More contradictions!!!!

Wisdom_Seeker · January 11, 2007

U.S. denies reports of new Somalia air strikes

By Sahal Abdulle

MOGADISHU (Reuters) - The United States, facing growing international criticism over an air strike targeting al Qaeda suspects in Somalia, denied reports on Wednesday it had carried out further strikes.

A Somali government source and a local lawmaker said U.S. planes struck several sites on Wednesday after an assault on Monday against a village where the suspects were thought to be hiding.

But an official in Washington said, "There have been no additional attacks."

U.S. government sources said U.S. ally Ethiopia, which defeated Islamist forces in a lightning war last month, had conducted further air strikes since Monday.

The Somali officials did not say how they distinguished between U.S. and Ethiopian planes operating in the remote southern area where Islamists were driven after their defeat.

The government source said four new U.S. strikes hit areas near Ras Kamboni, a coastal village close to the Kenyan border long thought by Western and East African intelligence agencies to be a hide-out and training camp for Islamic militants.

"As we speak now, the area is being bombarded by the American air force," said the source, talking to Reuters on condition of anonymity.

Somali officials said many died in Monday's strike -- the first overt U.S. military action in Somalia since a disastrous humanitarian mission ended in 1994.

Amnesty International said it had written to the U.S. government expressing concern, echoing U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, France, the European Union, former colonial power Italy, Egypt and the Arab League.

"We are concerned that civilians may have been killed as a result of a failure to comply with international humanitarian law," said Claudio Cordone, an Amnesty International official.

At the United Nations, the Security Council raised no questions or objections on Wednesday after a U.S. diplomat told a closed-door meeting on Somalia that Washington's air strike on Monday targeted "a high-level al Qaeda leader."

"There was no discussion of this particular issue and I have no comment on that," Russian U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, the council president for January, told reporters after the meeting.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said there had been just one U.S. air attack with no civilian casualties.

"They knew where the target was and they suspected that the target would move and they would miss the opportunity unless they acted quickly," he said.

Meles told a news conference in Addis Ababa that Ethiopian soldiers had gone to the site of the attack. Eight "terrorists" were killed, five captured and seven escaped, he said.

ISLAMISTS HIDING

Lawmaker Abdirashid Mohamed Hidig said after touring the region in an Ethiopian helicopter that at least 50 people were killed by U.S. and Ethiopian air strikes.

Hidig told reporters: "Yesterday I personally saw the planes striking. The air strikes resumed this morning." He spoke in the port of Kismayu after returning from a tour of the area.

"The worst loss has befallen civilians since the fleeing Islamists are hiding among the people there," he said.

U.S. officials said Monday's strike targeted an al Qaeda cell that includes suspects in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and a 2002 attack on an Israeli-owned Kenyan hotel.

The strike, by an AC-130 plane firing automatic cannons, was believed to have killed one of three al Qaeda suspects wanted for the embassy bombings, a U.S. intelligence official said.

Washington is seeking a handful of al Qaeda members, including Comorian Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, indicted in a U.S. court for his suspected role in the embassy bombings.

In Mohammed's hometown of Moroni, his family waited for news of his fate. "We had to keep a night vigil in the hope of getting a telephone call," one of Fazul's relatives said.

Ethiopia sent thousands of troops across the border last month to oust Islamists who had held sway over most of the south, including the capital, Mogadishu, for six months and threatened to overrun the weak government in its base of Baidoa.

Meles says Ethiopia wants to pull out its troops as soon as possible and make way for African peacekeepers.

Mogadishu residents were awoken by gunfire before dawn on Wednesday in an area housing Ethiopian and Somali troops, who were targeted in a rocket attack on Tuesday.

In another attack, at least one person was killed when Somali militiamen fired a rocket-propelled grenade at an Ethiopian truck, missing it but hitting a house, a government source said.

(Additional reporting by Guled Mohamed in Mogadishu, David Morgan and Sue Pleming in Washington, Philip Pullella in Rome, Irwin Arieff in the United Nations, Andrew Cawthorne in Nairobi, Ahmed Ali Amir in Moroni and Noor Ali in Garissa)

Ethiopia says more attacks while the U.S refutes the claim.

But for some apparent reason, the Denver post took off the article which they confirmed that Zenawi has stated that the US air strikes Somalia again on Wednesday.

Click on the site below and there will be a notice verifying the article is no longer available. I wonder why?????

DenverPost'>http://www.denverpost.com/ci_4988626?source=rss]DenverPost[/url]

NASSIR · January 11, 2007

Just a couple of hours ago, I watched the air strikes live on CNN.

Don't rely more on unreliable sources.

Castro · January 11, 2007

Mystic, I recommend these four books for you to read before 2007 ends. They're all written by the same man: Noam Chomsky. You will never see media, politics or the world the same way again. If you can, read them in the order I listed them:

1. Media Control, Second Edition: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda

2. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

3. Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

4. Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (The American Empire Project)

These in my opinion are Chomsky's greatest works.