Sunday, Sep 29th
Last update06:31:21 AM GMT
War Glance
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said US private security firms, including Xe Services LLC, formerly known as Blackwater, are being behind terrorism in the country.
At a press conference in Kabul, Karzai said that US security companies have been behind explosions that have claimed the lives of women and children.
An intense military campaign aimed at crippling the Taliban has so far failed to inflict more than fleeting setbacks on the insurgency or put meaningful pressure on its leaders to seek peace, according to U.S. military and intelligence officials citing the latest assessments of the war in Afghanistan.
Escalated airstrikes and special operations raids have disrupted Taliban movements and damaged local cells. But officials said that insurgents have been adept at absorbing the blows and that they appear confident that they can outlast an American troop buildup set to subside beginning next July.
"If you're asking, are there al-Qaeda in Iraq, the answer is yes, there are. It's a fact, yes." Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defence, August 2002
It was one of the key American justifications for the Iraq war. But the theory that al-Qaeda was present in Saddam-era Iraq, much cited by the Bush adminsitration in the run-up to the invasion, has been undermined by the content of secret US military documents.
Fresh evidence that US soldiers handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad has emerged in army logs published by WikiLeaks.
The 400,000 field reports published by the whistleblowing website at the weekend contain an official account of deliberate threats by a military interrogator to turn his captive over to the Iraqi "Wolf Brigade".
The interrogator told the prisoner in explicit terms that: "He would be subject to all the pain and agony that the Wolf battalion is known to exact upon its detainees."
The US military gave a secret order not to investigate torture by Iraqi authorities, Pentagon logs on the Iraq War leaked by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks have disclosed. The disclosure was included in almost 400,000 US military files leaked by Wikileaks to The Guardian, New York Times, Der Spiegel and Al-Jazeera.
It reveals that Frago 242 - an abbreviated order - instructed troops not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition.
The CIA was warned that a man who claimed to be al-Qaeda turncoat might be plotting an ambush, weeks before he exploded a hidden bomb inside an agency base in Afghanistan, killing nine people and himself, an internal investigation has found.
The warning, from a Jordanian intelligence officer, was never passed along, one of a chain of lapses that ultimately allowed a double agent to penetrate the CIA's secret base in Khost, Afghanistan, CIA Director Leon Panetta said Tuesday. Panetta provided an overview of the agency's still-classified report, which he said points to multiple failures but stops short of recommending disciplinary measures against any individuals.
Prisoners are being abused at a "secret jail" in the main American military base in Afghanistan, according to a report from a US policy think tank. Ex-detainees said they were deprived of sleep and held in cold isolation cells in the site at Bagram, says New York-based Open Society Foundations.
A BBC investigation in April uncovered similar allegations of prisoner abuse at a hidden facility in Bagram airbase. The US military repeated its denial that it was operating a secret jail.
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