim residents of Urumqi are becoming increasingly enraged at being treated like strangers in their own homeland. Many feel that they are misused as colorful traditional dancers and singers, and only valued when Beijing wants to demonstrate how harmoniously the ethnic groups in the People's Republic can live together.

What happens next, after the tragedy of Urumqi? "I want things to be the way they used to be," says Wang, the music student. "But things should also be more just," says her fellow student Hairegul, the Uighur.

Source: Free Internet Press.
Link: http://freeinternetpress.com/story.php?sid=22115.

China on collision course with Turkey?

Treatment of Uighurs becomes focal point

A Chinese crackdown in its westernmost Xinjiang province on Uighurs – called separatists and terrorists by Beijing – could be just about to create a serious rift with Turkey, given that the Uighurs are an ethnic Turkic group, according to a report from Joseph Farah's G2 Bulletin.

The Turkish public and press are expressing outrage over the ongoing Chinese response to Uighur demonstrations that have resulted in riots between the ethnic minority and the larger Chinese population over the last week.

At least 156 people have died, although some Turkish sources, such as the Uighur solidarity group Seyit Tumturk, suggest the death rate could number between 500 and 800 people, with thousands injured.

The Chinese government has deployed thousands of troops trained to handle rioters to the western-most province.

In Turkey, the government has expressed a growing concern over the way Chinese troops have treated the Uighurs, although initial criticism was tempered by the fact that Turkish President Abdullah Gul recently paid an official visit to China with eight Turkish companies and signed $3 billion in contracts.

If the violence in the province continues, the Turkish government's reaction may become more serious, particularly in the area of trade relations which have been on a downward spiral as a result of the global financial crisis. Ankara also could break off diplomatic relations with Beijing.

Already, China's actions against the Uighurs are prompting such a reaction. Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tawip Erdogan denounced China's behavior as "savagery" and called on the Chinese government to "give up efforts to assimilate the country's Uighur minority." He's even gone so far as to declare the violence against the Uighurs as "genocide."

The riots broke out July 5 in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang province, between the minority Turkish ethnic Uighurs and Chinese residents following a brawl in a toy factory.

The brawl resulted in the death of two Uighurs. In turn, Uighurs responded by attacking the police and local Chinese. Thousands of Chinese troops now occupy Urumqi. One report said that Chinese troops were arriving in Urumqi's city center in trucks with such slogans as "We must defeat the terrorists," referring to the Uighurs.

The underlying cause of such a violent outburst has been developing over the past three decades, with little effort by the Chinese government to defuse growing anger between the two groups.

In fact, the Chinese government for years has imported Chinese to dilute the concentration of Uighurs, who at one time were a majority and regard the western Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as Uighurstan or East Turkistan. The Uighurs are the largest group of Turkic people living in Central Asia.

But to Chinese authorities, the Uighurs are terrorists. And Beijing even has sought to get the United States to make such a declaration.

Resisting by living

Eva Bartlett, In Gaza

July 13, 2009

Walking the sandy lane through the As Samouni district of Zeitoun it was obvious that little had changed, nothing had improved, half a year after the Israeli attacks on Gaza which killed 48 from the Samouni family in a series of Israeli targeted shooting and shelling of the civilians.

A bulldozer had just begun the work of pushing aside the piles of broken homes, sifting, dumping, clearing away memories of life and death. But the latter remain, present in every demolished building, in the paths between homes, in the razed farmland, in the absence of family members.

In Mousa Samouni’s house the memories of death are stronger. The Israeli soldier graffiti hasn’t been washed off or painted over, instead lingering on the walls, taunting everyone who passes through the stairwell and rooms. Some of the rocket-attack holes have been patched, others still gape.

Two of Mousa’s aunts live with the he and his orphaned siblings now; their homes were among the destroyed.

Mousa was away, at university, when I arrived in the afternoon. But young Mona, a cousin who became a media spotlight for her poise and maturity beyond her young years, was visiting. She speaks and knows of realities that no child should. And she’s not alone in this in Palestine.

His grandmother was now staying with the family. Um Talal, mother of Talal, had three martyrs in her direct family. She continually relives the days of terror, describing in detail what ensued, who was covered in blood, who was crying for help, how old the child martyrs were….It was into Talal’s 3 level home that about 50 of the family had crowded, enduring a missile strike and fire before being moved at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers to a building Wael Samouni. This was the building which was later shelled repeatedly, killing and injuring tens more.

After visiting with Mousa’s family, I left, walking towards the al Helo home to visit. Along the way, the clatter of hammers on cement became loud. A group of 5 young boys, most 12 years and under, were busy chipping off old pieces of mortar from cement blocks, readying them for re-use for their destroyed home. They worked cheerfully, calling out to me as I passed.

"Daali, ashrub ahua," come drink coffee, one said, smiling. While Ahmed was the most gregarious, all the boys were friendly, welcoming, and seemed glad to be working on something like improving their living situation.

They began to chat about a journalist who had stayed in the area and a photographer who visited, happily recalling getting to know these visitors, then asking me to return often.

I left them to their prep-work and moved on to Shireen al Helo. Her house is easy to find even when in a quickly moving taxi: the burnt remainder of a delivery van sits next to their missile-scarred cement house.

Shireen and her three kids were sitting in the ground level courtyard below their house, a pleasant breeze defying the afternoon heat. She glowed, and soon revealed a reason for her beauty: she is newly pregnant. The announcement came with a wide smile, and the words "it’s a gift from God, because we lost our last baby."

Shireen and Amer’s infant girl, Fara, was shot point-blank by Israeli soldiers invading the Zeitoun area. This came after Amer’s father had been likewise shot point-blank, killing him, and the terrified family had been ordered to walk down a back lane. It was along this lane, and in Shireen’s arms, that Fara was targeted.

Their youngest surviving child still displays psychological stresses, veering from giggling and happy to angry and confused looking in an instant.

In February, when I first met Amer and Shireen, Amer was newly-heartbroken by his daughter’s murder. At the time he’d said they would never have more children, the anguish too great, the thought of losing another too painful. But Shireen’s unplanned pregnancy has brought joy to them both, despite their overwhelming sorrow.

Later, I read that the 1, 505th victim of the December/January Israeli massacre of Gaza has been found, a young man in his 20s, buried until now under rubble near Gaza’s Islamic University.

Rubble is only now slowly, slowly being moved. The same report cites a UNDP program to clear the rubble, and a representative calling for the opening of Gaza’s borders, to re-build Gaza, to recover.

Recover, from what exactly? The 23 days of attacks? The years of siege? The decades of occupation, of being in the world’s blind spot?

The latest convoy, Viva Palestina2, an American delegation, waits on the Egyptian side, trying first to pass Egypt’s many roadblocks in order to reach Rafah, and then to pass through the border crossing which has denied so many thousands of Palestinians the right to life, liberty, dignity. For no clear reason other than complicity in Israel’s siege against the Palestinians of Gaza, Egypt has been blocking the 200 strong delegation’s entry to Gaza.

This comes just weeks after the latest Free Gaza boat was stopped at gunpoint by a number of Israeli naval boats, boarded by Israeli special forces, and all 21 humanitarian aid workers and crew were abducted to an Israeli prison, then deported without charge.

The international movement to open the Rafah border (IMORB) remains resolute in their campaign to contest the siege, draw attention to the closed borders, highlight the human cases of people being denied entry to Gaza, and put pressure on the Mubarak regime to open the borders.

Near the Gaza city port, in the early morning hours, the arrival of horse and donkey carts herald the awakening of Gaza’s fish market, once a thriving market in a thriving industry, now a testament to the resilience of the fishermen and of Palestinians under siege: despite all odds, despite meagre catches, the fishermen continue to face Israeli brutality on Gaza’s seas in order to provide a livelihood for their families, to exist. They resist.

New York Times on Northern Alliance war crime A cover-up of US massacre at Mazar-i-Sharif

By Barry Grey

July 13, 2009

The New York Times on July 11 published a lengthy front-page article recalling the murder of hundreds of captured Taliban fighters by the US-allied Northern Alliance at the end of November, 2001, during the final days of the American-led invasion that toppled the Taliban regime.

The article, by James Risen, recounts the deaths of mostly foreign Taliban who surrendered to the Northern Alliance at Kunduz and were stuffed into shipping containers for transfer to a prison near the town of Shibarghan. Over a three-day period, the prisoners were kept in closed metal containers and given no food or water. Many suffocated. Others were killed when guards fired into the containers.

According to the Times, estimates of the number who died vary between several hundred and several thousand. They were buried in a mass grave in a stretch of desert outside of Shibarghan.

Risen gives details of the cover-up carried out by the Bush administration, which rejected calls by the FBI, the US State Department, the International Committee of the Red Cross and human rights groups for an investigation, "because," Risen writes, "the [Northern Alliance] warlord, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, was on the payroll of the CIA and his militia worked closely with United States Special Forces in 2001, several officials said."

Risen adds, "The United States also worried about undermining the American-supported government of President Hamid Karzai, in which General Dostum had served as a defense official."

The evident purpose of the article becomes clear as Risen goes to explain that top US officials have been pressing Karzai to reverse his recent reappointment of Dostum to serve as his military chief of staff. Dostum was suspended last year and is living in exile in Turkey after having been accused of threatening a political foe "at gunpoint."

The Times writes: "A senior State Department official said that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan, had told Mr. Karzai of their objections to reinstating General Dostum. The American officials have also pressed his sponsors in Turkey to delay his return to Afghanistan while talks continue with Mr. Karzai over the general’s role, said an official briefed on the matter."

Risen relates US opposition to the reappointment of Dostum to the Obama administration’s military escalation in Afghanistan and its efforts to distance itself from Karzai, "whose government is deeply unpopular and widely reviewed as corrupt." It appears that the US fears the elevation of a man tainted by war crimes to head the military of its supposedly democratic puppet government would impede its efforts to crush a growing popular insurgency against the US-NATO occupation.

The article cites "several senior officials" who suggest that the Obama administration "might not be hostile to an inquiry" into the mass deaths of Taliban POWs at the hands of Dostum and the Northern Alliance. This statement has the character of a threat directed at convincing Karzai to reverse his appointment of Dostum.

However, the Times indicates the limited and self-serving parameters of any such investigation, were it to take place, as foreseen by it and the Obama administration. The newspaper quotes a "senior" State Department official as saying, "We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated." This statement is belied by the remarkable fact that the article omits any mention of another war crime that occurred over the same period as the mass killing of Taliban POWS in the desert near Shibarghan.

At the end of November, 2001, US Special Forces, CIA operatives and US Army troops, backed by British commandos and working with Dostum’s militia, carried out a horrific three-day bombardment and mass execution of foreign Taliban POWs at Dostum’s Qala-i-Janghi prison fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif. In fact, the Taliban from Kunduz who died in metal containers were originally slated to be shipped to Qala-i-Janghi, but were diverted because of the US-led slaughter that was then underway at the fortress.

The exact number of defenseless POWs who were slaughtered at Qala-i-Janghi remains unknown, but most estimates place the toll in the many hundreds. Unlike the mass murder of Taliban in the desert near Shibarghan, the carnage at Qala-i-Janghi is well documented. News video at the time showed US jets and helicopter gunships dropping bombs on the prison compound, Northern Alliance troops firing from ridges into the prison yard, and dozens of corpses and body parts littering the grounds of the fortress.

Under US direction, Northern Alliance forces poured gasoline into basement hideouts where Taliban prisoners had sought refuge and ignited them, burning scores of people alive. They followed this by flooding the basements with freezing water. On December 1, after three days of mass murder, some 85 survivors surrendered. Most of these were subsequently shipped to the US prison camp at Guantanamo.

Dead POWs were found after the attack with bullets to their heads and their hands tied behind their backs, making clear that they had been executed. A documentary film entitled House of War: The Uprising at Mazar-i-Sharif, containing footage shot during the rampage by international journalists, was aired by CNN on August 3, 2002.

The attack began when POWs, provoked by CIA agents who were interrogating them, killed their main tormentor, CIA operative Johnny "Mike" Spann, and his partner fled and called for US air strikes to put down what he called a prisoner revolt.

Top Bush administration officials bear direct responsibility for this war crime, which recalls the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and atrocities carried out by Nazi forces in Europe during World War II. In the days leading up to Qala-i-Janghi, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld vetoed an offer from Northern Alliance commanders besieging Kunduz to allow Afghan Taliban to return to their homes and foreign Taliban to be placed under United Nations jurisdiction in return for their surrender.

Rumsfeld on several occasions stated publicly that the US wanted all foreign Taliban to be killed or indefinitely imprisoned. Shortly after the massacre at the fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif, Rumsfeld announced that the United States rejected the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war in relation to Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters captured in Afghanistan.

This defiance of international law paved the way for all of the crimes that have been committed over nearly a decade in the name of the "war on terror," from Abu Ghraib, to water-boarding and other forms of torture, to renditions, to secret CIA prisons, to indefinite detention and military kangaroo courts, to the destruction of Fallujah and other cities in Iraq and the escalating military violence in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The Times deliberately excludes mention of the massacre at Mazar-i-Sharif because that raises directly the question of war crimes by the United States and top US officials, beginning with George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Powell, Rice, Cheney and their lieutenants. The Times itself has systematically sought to cover up these crimes, and supports the Obama administration’s policy of opposing any serious investigation into them, as well as its continuation, in all essentials, of the illegal policies of the previous administration.

At the time of the Qala-i-Janghi massacre, the Times published articles and commentaries suggesting that the prisoners had brought the mass killing on themselves and arguing that their alleged revolt proved them to be incorrigible terrorists.

Particularly revealing was the Times’ response to the capture and prosecution of John Walker Lindh, dubbed by the US media as the "American Taliban." This California youth, then 20 years old, was among the few who survived the mass killing at the Mazar-i-Sharif prison fortress.

Lindh had traveled to Central Asia to study Islam. He joined the Taliban months before 9/11, when the Taliban was fighting the Northern Alliance and before it was targeted for attack and overthrow by the US for its rejection of a US ultimatum that it hand over Osama bin Laden to American authorities.

Captured at Kunduz, Lindh was shipped to the Qala-i-Janghi fortress. There is video showing CIA agent Spann interrogating him at Qala-i-Janghi and threatening him with death if he did not confess.

After surrendering on the final day of the US-led assault on the fortress, Lindh, near death and suffering from a bullet in his leg, was denied medical care and held for days at a Marine compound in a shipping container, strapped to a stretcher by tape. He was denied access to a lawyer for 55 days.

No evidence, outside of a forced confession, was advanced to show that Lindh was a terrorist or that he fired on US personnel. Nevertheless, the Times, in a December 21, 2001 editorial entitled "The American Prisoner," solidarized itself with the decision of the Bush Justice Department to charge Lindh with "aiding a terrorist organization," a crime punishable by life imprisonment.

"That sounds about right," declared the voice of American liberalism. The editorial went on to denounce Lindh for "unspeakable ignorance" and for having "fallen down a rabbit hole of one’s own making."

The undisguised hatred for Lindh was the reverse side of the newspaper’s support for Bush’s "war on terror," which would 15 months later expand into Iraq, a further act of aggression that was provided a cover of legitimacy by the Times’ copious reports on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction."

In an article published on December 22, 2001, the World Socialist Web Site wrote: "Far from raising the question of [Lindh’s] democratic rights, the Times essentially intervenes to further poison public opinion against [Lindh] under conditions in which virtually nothing is known about his case, nothing has been proven against him and the full force of the state, armed to the teeth and in unrestrained military mode, is bearing down upon him—a 20-year-old who has seen things that no 20-year-old should have to see. In this the 'liberals’ at the Times demonstrate a horrifying callousness."

In July of 2002, Lindh entered into a plea bargain with federal prosecutors, agreeing to plead guilty to aiding a terrorist organization in return for the government’s agreement to drop more serious charges. The Bush administration extorted the agreement from Lindh by threatening to declare him an "unlawful enemy combatant" and lock him away for life without legal recourse in a military prison.

The government was anxious to avoid a trial because it had no serious evidence to back up its major charges other than statements extracted from Lindh under torture, and Lindh’s lawyers were prepared to present evidence of the illegal treatment of their client, as well as evidence of support for the Taliban by a number of companies, including the oil giant Unocal, as well as the US government itself.

The Times, in a July 16, 2002 editorial, hailed this travesty of justice as a model of judicial fairness. It wrote that the plea bargain "honors the demands of criminal justice, national security and America’s commitment to constitutional rights." It added that the Justice Department obtained its guilty plea "without violating Mr. Lindh’s rights."

The editorial ignored one aspect of the plea bargain which flatly contradicted its efforts to portray the agreement as a testament to American democracy: a provision allowing the government at any time to declare Lindh an "unlawful enemy combatant" and detain him indefinitely once his prison sentence is completed.

Revealing its own bias in the case and its contempt for democratic rights, the newspaper wrote that "by agreeing to the plea, the government eliminated any risk of acquittal."

In October of 2002, Lindh was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The Times’ suppression of the Mazar-i-Sharif massacre in its July 11 article is of a piece with its role in covering up the crimes of American imperialism and supporting its military aggression abroad. It reflects the indifference of the liberal establishment, and the wealthy and privileged social layers for which the Times speaks, to the defense of democratic rights.

Israeli PM names new advisor convicted of killing Palestinian teen

July 13, 2009

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has offered an advisory post to a Jewish settler leader involved in a 1988 killing of a Palestinian youth during an anti-Israeli protest, a settler spokeswoman said on Monday.

Netanyahu's spokesmen would neither confirm or deny he had asked Pinchas Wallerstein, 60, director-general of the settlers' YESHA council, to serve as the prime minister's adviser on settlement affairs, Reuters said.

Aliza Herbst, a YESHA spokeswoman, said Wallerstein "has definitely been offered the job," and has been filling out forms for a vetting process by Israel's attorney-general, and that it wasn't clear how long that may take.

Muslim world and West has urged Israel to halt settlement activity as part of a bid to revive peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

But Wallerstein has conditioned acceptance of the post on Israel continuing to reject U.S. President Barack Obama's call to stop all construction in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, Herbst said in a telephone interview.

In 1988, Wallerstein was sentenced to only four months' community service for killing of a 16-year-old Palestinian in the West Bank.

Court support of killings of Palestinians

International critics of Israel's West Bank occupation have long cited the case as an example of support that Israeli courts have shown to soldiers and settlers who killed Palestinians.

Wallerstein would replace Uzi Keren, an Israeli kibbutz leader, who has held the position since being named about seven years ago by former prime minister Ariel Sharon, still comatose since suffering a stroke in 2006.

The World Court has ruled all settlements illegal under international law. The United States and European Union regard them as obstacles to peace.

Palestinians, who want their own state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, see the settlements as a land grab as an occupier "state".

Israel occupied East Jerusalem along with the rest of the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Golan Heights in June 1967. In 1980 Israel annexed the eastern half of Jerusalem, declaring the whole of the city it 'eternal capital,' a step rejected by the UN Security Council.

Netanyahu, under U.S. and Western pressure, has pledged not to build new settlements in the West Bank or extend more land. Further discussions are planned between Mitchell and Net World Court ruled Jewish settlements were illegal.

The Group of Eight leading powers and the Quartet of Middle East peace brokers, meeting in Trieste, northern Italy, last week, both called for a total freeze on construction in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, including on "natural growth" of existing settlements.

I've Seen 1,200 Torture Photos

By David Swanson

July 13, 2009

This moment, in which the Attorney General of the United States claims to be considering the possibility of allowing our laws against torture to be enforced seems a good one in which to reveal that I have seen over 1,200 torture photos and a dozen videos that are in the possession of the United States military. These are photographs depicting torture, the victims of torture, and other inhuman and degrading treatment. Several videos show a prisoner intentionally slamming his head face-first very hard into a metal door. Guards filmed this from several angles rather than stopping it.

The Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) of Australia revealed several of these photographs, video of the head slamming, and video of prisoners forced to masturbate, as part of a news report broadcast in 2006. But the full collection has not been made available to the public or to a special prosecutor, although it was shown to members of Congress in 2004. When these photos are eventually made public, I encourage you to take a good look at them. After you get over feeling ill, it might be appropriate to consider Congress' past 5 years of inaction. You'll be able to feel sick all over again.

In January 2004, the military seized photos and videos that were on computers and cell phones at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Those related to the abuse of prisoners amounted, as far as I know, to those in the collection I've looked at. So, this collection does not include images of torture or mistreatment that may have taken place at Abu Ghraib after that date or at other locations at any time. I have reason to believe that such photos also exist in large quantity and depict types of abuses we have not yet seen.

Most people have seen fewer than 100 photographs from Abu Ghraib. I have posted online many of those that have been made public. These are not a bad representative sample of the whole, but they are far from complete. There are, among the more than 1,200 photos, images of prisoners and of military personnel that have not been published. There are gruesome scenes here that we have not publicly seen a single image of. And the images that we have seen are, in most cases, a single image or two from a long series of photos of an incident. In many cases, the collection includes multiple series of images from one event shot with multiple cameras. The public images have in many cases been cropped and/or censored to hide faces or genitals. In the uncropped versions there are, in some cases, additional people in the frame.

Were these Abu Ghraib photos all made public, but those from other times and places kept hidden, and were we unaware of the executive orders, Justice Department memos, presidential signing statements, congressional reports, Red Cross reports, presidential and vice presidential televised confessions, and so forth, the military could still claim this was the isolated work of a few "bad apples". But we would have a better understanding of what that work was. And making these images available to the public, or merely to a special prosecutor, would suggest an interest in seeking accountability for those responsible but not present in the photographs. On the other hand, hiding the evidence while prosecuting the soldiers who posed in some of the photos looks increasingly like scapegoating for the benefit of the Military Intelligence, CIA, and contractors who instructed the soldiers, as well as the commanders all the way up to the Secretary of Defense who encouraged torture, the lawyers who sought to provide immunity, and the president and vice president who gave the authorizations. Remember, for Attorney General Eric Holder to decide that our laws against torture can be enforced, he does not need to wait until each new piece of evidence is revealed and then respond appropriately. He already has all of this evidence and much more that we know about but have not seen.

The over 1,200 images that I've seen add to some stories we've seen sketched out before. We've seen the body of murdered prisoner Manadel al-Jamadi packed in ice. We've seen Spc. Charles Graner posing with it, and Spc. Sabrina Harman doing the same. But the fuller collection shows the process of cleaning the body up. A giant gash in the top of the man's head is stitched up, his eye patched, etc. Photos, some of which have been made public, show floors covered with the blood of this victim.

We've also seen a few images (one, two, three) of a man attacked and bitten by dogs. But the larger series of photos shows us much more of the wounds on his legs and arms, as well as his identification number: 153863.

Another prisoner with an ID (153399) is shown missing a good portion of his head. This is one of a number of dead bodies shown in the photographs. SBS (the Australian news outlet) found an Army report on his death and concluded that these dead prisoners had likely been shot by guards during a riot or murdered by guards in other circumstances. Others have claimed mortar attacks from outside the prison are to blame.

Charles Graner and Sabrina Harman appear quite a bit in these photos, posing and smiling, but also tending to wounds. Private Lynndie England appears in a relative few, the ones we've seen with a thumbs up and pointing at masturbating prisoners. Other photos show additional military personnel. In one shot, Graner and two other male soldiers are putting a bag on a prisoner's head. In one shot a possible private contractor wears an ID badge.

There are lots of photos among the over 1,200 showing naked prisoners, sometimes chained to bunk beds or with their legs stuck through bars. There's a naked prisoner face-down on the ground with blood beside him, and with an MP on his back and two more watching.

We have previously seen and heard about a prisoner who had lost his sanity and covered himself with feces, earning the moniker "shit boy." In the larger collection, we see him naked in the shower from the front, wearing white latex gloves. We see him pinned between stretchers but also standing, sandwiched between foam mattresses chained on him like a robe, with bags tied over his hands, and in other positions. And he is reportedly the same man shown slamming his head against a door.

We see a naked, hooded prisoner standing on two MRE boxes and bent over. We see photos shot from a balcony of two prisoners sitting or squatting with their hands behind their heads, one of them on the floor and the other on an MRE box. We see a prisoner with his ID number written across his naked chest in red marker, and red marker smiley faces drawn on his nipples. (His number, obscured by his hood, is 200_ _ 4, where the first missing number is 1 or 7 and the second is 9 or 4.)

Of course, we also see the simulated electrocution photos of a hooded prisoner standing on an MRE box with wires attached to him. And we see a prisoner apparently forced to stick a banana in his anus. We see this young woman lifting her shirt up, but without the cropping, fuzzing, and blacked-out eyes. We see her together with another young woman. We see a bunch of photos of these young women posing, fully clothed. We see the first one clothed and posing with Spc. Sabrina Harman, both smiling. According to SBS the story is that the two prisoners were picked up on the charge of prostitution.

There are three photos of a little boy, naked, in a robe, and fully dressed. While it is very disturbing to see this little child's photos in the middle of this revolting collection, I have no idea what they are doing there or whether he was mistreated, or whether anyone was threatened with his mistreatment. But I do know that the leading lawyer who facilitated our national torture campaign and famously said that a U.S. president has the right to crush a child's testicles is a professor at a prestigious university, while his boss is sitting as a life-time judge in the Ninth Circuit because Congress refuses to impeach him. The current excuse for delay is that the Justice Department plans to release its internal report (from the Office of Professional Responsibility) very soon, just as it has been promising for many months. If Holder finally releases the report and simultaneously announces the appointment of a special prosecutor, two things must happen.

1. We must not allow Congress to delay impeachment of Bybee any longer with the new excuse that a criminal investigation is underway.

2. We must pressure the special prosecutor to act without delay and without considering anyone to be above the laws written by Congress.

Calls grow for probe of CIA plan for al-Qaida hits

By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Congressional demands for an investigation grew on Monday over new disclosures that a secret CIA program to capture or kill al-Qaida leaders was concealed from Congress for eight years, perhaps at the behest of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

The program, which never got off the ground and remains shrouded in mystery, was designed to target leaders of the terrorism network at close range, rather than with air strikes that risked civilian casualties, government officials with knowledge of the operation said Monday.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The program was canceled last month by CIA Director Leon Panetta shortly after he himself first learned of it.

Some Democratic lawmakers suggested the failure to notify the congressional intelligence committees violated the oversight laws, which require the intelligence community to keep Congress informed of its activities.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that House and Senate intelligence committees should "take whatever actions they believe are necessary to get more information on the subject," including whether Cheney played a direct role in proposing the secret program and withholding information from Congress.

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., joining the ranks of those calling for a thorough investigations, said, "Individuals who ordered that Congress be kept in the dark should be held accountable." Feingold said he had "deep concerns about the program itself," adding that he had written to President Barack Obama to ask for the probe.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has said that being kept in the dark by the CIA broke

the law and "should never, ever happen again." But defenders of Cheney suggested that no laws were broken because the counterterrorism program never got beyond the talking stage.

However, the issue might come down to whether any tax dollars were spent on the planning — and thus subject to congressional scrutiny.

"There are points governed by law at which the executive branch is obligated to notify Congress of an anticipated intelligence activity," said Vicki Divoll, a former deputy counsel to the CIA Counterterrorist Center who was general counsel of the Senate Intelligence Committee from 2001 to 2003.

"Even if arguably those points weren't reached, the executive branch may not spend money developing a program if those funds had not been appropriated and authorized by Congress," said Divoll, who teaches government at the U.S. Naval Academy.

It presented a delicate dilemma for the Obama administration, which so far has steered clear of joining congressional calls for thoroughly investigating controversial intelligence-community actions under President George W. Bush and Cheney and prosecuting those who broke the law.

Robert Gibbs, Obama's spokesman, continued on this careful path on Monday, saying Panetta was reviewing how keeping the information from congressional intelligence leaders "came to pass and I think that's wise."

"The president believes that Congress should always be briefed fully and in a timely manner in accordance with the law. Those are his beliefs as it relates to any of these programs," Gibbs said.

As to a related controversy, reports that Attorney General Eric Holder may be leaning toward having a criminal prosecutor look into whether U.S. interrogators tortured terror suspects, Gibbs repeated Obama's earlier statement that "our efforts are better focused looking forward than looking back."

Gibbs said the president as well as the attorney general and others in the administration "all agree that anyone who followed the law, that was acting in the good faith of the guidance that they were provided within the four corners of the law, will not and should not be prosecuted."

Panetta canceled CIA program on June 23 after learning of its existence, its failure to yield results, and the fact that Congress had been unaware of it since its inception soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, according to one official with direct knowledge of the plan.

That official said Bush authorized killing al-Qaida leaders and that Congress was made aware of that. However, the official said, Panetta also told members of Congress that, according to notes that he had been given on the early months of the program, Cheney directed the CIA not to inform Congress of the specifics of the secret program.

Panetta told the committees there was no indication that there was anything illegal or inappropriate about the effort itself, the official said.

CIA directors since 2001 agreed with Cheney's decision not to inform Congress because the highly classified operation, described as "sporadic" and "embryonic," never managed to turn up the intelligence needed to carry out a kill and was not considered a covert operation, according to a former intelligence official. That official also was not authorized to discuss the program and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Congress has a right to know everything the CIA does, but the president can by law limit those told about covert operations to just the top four members of the House and Senate from the two parties and the senior members of the intelligence committees. Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee are pushing for a legal provision that would require the president to brief both committees in their entirety more often, but the White House has threatened to veto the move.

Most attempts to kill al-Qaida's leaders, believed to be hiding in Pakistan's troubled western border region, use armed drone aircraft because it is difficult terrain controlled by sometimes hostile tribes. But those strikes have sometimes killed and injured innocent civilians and caused outrage in Pakistan.

The government official said the CIA effort was meant to avoid such collateral damage.

Panetta revealed the CIA program to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees in emergency briefings he called June 24 and told them he had begun an internal inquiry to determine why Congress — and he — had not been told sooner.

That ignited a storm of protests from Democratic members of the House Intelligence Committee, who accused the CIA of lying to Congress.

Republicans who had been supporters of the Bush administration's interrogation and other war-on-terror tactics have dismissed the new controversy as much ado about little, suggesting it was an attempt by Democrats to provide political cover to Pelosi, who has accused the CIA of lying to her in 2002 about its use of waterboarding, or simulated drowning, which many people, including Obama, consider torture.