TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A senior Iranian prosecutor accused three Americans detained on the border with Iraq of espionage on Monday, the first signal that Tehran intends to put them on trial.
The action could set up the Americans — who relatives say were hiking and strayed across the border from Iraq — as potential bargaining chips in Iran’s standoff with the West. The announcement came as Washington and Tehran were maneuvering over a deadlock in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad alleged the three crossed Iran’s border illegally, …

Many Afghans believe foreign forces providing support for insurgents in the north.
By Ahmad Kawoosh in Mazar-e-Sharif (ARR No. 343, 26-Oct-09)
Persistent accounts of western forces in Afghanistan using their helicopters to ferry Taleban fighters, strongly denied by the military, is feeding mistrust of the forces that are supposed to be bringing order to the country.
One such tale came from a soldier from the 209th Shahin Corps of the Afghan National Army, fighting against the growing insurgency in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. Over several months, he had taken part in several …

MILAN — An Italian court on Wednesday convicted 22 CIA operatives and a U.S. Air Force colonel of orchestrating the kidnapping of a Muslim cleric here in 2003 and flying him to Egypt, where he said he was tortured.
In rendering the verdict, the judge in the case, Oscar Magi, acquitted three other Americans, including the former Rome station chief for the CIA, saying they were covered by diplomatic immunity.
The Americans were all tried in absentia but were represented throughout the trial by defense attorneys, most of them court-appointed. The U.S. …

ABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.
The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

A former Central Intelligence Agency officer has confirmed US’ relations with the terrorist group Jundullah, despite the CIA knowing that the group has close links with the al-Qaeda.
“American intelligence has also had contact with Jundullah. But that contact, as Iran almost certainly knows, was confined to intelligence-gathering on the country,” Robert Baer, a former Middle East CIA field officer wrote on the Time.com, IRNA reported early on Saturday.
However, he noted that the US-Jundullah relationship “was never formalized, and contact was sporadic.”

“The CIA’s harsh interrogation program likely damaged the brain and memory functions of terrorist suspects, diminishing their physical ability to provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a new scientific paper.”