Saturday, Sep 28th
Last update10:05:39 PM GMT
War Glance
Six U.S. soldiers were killed Monday in two roadside bombings in Afghanistan.
Four were killed in an attack in the northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz, the U.S. military said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it struck a military vehicle, killing five "foreign" soldiers and wounding two others. Two other U.S. soldiers were killed in an improvised explosive device attack in southern Afghanistan.
The use of unmanned drones as weapons of war in conflicts around the world has been called into question by one of Britain's most senior judges. Lord Bingham, until last year the senior law lord, said that some weapons were so "cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance".
The Americans wanted someone to build a police station in Abu Ghraib, another no-go zone for Western contractors. They were willing to pay $700,000 for the construction of the station, which they named Victory and Peace.
“We made a deal with the local leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mr. Mohsin said. “They agreed not to destroy the station, and we promised to cut them in on the profit.” When the project was completed, however, he gave the Qaeda leader’s name to the Americans, and the man was arrested, Mr. Mohsin said, adding that he kept the entire $350,000 profit.
TVNL Comment: Any of you unemployed out there in the good old USA? Here's where your tax dollars went...and this is just one story of thousands.
A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.
The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.
Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.
When Tony Blair told the Commons that he hoped conflict with Iraq could be averted, he already knew the White House had picked 1,500 targets for its bombers. Gaby Hinsliff, Paul Harris and Jamie Doward report on the gaps between what the public were told and what politicians were discussing in private, as the government prepares for a closed inquiry.
An American soldier was killed in a roadside bomb explosion during combat operations on Friday, the U.S. military said on Saturday.
A military statement gave no further details about the incident, but said the soldier is assigned to Multi-National Corps - Iraq (MNC-I) which is the Tactical Unit responsible for command and control of operations in Iraq.
The Iraq Special Operations Forces (ISOF) is probably the largest special forces outfit ever built by the United States, and it is free of many of the controls that most governments employ to rein in such lethal forces. The project started in the deserts of Jordan just after the Americans took Baghdad in April 2003. There, the US Army's Special Forces, or Green Berets, trained mostly 18-year-old Iraqis with no prior military experience. The resulting brigade was a Green Beret's dream come true: a deadly, elite, covert unit, fully fitted with American equipment, that would operate for years under US command and be unaccountable to Iraqi ministries and the normal political process.
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