Pentagon - Victims of missile strike probably 'not innocents'

Associated Press WriterWASHINGTON (AP) -- Credit card applications and airline schedules were found at the site of a U.S. missile attack in Afghanistan, indicating that the victims of the strike were not innocent civilians, a top Pentagon spokesman said.

Those killed were picked out from among more than a dozen suspects the CIA had been watching, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday.

Some Afghans have claimed that the Feb. 4 attack from a CIA-operated Predator spy drone killed civilians rather than members of the Taliban or al-Qaida.

"The people who operate the Predator were watching ... 15, 20 people over a period of time. And out of this group came three people, and they moved in and among various outcroppings of rocks and trees," Rumsfeld told a Pentagon press conference.

"And the people who have the responsibility for making those judgments, made the judgment that, in fact, they were al-Qaida and that they were a proper target," he said.

U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, have given several reasons for striking the site, including that the Predator observed the people taking heavy security precautions and several people paying homage to a central figure.

More than 50 U.S. soldiers searched the site over the weekend and found evidence that "would seem to say that these are not peasant people up there farming," Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem said Monday.

Besides the English-language airline schedules and other documents, the searchers found ammunition and an empty box for a hand-held radio, said Stufflebeem, deputy operations director for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The soldiers also found bits of human remains and evidence the site had been disturbed by animals or other people before the American team arrived, he said.

The team also checked in nearby caves and villages and talked with locals before leaving the area Monday, he said.

Based on initial indications from these efforts, U.S. officials are "in a comfort zone" about the attack, he said.

"These were not innocents," he told reporters, while acknowledging that their identities are not known.

Villagers told a Washington Post reporter that the victims were three peasants who were gathering scrap metal from the war when a Hellfire missile launched from a pilotless aircraft operated by the CIA shrieked out of the sky last Monday and killed the men.

In a telephone interview Monday, Central Command's chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Craig Quigley, said CIA and Central Command officers had "compared notes" before the decision was made by the CIA to launch the attack. Central Command officials did not object to the decision to fire, Quigley said.

"We think this was a good call," he said.

Other senior Defense Department officials have been unwilling to publicly discuss the CIA's role in offensive military operations in Afghanistan. Stufflebeem, however, offered new insights into its actions. He said the Pentagon and CIA work closely together on "just about everything" happening in Afghanistan.

But there are times when the CIA has its own objectives and pursues them without asking for support from the Pentagon -- and in some cases, apparently without informing Central Command.

"Because of the time sensitivity to it, we may not even be totally aware of all those actions that are going on," Stufflebeem said.

Quigley said that even in cases where Central Command is consulted in advance by the CIA, it cannot veto an agency decision to attack.

The U.S. military personnel who went to the strike site retrieved for study bits of human remains found there, Stufflebeem said. He said DNA from remains recovered at this and other attack sites is being catalogued for identification purposes.

The only way DNA would be useful in identifying al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden is if the United States already had a bin Laden DNA sample with which to compare. That could be either a sample from bin Laden himself or from a relative on his mother's side of his family.