Monday, May 25th
Last update08:11:21 AM GMT
War Glance
Tony Blair and George Bush might have “signed in blood” their agreement to topple Saddam Hussein a year before the Iraq war, according to Sir Christopher Meyer, Britain’s former ambassador to Washington
Sir Christopher Meyer told the Iraq Inquiry that the two men spent an afternoon meeting in private at the former president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, in April 2002, which appeared to lead to a shift in the then Prime Minister’s stance on Iraq.
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The military timetable for war in Iraq did not allow UN weapons inspectors the time to conclude their work, a former British ambassador to the US has told a public inquiry.
Christopher Meyer told a hearing in London on Thursday that because contingency military plans had been decided before inspectors went in, "we found ourselves scrabbling for the smoking gun". "When you looked at the timetable for the inspections, it was impossible to see how [Hans] Blix could bring the process to a conclusion, for better or for worse, by March," when the US invasion began.
President Barack Obama has no plans to join a global treaty banning landmines because a policy review found the United States could not meet its security commitments without them, the State Department said on Tuesday.
At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, "snatch and grabs" of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found.
The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help run a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.
Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.
In this grotesque carnival, the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban.
Top executives at Blackwater Worldwide authorized secret payments of about $1 million to Iraqi officials that were intended to silence their criticism and buy their support after a September 2007 episode in which Blackwater security guards fatally shot 17 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad, according to former company officials.
Blackwater approved the cash payments in December 2007, the officials said, as protests over the deadly shootings in Nisour Square stoked long-simmering anger inside Iraq about reckless practices by the security company’s employees.
Senior Bush administration figures including Zalmay Khalilzad, former US ambassador to Baghdad, and Jay Garner, the retired general who led reconstruction efforts immediately after the war, are leading a new business push into Iraq.
The two one-time senior officials are among a raft of former US soldiers and diplomats either leveraging their war experience helping foreign companies to enter the Iraqi market or starting businesses there themselves. Mr Khalilzad’s Khalilzad Associates this year set up offices in Baghdad and the northern Kurdish city of Erbil from which it is advising companies wanting to do business in Iraq.
TVNL Comment: Khalilzad can be traced back to PNAC, the neocon killers who brought us the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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