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(The U.S. military is distributing fliers along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan asking for informaton about a missing soldier. Brian Williams reports.)
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WASHINGTON - The American soldier who went missing June 30 from his base in eastern Afghanistan and was later confirmed captured, appeared on a video posted Saturday to a Web site by the Taliban, two U.S. defense officials confirmed.
The soldier is shown in the 28-minute video with his head shaved and the start of a beard. He is sitting and dressed in a nondescript, gray outfit. Early in the video one of his captors holds the soldier's dog tag up to the camera. His name and ID number are clearly visible. He is shown eating at one point and sitting on a bed.
The soldier, whose identity has not yet been released by the Pentagon pending notification of members of Congress and the soldier's family, says his name, age and hometown on the video, which was released Saturday on a Web site pointed out by the Taliban. Two U.S. defense officials confirmed to The Associated Press that the man in the video is the captured soldier.
The soldier said the date is July 14. He says he was captured when he lagged behind on a patrol.
He is interviewed in English by his captors, and he is asked his views on the war, which he calls extremely hard, his desire to learn more about Islam and the morale of American soldiers, which he said was low.
Asked how he was doing, the soldier said on the video:
"Well I'm scared, scared I won't be able to go home. It is very unnerving to be a prisoner."
He begins to answer questions in a matter-of-fact and sober voice, occasionally facing the camera, looking down and sometimes looking to the questioner on his left.
He later chokes up when discussing his family and his hope to marry his girlfriend.
"I have my girlfriend, who is hoping to marry," he said. "I have a very very good family that I love back home in America. And I miss them every day when I'm gone. I miss them and I'm afraid that I might not ever see them again and that I'll never be able to tell them that I love them again and I'll never be able to hug them."
He is also prompted his interrogators to give a message to the American people.
"To my fellow Americans who have loved ones over here, who know what it's like to miss them, you have the power to make our government bring them home," he said. "Please, please bring us home so that we can be back where we belong and not over here, wasting our time and our lives and our precious life that we could be using back in our own country. Please bring us home. It is America and American people who have that power."
The video is not a continuous recording — it appears to stop and start during the questioning.
It is unclear from the video whether the July 14 date is authentic. The soldier says that he heard that a Chinook helicopter carrying 37 NATO troops had been shot down over Helmand. A helicopter was shot down in southern Afghanistan on July 14, but it was carrying civilians on a reported humanitarian mission for NATO forces. All six Ukrainian passengers died in the crash, and a child on the ground was killed.
On July 2, the U.S. military said an American soldier had disappeared after walking off his base in eastern Afghanistan with three Afghan counterparts and was believed to have been taken prisoner.
A U.S. defense official said the soldier was noticed missing during a routine check of the unit on June 30 and was first listed as "duty status whereabouts unknown." The official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case.
Details of such incidents are routinely held very tightly by the military as it works to retrieve a missing or captured soldier without giving away any information to captors.
But Afghan Police Gen. Nabi Mullakheil said the soldier went missing in eastern Paktika province near the border with Pakistan from an American base. The region is known to be Taliban-infested.
The most important insurgent group operating in that area is known as Haqqani network and is led by warlord Siraj Haqqani, whom the U.S. has accused of masterminding beheadings and suicide bombings including the July 2008 attack on the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed some 60 people. The Haqqani group also was linked to an assassination attempt on Afghan president Hamid Karzai early last year.
On Saturday, a U.S. military official in Kabul, Col. Greg Julian, said the U.S. was "still doing everything we can to return him safely."
Julian said U.S. troops had distributed two fliers in the area where the soldier disappeared. One of them asked for information on the missing soldier and offered a $25,000 reward for his return. The other said "please return our soldier safely" or "we will hunt you," according to Julian.
A number of civilians have been abducted in Afghanistan including aid workers and journalists, both foreigners and Afghans.
But the only other service member that officials could recall who had been captured was a Navy SEAL in March 2002, who fell out of a helicopter and was killed by al-Qaida.
Afghan Government Shuts Down Critical Websites
KABUL — The Afghan government has blocked access to four Web sites with President Hamid Karzai's name in the address that are critical of the Afghan leader or have links to sites advertising locally taboo subjects such as online dating and mail order brides.
The shutdown order comes ahead of the country's Aug. 20 presidential election. An Information Ministry spokesman initially said the original complaint about two of the sites came from the Karzai campaign. Karzai's campaign spokesman agreed, but later called back to deny involvement.
Afghan coverage of the presidential race has been dominated by Karzai, while his 40 opponents complain they've received scant attention in state-run media, forcing them to campaign in person or on the Internet in a country where daily travel can be deadly and few have home computers.
The Information Ministry ordered the country's 25 Internet service providers to shut down access to four Web sites bearing Karzai's name and one with the name of an Afghan Cabinet minister, the director of the Afghan Telecom Regulatory Authority said Saturday.
The four sites all bear the president's full or last name, but they clearly don't have Karzai's backing.
Hamidkarzai.com asks "Is Hamid Karzai anything more than a puppet?" in a blaring red headline. The site calls Karzai an "inefficient" politician and says he came into power because of his "long-standing ties with the CIA." The site is registered in Springfield, Va., according to the Web site , which publishes Internet registration records. http://www.whois.net
Other banned sites with Karzai in the address show advertisements for online dating and mail order brides – touchy subjects in conservative Afghanistan. Another links to a Chinese-language search engine.
The spokesman for Karzai's election campaign, Waheed Omar, first told The Associated Press that the shutdown of the sites was "on our request." Omar said he did not think that others had the right to operate sites such as HamidKarzai.com and write negative things about the president.
Omar said the campaign was launching a new Web site, , and it didn't want Web users to be confused by unofficial sites. http://www.hamidkarzai.af
However, Omar later called AP back and said that he had been mistaken, and that after consulting with colleagues learned that the request had not come from the campaign office.
"I can assure you it has not come from our side," Omar said.
The spokesman for the Information Ministry, Hamid Nasery, said he believed the original complaint over two Web sites had originated from the Karzai campaign but said he needed to gather more information.
The ministry's complaint commission, which investigates media violations, had not received any complaints about the Web sites, said Ali Ahmad Fakoor, a member of the commission.
The order only applies to Afghanistan's 25 Internet Service Providers, and the sites remain available outside Afghanistan. Any Internet company that does not block the sites will be referred to the attorney general, said Zekria Hassan, the director of the Afghan Telecom Regulatory Authority.
One of the sites ordered blocked is , a site registered in the name of Information Minister Abdul Karim Khoram, who has been criticized for stifling media freedoms in the past. http://www.karimkhoram.com
The site, which is a mirror copy of , calls on the government to free a jailed student journalist named Parwez Kambakhsh, who was convicted in 2008 of blasphemy in part for distributing an Internet article asking why Islam does not modernize to give women equal rights. His death sentence was reduced to 20 years in prison by the Supreme Court. http://www.kabulpress.org
The order comes on the heels of a July 9 report by the Independent Election Commission, which found that Karzai garners 60 percent of election coverage on state TV. Karzai's presidential opponents have complained repeatedly that Karzai has a built-in campaign advantage by being able to use state media for campaign purposes.
On the Net:
Sites the government ordered Afghan Internet service providers to block:
http://www.hamidkarzai.com
http://www.hamidkarzai.net
http://www.karzai.com
http://www.karzai.net
http://www.karimkhoram.com
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Sources: U.S. Dept of Defense, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Google Maps
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