These are the archives for the week ending 8th July 2005
Gleneagles security
It has taken 18 months of planning and £100m of public money to set up the seven-day security operation. The most visible sign is the six-feet-high, 5.5-mile-long double steel fence that snakes around the perimeter of the Gleneagles resort. Yesterday there was barely room in the town or its environs to station the police, who have been called in from 12 British forces. Every road junction, bridge, intersection, layby, verge and pathway in and around Auchterarder had at least one vanload of police or a pair of motorbikes police on it.
Guardian, 6/7/05
Pigs in the trough
The U.S. military has signed on Halliburton to do nearly $5 billion in new work in Iraq under a giant logistics contract that has so far earned the Texas-based firm $9.1 billion. The new deal, worth $4.97 billion over the next year, was not made public when it was signed because the Army did not consider such an announcement necessary, said Linda Theis, a spokeswoman for U.S. Army Field Support Command. The new contract is about $1 billion more than the company earned under last year's services contract.
Halliburton, which was run by Vice President Dick Cheney from 1995-2000, has been under scrutiny for its contracts in Iraq and several U.S. government agencies are looking into whether it overcharged for some work. A top U.S. Army procurement official said last week Halliburton's deals in Iraq were the worst example of contract abuse she had ever seen.
Reuters, 6/7/05
Defence spending on rise
Rich western countries spend up to 25 times as much on defence as they do on overseas aid according to United Nations figures. Although the UK has increased its aid budget in recent years, the UN data reveals that for every £1 spent on development, £8 is spent on defence. In the United States, 1% -one cent in every dollar - goes on aid compared to the 25% of the budget that is spent by the Pentagon.
Defence spending in both the US and the UK has increased in recent years as a result of the war in Iraq, where British military operations cost about £1bn a year. The UN figures show that while Germany and Italy cut defence spending in the four years from 2000 to 2004 and France held it steady, spending on defence in the UK rose by $92 per head to $790 (£450) a year. In the US, there was a sharper increase of $379 per head to $1,549.
Guardian, 6/7/05
Iraq main training ground for terrorists
Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the prime training ground for foreign terrorists who could travel elsewhere across the globe and wreak havoc, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials and classified studies by the CIA and the State Department. Of particular concern, the officials and studies say, are the urban combat techniques being learned and used by foreign fighters assaulting U.S. and Iraqi troops.
There's already evidence that those tactics are being replicated elsewhere. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. James T. Conway told a Pentagon briefing last week that remotely detonated bombs known as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs - the insurgents' weapon of choice in Iraq - are an increasing threat to U.S. forces trying to stabilize Afghanistan. The trend is "a little bit troubling," Conway said.
Iraq's emergence as a terrorist training ground appears to challenge President Bush's rationale for invading and overthrowing leader Saddam Hussein in March 2003.
Duluth News Tribune, 4/7/05
US bombs Afghan civilians
An Afghanistan official claimed that last week's bombing by US planes of a suspected Taliban compound in eastern Afghanistan killed 17 villagers, including women and children. The US says it regrets the killings of civilians but didn't give the exact number.
Last Friday's bombing took place in Kunar province, where an elite US military team disappeared last week. Asadullah Wafa, the Governor of Kunar province, said it was not the first bombing by the US troops in this area. "According to our information, while the civilians were burying two women killed in the first bombing strike by coalition aircraft, the bombing started again", Wafa said.
Xinhua, China, 5/7/05
Attacks cost oil industry billions
Iraq has lost about $11.35 billion because of damage to oil sector infrastructure and lost revenue since petroleum exports resumed after the U.S.-led invasion two years ago, an Iraqi oil ministry spokesman said Sunday. Assem Jihad told Dow Jones Newswires that there had been 300 acts of sabotage against Iraqi oil installations. He said 70 acts of sabotage took place in the first five months of 2005.
Associated Press, 3/7/05
'I'm tired of going to my buddies' funerals'
At Saddam Hussein's vast palace complex that is now the U.S. Forward Operating Base Danger in Tikrit, Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Taluto contemplates the war American soldiers under his command are now waging. "The enemy is intrinsic," said Taluto, who heads the 42nd Infantry Division and the Army units attached to it in Iraq. "They're infiltrating the Iraqi security forces as we speak. I don't know how big (the insurgency) is, but I think their capability is constantly replenished."
In conversations and interviews over the past month, U.S. soldiers under the command of the 42nd Infantry Division in Samarra and Tikrit came across as frustrated, sometimes disheartened, though still largely unbowed. Some of them say that Iraqis will never accept the American presence. Others do not believe democracy can work here. The declining support in the United States for the war provokes anger. The mounting U.S. death and injury toll is depressing.
"I'm tired of going to my buddies' funerals," said Spc. Joshua Forman of Sammamish, Wash., referring to memorial services the military holds for soldiers killed in Iraq.
San Francisco Chronicle, 4/7/05
US citizenship via armed forces
Join the US armed forces and take a short-cut to US citizenship. With the US engaged in a two-front war in Afghanistan and Iraq almost 5 percent of the US forces are foreign-born. After the US launched the war on terrorism, President George Bush made it easier for foreign-born US residents joining the military to become citizens. Among other things, a traditional five-year waiting period has been waived by a July 2002 executive order.
This is the time of year (July 4) when the US abounds in citizenship oath-taking. Of the 15,000 new US citizens who will be naturalised this week, over 10,000 come from the military. According to US immigration figures, 73 non-citizens serving in the US armed forces have died in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and 59 of them have been given posthumous citizenship.
Times of India, 4/7/05
Deadly year in Afghanistan
This year has been the deadliest for US troops in Afghanistan since war began in late 2001, as more American soldiers have died than in each of the previous three years, according to military figures. In the first half of this year, at least 54 Americans lost their lives, compared with 52 in all of last year.
The statistics signal that well-armed Taliban and Al Qaeda militants holed up in caves, tribal villages, and craggy peaks along the border with Pakistan will remain a threat to the new Afghan government for years and require US troops, now numbering 18,000, to remain indefinitely, according to regional specialists.
Boston Globe, 3/7/05
UK funding torture groups
British and American aid intended for Iraq's hard-pressed police service is being diverted to paramilitary commando units accused of widespread human rights abuses, including torture and extra-judicial killings. The allegations follow a wide-ranging investigation by this paper into serious human rights abuses being conducted by anti-insurgency forces in Iraq. The Observer has seen photographic evidence of post-mortem and hospital examinations of alleged terror suspects from Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle which demonstrate serious abuse of suspects including burnings, strangulation, the breaking of limbs and - in one case - the apparent use of an electric drill to perform a knee-capping.
The investigation revealed:
· A 'ghost' network of secret detention centres across the country, inaccessible to human rights organisations, where torture is taking place.
· Compelling evidence of widespread use of violent interrogation methods including hanging by the arms, burnings, beatings, the use of electric shocks and sexual abuse.
· Claims that serious abuse has taken place within the walls of the Iraqi government's own Ministry of the Interior.
Observer, 3/7/05
Pushing for autonomy in south
With the Aug. 15 deadline for writing a new constitution bearing down, some powerful, mostly secular Shiite politicians are pushing for the creation of an autonomous region in the oil-rich south of Iraq, challenging the country's central authority. The politicians argue that the long-impoverished south has never gotten its fair share of the nation's oil money, even though the bulk of the country's oil reserves lie near Basra, at the head of the Gulf.
"We want to destroy the central system that connects the entire country to the capital," said Bakr al-Yasseen, a former foe of Saddam who spent years in exile in Syria. He is a chief organizer of the autonomy campaign, which is supported by Ahmad Chalabi, a one-time favorite of the Pentagon and the scion of a prominent Shiite family from the south, among others. American officials have remained publicly silent on the matter. The interim constitution that the Americans co-wrote last year says that Iraq must adopt a federal system "to avoid the concentration of power."
Chalabi and Sheik Abdul Kareem al-Muhammadawi, a prominent member of the National Assembly, are planning to propose a regional vote on the question of southern autonomy in October, at the same time as a national referendum on the constitution, said Ali Faisal al-Lami, an aide to both politicians. Chalabi comes from the southern city of Nasiriya and, though he is distrusted by many Iraqis, he could use his family and political ties to wield considerable influence in an autonomous south.
International Herald Tribune, 30/6/05
US attacks spread humanitarian crisis
As US-led offensives on insurgent strongholds continue, Iraqi humanitarian officials are expressing concerns about increasing problems for civilians in cities across the country's vast western desert. The Iraqi Red Crescent Society says 6,000 families have been displaced across Anbar province in the fighting and are suffering in heat that regularly exceeds 110 degrees.
The society has dispatched five convoys carrying relief supplies including tents and medical equipment to the region over the past few days. Medical teams are assessing potential cholera outbreaks caused by bodies buried in rubble. ''It's a tragedy," said Ferdous Abadi, spokeswoman for the society. ''There is a shortage of medical supplies and clean water."
Boston Globe, 1/7/05
Iraqi ambassador accuses US troops of murder
Iraq's UN ambassador today accused US marines of firing at and killing his cousin in cold blood during a house raid near the western town of Haditha on June 25. Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie, a supporter of the United States, said Mohammed al-Sumaidaie, the son of his first cousin, was shot by marines during a raid at his father's house in the village of Al-Shaikh Hadid, near a US military base at the Haditha Dam.
"All indications point to a killing of an unarmed innocent civilian - a cold-blooded murder," Mr Sumaidaie said. He called for an investigation into the killing, saying outrage over the incident could jeopardise public support for the US-led reconstruction of Iraq. The US military said in a statement from Iraq that the events described in the allegations "roughly correspond to an incident involving coalition forces on that day in that general location".
Herald Sun, Australia, 2/7/05