Saturday, Mar 21st
Last update05:45:55 AM GMT
War Glance
The UK's commander in Helmand has said Britain should not expect a "decisive military victory" in Afghanistan.
He said it was unrealistic to expect multinational forces would be able to wipe out armed bands of insurgents in the country. Brig Carleton-Smith is the Commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade which has just completed its second tour of Afghanistan.
In an apparent violation of federal regulations, the State Department has outsourced to private contractors the responsibility to investigate possible crimes committed by security contractors in Iraq.
According to a contract obtained by ABC News, the company was hired to supplement Diplomatic Security personnel. However, the eight USIS contractors hired for the team represent the majority of the full-time team, an apparent violation of federal regulations that prohibit such work by contractors.
A Houston security company has been indicted on charges of defrauding the U.S. government for work done during the Afghanistan war and rebuilding efforts.
The company accused is United States Protection and Investigations. The indictment released Friday names the company and four employees: CEO Dwayne Spier; President Barbara Spier; USPI's Afghanistan operations manager, William Felix Dupre; and executive assistant Behzad Mehr.
An M4 machine gun sent to Iraq by the Blackwater private security firm somehow disappeared from the company's storage facility in Baghdad and was later discovered during a US military operation, apparently against suspected insurgents, people familiar with the situation have told ABC News.
The incident, in 2006, has been kept secret until now but it raised more questions about Blackwater's operations in Iraq.
Allegations that Blackwater shipped weapons and silencers to Iraq without proper licensing are already under investigation by a federal grand jury in North Carolina, according to people familiar with the case.
Suicide bombers have struck near two Shia mosques in Baghdad, killing 20 people and wounding another 25, Iraqi security officials said.
The attacks came as worshippers left mosques after prayers celebrating Eid al-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan.
The official version of the US-led campaign in Afghanistan received a blow today with a leaked report that the British Ambassador in Kabul believes that US strategy is wrong and the war is as good as lost.
The potentially explosive views were published by Le Canard Enchaîné, a respected French weekly, which said that they were direct quotations from a diplomatic cable written by François Fitou, the French Deputy Ambassador in Kabul.
Iraq has signed preliminary deals worth billions of dollars with General Electric Co and Siemens for equipment to almost double electricity generation capacity, an energy official said on Saturday.
The deals with GE, Siemens and a third company would be worth a total of $7 billion to $8 billion, Iraq's Electricity Minister Karim Waheed told Reuters.
TVNL Comment: The spoils of war: Bomb a country's electrical generators to smithereens and then make deals worth billions to rebuild them. Damn clever, these Americans...
Page 106 of 120
