War Glance
The CIA is reported to have used unmanned drones to target leaders of al-Q'aida's affiliate in Somalia for the first time, attacks coinciding with the unveiling of a new US counterterrorism strategy shifting the war on terror away from costly battlefields and toward expanded covert operations.
The strikes in Somalia, which last week apparently wounded two leaders of the al-Shabab militant group, bring to six the number of countries where the missile-armed drones have been deployed: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Iraq, and now the lawless country in East Africa which officials here increasingly identify as a major terrorist base after the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.
US expands its drone war to Somalia
Report: Iraq, Afghanistan Wars Cost US Nearly $4 Trillion
A new report issued by Brown University says the cost of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and operations in Pakistan - will cost the country nearly $4 trillion. The report's total is more than three times higher than U.S. President Barack Obama’s estimate in a recent speech.
When Obama recently announced a drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, he said America's wars have cost the country $1 trillion dollars. But a report by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies estimates the total cost at $3.7 trillion.
Cost of air conditioning for U.S. troops in MidEast more than NASA budget
The United States spends $20.2 billion annually on air conditioning for troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan — more than NASA's entire budget, NPR reported.
In fact, the same amount of money that keeps soldiers cool is the amount the G-8 has committed to helping the fledgling democracies in Tunisia and Egypt.
Ex-MI6 chief altered Iraqi intelligence
The then Prime Minister Tony Blair had assigned Sir John Scarlett to write the notorious dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on September 2002.
But, Scarlett, who was head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, sent a memo to Blair's foreign affairs adviser referring to "the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional".
Joint Intelligence Committee was duty-bound to give impartial intelligence-based advice to ministers, but in this case, intelligence has been misrepresented to make the case for war.
'Hit and run' drone strikes are 'breaking laws of war"
Nations which carry out drone attacks must confirm and report who is killed, say lawyers in a newly published study on the legality of attacks by the unmanned aircraft.
Independent think-tank Oxford Research Group (ORG) has published a report which claims an "existing but previously unacknowledged requirement in law" has been identified that says all parties involved in drone attacks are legally obliged to search for and identify all persons killed in strikes.
Missing Iraq cash 'as high as $18bn'
"There is a lot of money missing during the first American administration of Iraqi money in the first year of occupation.
"Iraq's development fund has lost around $18bn of Iraqi money in these operations - their location is unknown. Also missing are the documents of expenditure.
"I think it will be discussed soon. There should be an answer to where has Iraqi money gone."
US data: 90% of captured 'Taliban' were civilians
In December 2010, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan General David Petraeus claimed in an interview that a total of 4,100 Taliban rank and file had been captured and 2,000 others had been killed in the space of six months.
The claim followed another set of misleading figures that had been released three months earlier and which said US Special Operations Forces had captured 1,355 rank and file Taliban militants, killed 1,031, while having killed or captured 365 middle or high-ranking Taliban members through May and July of the same year.
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