Gates: Gadhafi Taking Bodies He's Killed and Placing Them at Coalition Attack Sites

According to intelligence gathered by the Department of Defense, Gadhafi has ordered his forces to take dead bodies from hospitals and morgues and place them at the sites of coalition attacks--having the dead bodies pose as coalition-inflicted civilian casualties.

Speaking on CBS's Face the Nation, in an interview that will air today, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said, "We do have a lot of intelligence reporting of Gadhafi taking the bodies of people he's killed and putting them at sites that we've attacked." There's no evidence, Gates said, of civilian casualties caused by coalition forces.

CNN reports:

Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi is placing bodies of people his regime has killed at the sites of some missile strikes by the U.S.-led coalition, according to intelligence reports cited by U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates.

In an interview to be broadcast Sunday on the CBS program "Face the Nation," Gates said he was unaware of coalition attacks causing civilian casualties.

"The truth of the matter is we have trouble coming up with proof of any civilian casualties that we have been responsible for," Gates said in the interview conducted Saturday...

Asked how often it has happened, Gates replied: "We have a number of reports of that."...

A senior defense official told CNN on Sunday that the U.S. military has information gleaned from intelligence sources that Gadhafi has tasked his aides to search morgues and hospitals for dead bodies to be posed as civilian casualties.