Monday, Jul 01st
Last update06:38:08 AM GMT
War Glance
After nearly eight long years, we seem to be no closer to the end of the war in Afghanistan. In fact, given the current buildup of U.S. troops and the possibility that even more may be deploying soon, many Americans, and many Afghans, wonder what we hope to achieve—and when our service members will start to come home.The founder of Blackwater USA deliberately caused the deaths of innocent civilians in a series of shootings in Iraq, attorneys for Iraqis suing the security contractor told a federal judge Friday.
The attorneys singled out Erik Prince, a former Navy SEAL who is the company's owner, for blame in the deaths of more than 20 Iraqis between 2005 and 2007.
The cost of running the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is projected to rise in the coming years as the world's largest diplomatic mission weans itself from the support it receives from the U.S. military, the State Department's acting inspector general said in a report this week.
Harold W. Geisel also said an embassy office that oversees infrastructure projects worth hundreds of millions of dollars is chronically understaffed and may be unable to complete its work by May, when its charter ends.
It was the 37th death for the U.S. military in Afghanistan since the beginning of August, a month that has seen a jump in attacks and violence as the country prepared for its second-ever direct presidential election last week.
A CIA decision to hire contractors from Blackwater USA for a covert assassination program was part of a broader constellation of connections between the agency and the widely criticized security firm.
The 2004 contract cemented what was then a burgeoning relationship with Blackwater, setting the stage for a series of departures by senior CIA officials who took high-level positions with the North Carolina company. The revolving door helped fuel a backlash against what many inside the agency and on Capitol Hill came to regard as an overuse of outside firms, many of which made millions of dollars after filling their staffs with former CIA employees.
The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.
Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not capture or kill any terrorist suspects.
An Iranian exile group accused the Obama administration Tuesday of betraying written U.S. promises to protect several thousand of its members confined in a camp north of Baghdad that was recently stormed by Iraqi forces.
The accusations against the United States, made at a news conference, called attention to an unusual situation created by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in which the American military, for the past six years, has been protecting a disarmed Iranian guerrilla force considered a terrorist group by the U.S. government.
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