Taliban may have plans to poison rations, U.S. says

The Pentagon said Wednesday that it has received intelligence indicating the Taliban might poison the rations American planes have been dropping for civilians in Afghanistan and blame the United States for the contamination.

“The United States has obtained information that the Taliban might intend to poison humanitarian foodstuffs,” said Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem, deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We are choosing to release that information now before it might become a fact. If it becomes a fact, it’s not because the United States is doing something untoward; it’s because somebody else is.”

More than 785,000 bright-yellow food aid packages have been dropped in Afghanistan since Oct. 7, when the U.S. began its bombing campaign against the ruling Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists.

At a background session following Stufflebeem’s briefing, a senior defense official said that if the Taliban does not actually put poison in the packages, it may try to spread rumors that the rations are toxic in an effort to frighten Afghans and turn them and world opinion against the United States.

“It would be a classic `deceit and deception’ tactic,” the official said.

Stufflebeem and the official said the Taliban has been positioning soldiers in civilian houses and hiding military vehicles inside mosques, knowing the U.S. is trying to avoid such targets.

Taliban’s exaggerated claims

At the same time, the Taliban has been making exaggerated claims about civilian losses and positioning burning helicopters next to mosques to make it look as if the United States is attacking religious centers, the official said.

Stufflebeem would not reveal the source of the Pentagon’s intelligence on the possible poisoning, but he said he was “confident in the information that we have, that they may intend to poison one or more types of food sources and blame it on the Americans.

“The report that we would do that is categorically false,” he said. “We would never poison any foodstuffs. We are a humane people. We want to provide humanitarian assistance to those in need. It’s just beyond our comprehension that we would consider poisoning a food source.”

Afghanistan is suffering from a three-year drought, and food shortages are widespread. The U.S. has been coordinating food-package drops with its bombing campaign in an effort to demonstrate that it is not making war on Afghanistan or its people but trying to eliminate the Taliban radicals and al-Qaida terrorists led by Osama bin Laden.

“We’re providing the predominance of what humanitarian assistance has been brought to bear to date,” Stufflebeem said. “The Taliban ... have control of some Red Cross warehouses, or may be collecting the humanitarian daily rations that are dropped. ... If it comes from Taliban control, [the Afghan people] must be careful. It’s not the Americans.”

Stufflebeem said the U.S. would use all means of communications it can to warn Afghan civilians of the possible poisoning plot.

Using mosques to hide trucks

He also said the U.S. has established as “a matter of fact” that the Taliban “are moving into neighborhoods, staying in people’s houses, putting their troops into university dormitories or using religious mosques to hide their vehicles.”

“We will use every available instrument of power known on this Earth to find a way to root them out,” he said. “We’ll not disregard any way or any possibility of how we could do that. I would also say that we will do it without threatening the locals in the cities. It is not our intention to reduce cities to rubble while they hide in there. We will find clever ways to go after [them]. But it’s extremely difficult.”

The senior defense official showed photographs of an airfield and a nearby mosque before and two days after an American attack. The later image showed a damaged helicopter positioned next to the mosque, though it more appropriately belonged on the airfield.

He said the Taliban put the helicopter there for propaganda purposes or to lure a U.S. warplane into dropping a bomb on it and hitting the adjacent mosque instead.

The official said he expected the Taliban to use exaggerated or invented civilian casualties as a propaganda tool for turning public opinion against the U.S.

“The technique is also intended to lower the morale of our military,” he said.

The Taliban has thus far claimed that American bombs and missiles have killed more than 1,000 Afghan civilians.

The Taliban said these included 52 killed in a village called Chakoor Kartz near Kandahar on Tuesday, an unknown number lost in the U.S. bombing of a hospital at Herat on Monday, nine children and 11 other civilians lost in the bombing of a refugee convoy near Tirin Kot, and 15 civilians killed Friday when American bombs went astray and struck neighborhoods in Kabul.