War Glance
Private security guards from Blackwater Worldwide participated in some of the C.I.A.’s most sensitive activities — clandestine raids with agency officers against people suspected of being insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan and the transporting of detainees, according to former company employees and intelligence officials.
The raids against suspects occurred on an almost nightly basis during the height of the Iraqi insurgency from 2004 to 2006, with Blackwater personnel playing central roles in what company insiders called “snatch and grab” operations, the former employees and current and former intelligence officers said.
Gossip from an Iraqi taxi driver was a key source for Tony Blair's 'dodgy dossier'.
Britain's military chiefs were suddenly included in top secret US planning for an invasion of Iraq in the months following a private meeting between Tony Blair and President Bush, the Iraq inquiry heard yesterday.
As he justified sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year, President Barack Obama's description Tuesday of the al-Qaeda "cancer" in that country left out one key fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al-Qaeda fighters in the entire country.
Already it is obvious that the four-man panel that constitutes the Chilcot Inquiry into the invasion of Iraq is patently not up to the job.
Jeremy Greenstock, British ambassador to the United Nations from 1998 to 2003, said that President George W. Bush had no real interest in attempts to agree on a U.N. resolution to provide explicit backing for the conflict.
The full extent of how Tony Blair misled the public about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction before and after the Iraq War was laid bare yesterday.
