Alleged NATO Attack in Afghanistan Underscores WikiLeaks Report

(July 27) -- A day after WikiLeaks' release of a trove of secret Afghan war reports renewed debate over the war itself, a disputed NATO rocket attack is adding fuel to the fire.

According to the Afghan government, the NATO strike Friday killed 45 civilians (with some reports as high as 52) in the village of Rigi. Witnesses told The New York Times that a firefight between the Taliban and U.S. troops forced residents of a nearby hamlet to flee to the tiny, remote village, where women and children from approximately eight families hid in one home while men took cover in the forest nearby. The Times' sources said they heard two explosions and saw military aircraft fly overhead.

Witnesses also told the BBC that many of the dead were the women and children who had been inside when rockets hit the houses. If true, the attack will be one of the war's worst incidents of civilian deaths.

But NATO forces said a preliminary investigation didn't find any civilian casualties or reports of errant rockets at all.

In a news conference Monday, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asserted that the secret reports his group published on Sunday showed that American forces were sometimes guilty of misclassifying civilian deaths as insurgent kills to protect themselves.

"You will find that the U.S. military units when self-reporting of course often speak in self-exculpatory language, redefine civilian casualties as insurgent casualties, downplay the number of casualties," he argued. "And we know this by comparing these reports to the public record for where there has been comprehensive investigation.'

Whether or not that is the case with Friday's alleged attack remains to be seen. While Afghan government spokesman Siamak Herawi said the information about Friday's rocket attack was from the government's intelligence service, a spokesman for a provincial governor said the villagers may have made up the deaths entirely, according to Reuters.