Quote:Taliban who shot down Chinook helicopter killed in US air strike

General John Allen says F-16 strike killed those responsible for deaths of 38 US navy Seals and colleagues in crash

Staff and agencies guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 10 August 2011 16.52 BST

A US air strike has killed the Taliban militants believed to be responsible for shooting down a Chinook helicopter, killing 38 US and Afghan troops, the top commander in Afghanistan said.

Marine Corps General John Allen told a Pentagon news conference that forces learned where the insurgents had fled to and killed them in an early morning F-16 air strike on Monday.

A separate statement from Afghanistan said the strike killed Taliban leader Mullah Mohibullah and the insurgent who fired the rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) that downed the Chinook helicopter. It said the two men were attempting to flee the country.

Thirty US troops most of them elite navy Seals were killed in the crash, the single deadliest incident for American troops in the Afghan war. Eight Afghans were also killed.

President Barack Obama flew to Dover Air Force Base on Tuesday to watch the arrival of the remains of those killed. The military has launched an investigation into the incident.

The Chinook was shot down while attempting to come to the aid of a team of soldiers engaged in a firefight. They were on a mission to capture a senior Taliban leader in the Tangi valley responsible for a series of attacks, including the planting of roadside bombs. Allen acknowledged that the main Taliban leader sought in the operation was still at large.

The general defended the decision to send in the elite team, saying it was deemed necessary at the time to go after "elements that were escaping" from an ongoing operation to target the Taliban leader.

"We committed a force to contain that element from getting out. And, of course, in the process of that, the aircraft was struck by an RPG and crashed," Allen told Pentagon reporters via video-conference from Kabul.

"We've run more than a couple of thousand of these night operations over the last year, and this is the only occasion where this has occurred," he said. "The fact that we lost this aircraft is not … a decision point as to whether we'll use this aircraft in the future."

While officials believe the helicopter was shot down by an RPG, Allen said the military's investigation into the crash will also review whether small-arms fire or other causes contributed to the crash.

Allen said the subsequent F-16 air strike killed the insurgents believed to be behind the attack an assertion the Taliban immediately challenged.

In Afghanistan Zabihullah Mujahid, a spokesman for the Taliban, said: "The person who shot down the helicopter is alive and he is in another province operating against [foreign forces]," he told Reuters by telephone from an undisclosed location

Quote:But Dr Hillhouse, who is known for her links to private military contractors that work extensively with the CIA, says Pakistan gave permission for a covert mission which would then be covered up by claiming bin Laden had been killed in a drone strike.

"The [Inter-Services Intelligence] officer came forward to claim the substantial reward and to broker US citizenship for his family," she writes on her intelligence blog, The Spy Who Billed Me.

Quote:Hillhouse writes a national security blog, The Spy Who Billed Me. The Spy Who Billed Me was featured in the New York Times Week in Review after the head of the private military corporation Blackwater USA granted her an exclusive interview.

Hillhouse studied in Central and Eastern Europe for over six years at various institutions including Moscow State University, Moscow Finance Institute, Humboldt University of Berlin, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany) and Babes-Bolyai University (Cluj, Romania). She earned her undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis[1] and her MA in Russian and East European Studies as well as her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan.

When living as a student in Europe, she claims to have engaged in the black market between East and West, running Cuban rum, smuggling jewels from the Soviet Union and laundering East Bloc currencies. She claims to have been recruited by the East German secret police, the Stasi, and by the Libyan Intelligence Service. Some sources assert that she was an American intelligence officer (McGuire, 2004; Adler, 2004), but Hillhouse denies this (Nolan, 2004).

Hillhouse's debut novel, Rift Zone (2004), is a spy thriller about a female smuggler who becomes entangled in an East German plot to stop the fall of the Berlin Wall. The American Booksellers Association Book Sense program selected it as one of the best books of 2004 and Library Journal named it one of the year's most promising debuts. Her second novel, Outsourced (2007) is a political thriller about the outsourcing of the CIA and Pentagon and the turf wars between the two agencies.

Hillhouse taught at the University of Michigan and was a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii. She is a founding member of the International Thriller Writers.

Magda Hassan Wrote:Actually, it is dry Australian wit. And if we are going to be really picky, dry New Zealand wit. John Clarke is a long time resident and local institution here but born in NZ. I'm pretty sure that Bryan Dawe, his partner, is born here. More here.