Shorts (left)
U.S. Forces Fire Missiles Into Somalia at a Kenyan
American naval forces fired missiles into southern Somalia on Monday, aiming at what the Defense Department called terrorist targets.
Residents reached by telephone said three civilians were wounded, and that the only other casualties were three dead cows, one dead donkey and a partly destroyed house.
Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington, said the target was a “known al-Qaida terrorist.”
The missile strike was aimed at Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, a Kenyan born in 1979 who is wanted by the FBI for questioning in the nearly simultaneous attacks in 2002 on a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and on an Israeli airliner taking off from there, said three American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the strike.
An American military official said the naval attack Monday was carried out with at least two Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from a submarine. The official said the missiles were believed to have hit their targets. Witnesses on the ground, though, described the attack differently.
Iran’s President, in Iraq, Calls for a U.S. Exit
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, on the second day of his visit here, on Monday called for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraqi soil and said their presence was the root of Iraq’s instability and violence.
Ahmadinejad, the first Iranian president to come to Iraq since the two nations fought a brutal war in the 1980s, contended that Iraq is ready to assume full control of its affairs and that the presence of the U.S. military served its own national interests, and not Iraqi goals.
“The people of this area get nothing from the occupation here except damage, sabotage, destruction, insults, and degradation for the people of this area,” said Ahmadinejad during a news conference in Baghdad on Monday. “All of the people here want those forces to go back home.”
Memo Gives Canada’s Account Of Meeting on Nafta
The denials were full-throated and sweeping when Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign mobilized last week to refute a report that a senior campaign official had provided back-channel reassurances to the Canadian government soft-pedaling the candidate’s tough talk on the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Obama has railed about NAFTA while campaigning in Ohio, where many blame the accord for an exodus of jobs, even agreeing at last week’s Democratic debate with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton that the United States should consider opting out of the accord if it could not be renegotiated.
But a memo surfaced Monday, obtained by the Associated Press, revealing Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economics professor and Obama’s senior economic policy adviser, met with officials at the Canadian consulate in Chicago last month. According to the memo’s author, Joseph De Mora, a political and economic affairs officer in the consulate, Goolsbee assured them that protectionist rhetoric from Obama on the trail “is more reflective of political maneuvering than policy.”