Voters targeted after Afghan polls

The Taliban has released footage of its fighters stopping Afghan citizens to see if they have voted, and abducting those who have.
The video footage, obtained by Al Jazeera and broadcast on Monday, showed Taliban fighters manning an impromptu checkpoint, stopping vehicles and demanding to see people's fingers.
On election day indelible ink was used as an anti-fraud measure to prevent people voting twice.
Before the polls, there had been rumours that Taliban fighters would use the ink to identify those who had voted and cut off their fingers.
The footage showed men who the Taliban accused of having voted being marched, blindfolded, by Taliban fighters and reprimanded for "standing in line with the Jews" by casting their vote.
Violence and fraud
The footage is the latest blow to the elections, backed by the West, which were carried out amid Taliban attacks on August 20 and have since been beset by accusations of fraud.
To the relief of Western officials, the Taliban were unable to derail the vote, but turnout was low due to increased violence and Taliban threats.
Election results have still to be released, with preliminary results due on Tuesday and final official results due in September. But claims of vote rigging have escalated in the wake of the vote.
The contest is thought to have come down to Hamid Karzai, the incumbent president, and Abdullah Abdullah, his former foreign minister and main election rival.
Abdullah announced on Sunday that he had evidence of widespread vote rigging by Karzai's faction and that "there might have been thousands of violations throughout the country".
Allegations rejected
Karzai's camp denied the claim, saying it had submitted its own election complaints against Abdullah's faction.
The election complaints commission, a body made up of Afghan and UN-mandated officials, has said it is investigating 225 allegations of misconduct.
The election disputes have arisen against a backdrop of continued high levels of violence. One American and two Estonian soldiers were killed in two separate attacks in southern Afghanistan on Monday.
The Estonian government said that its soldiers were killed when a bomb hit their armoured personal carrier near the Pimon patrol base in the Nad-e-Ali area of Helmand province.
The US military did not provide details of the attack on its soldier.

NATO presses for more resources in Afghanistan: report

KABUL: NATO military commanders told U.S. President Barack Obama's envoy on Sunday that they needed more troops and other resources to beat back a resurgent Taliban, particularly in eastern Afghanistan near the Pakistan border.
The Taliban has made inroads in recent months in many areas that U.S. forces though they had stabilized. The deteriorating security has increased pressure on the Obama administration to consider sending more forces into the fight, a move that could prove a hard sell with the U.S. Congress and the American public.
U.S. Major General Curtis Scaparotti, commander of forces in eastern Afghanistan, said he told U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke that veteran Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani had expanded his reach in several areas in Afghanistan near the border with Pakistan.
"Haqqani is the central threat. We've seen that expansion and that's part of what we're fighting," Scaparotti told reporters after the meeting.
The U.S. military has launched big offensives against the Taliban in southern Afghanistan but officials acknowledge that more attention may need to be paid to the increasingly unstable eastern provinces.
It is unclear how much room Obama has to maneuver.
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll showed most Americans believe the war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting and just a quarter say more troops should be sent there.
U.S. senators visiting Kabul said they told Afghan President Hamid Karzai and members of his cabinet on Sunday that U.S. patience was running out.
"I conveyed to Karzai that there's going to come a time when the patience of Americans will run out," U.S. Senator Robert Casey, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, said.
Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat who was part of the same delegation, said: "Time is not running out next week. But they have to show results. It's the last chance."
Some military officials contend that there are a growing number of Uzbek and other foreign fighters among the Taliban in border areas.
Asked about the presence of Uzbek fighters, one commander said his men had never found one, alive or dead, but added: "I'm pretty sure they are there."
U.S. officials increasingly see the fight against the Taliban as a "single battlefield" that runs from Afghanistan into the tribal areas of Pakistan.
While welcoming Pakistan's offensive against militants in the Swat valley, northwest of Islamabad, some U.S. officials are concerned that Islamabad will put off indefinitely a push into the South Waziristan region on the Afghan border, a stronghold of Pakistani Taliban fighters led by Baitullah Mehsud.
Mehsud is widely believed to have been killed this month in a missile strike by a U.S. pilotless drone aircraft.

Iran urges world not to counter its nuke drive

Tehran asks world powers to join hands to resolve nuke crisis
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TEHRAN- Iran pleaded for the world powers on Monday to stop working against its atomic drive and instead adopt a policy of interaction with the Islamic republic to resolve the nuclear crisis.
"It is the right time for the other parties to review their policy. Rather than countering Iran, they should interact with Iran," foreign ministry spokesman Hassan Ghashghavi told reporters.
Ghashghavi's remarks come just days after reports that Iran has allowed inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to check on the nuclear reactor at Arak for the first time in a year.
Arak, with its nearly completed 40-megawatt heavy water reactor, is one of most sensitive nuclear sites in Iran, as it could produce plutonium, which Tehran says would be for medical research.
World powers and Israel are at loggerheads with Iran over its nuclear program which they suspect is aimed at making atomic weapons, a charge consistently denied by Tehran.
Iran has long insisted that it has a right to nuclear technology as it is a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Ghashghavi also dismissed threats of additional sanctions on Iran if it fails to abide by international demands to halt uranium enrichment, a process which makes fuel for nuclear plants but can also be diverted to make the core of an atomic bomb.
"Past experience has shown that sanctions are futile. Sanctions will not prevent us from pursuing our legal rights," he said.
U.S. President Barack Obama has given Iran until September to take up an offer by world powers of talks if it freezes uranium enrichment, or face harsher sanctions.
IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei has persistently called for his agency's inspectors to be allowed back into Iran to continue their checks.
ElBaradei will publish his latest report on Iran next week and it will go before the agency's governors in September.

Obama approves new US interrogation team

WASHINGTON- U.S. President Barack Obama has approved the creation of an elite team of interrogators to question key terrorism suspects, The Washington Post reported Monday while the New York Times reported the U.S. Justice Department' recommendation to reopen a dozen prisoner abuse cases.
Citing unnamed senior administration officials, the newspaper said the decision was part of a broader effort to revamp U.S. policy on detention and interrogation.
Obama signed off on the unit, named the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG) late last week, the report said.
It will be made up of experts from several intelligence and law enforcement agencies and housed at the FBI, the paper noted.
The group will be overseen by the National Security Council, which means shifting the center of gravity away from the CIA and giving the White House direct oversight, The Post said.
Obama moved to overhaul interrogation and detention guidelines soon after taking office, including the creation of a task force on interrogation and transfer policies, the report said.
The US Justice Department recommends
In the meantime, the U.S. Justice Department has also recommended reopening nearly a dozen prisoner-abuse cases, which could expose CIA employees and contractors to prosecution for their treatment of terrorism suspects, The New York Times said on Monday.
The recommendation, reversing the Bush administration, came from the Justice Department's ethics office and has been presented to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
The department is due to disclose later on Monday details of prisoner abuse that were gathered in 2004 by the CIA's inspector general but have never been released, according to the Times report, which cited an unnamed person officially briefed on matter.
When the CIA first referred its inspector general's findings, it decided that none of the cases merited prosecution.
Holder reconsiders
But when Holder took office and saw the allegations included deaths of people in custody and other cases of physical or mental torment, he reconsidered, the newspaper said.
"With the release of the details on Monday and the formal advice that at least some cases be reopened, it now seems all but certain that the appointment of a prosecutor or other concrete steps will follow, posing significant new problems for the CIA," the Times said.
The recommendation to review the cases centers mainly on allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In some examples of abuse that have just been publicized, the CIA report describes how its officers carried out mock executions and threatened at least one prisoner with a gun and a power drill -- possible violations of a federal torture statute.
The Times quoted a CIA spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, as saying that the Justice Department recommendation to open the closed cases had not been sent to the intelligence agency.
"Decisions on whether or not to pursue action in court were made after careful consideration by career prosecutors at the Justice Department. The CIA itself brought these matters -- facts and allegations alike -- to the department's attention," he was quoted as saying.
"There has never been any public explanation of why the Justice Department under President George W. Bush decided not to bring charges in nearly two dozen abuse cases known to be referred to a team of federal prosecutors ... and in some instances not even details of the cases have been made public," the Times said.