Monday, May 25th
Last update08:11:21 AM GMT
War Glance
After a mass killing of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war by the forces of an American-backed warlord during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Bush administration officials repeatedly discouraged efforts to investigate the episode, according to government officials and human rights organizations.
TVNL Comment: How manymore crimes must be unearthed before the Bush criminals are held accountable? Just asking...
Up to 50 suspected militants have been killed in two US attacks in north-west Pakistan, local officials told the BBC.
In the first attack, suspected US drones attacked a Taliban forest camp in South Waziristan, near the Afghan border, killing at least 10 militants.
TVNL Comment: What the hell is a 'suspected militant'? Just asking....
But not so fast. The conflict that began in 2003 is far from over for us, and the next chapter - confronting a Taliban that reasserted itself in Afghanistan while the U.S. was sidetracked in Iraq - will be expensive and bloody. The death toll for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan reached 5,000 in June. An additional 80,000 Americans have been wounded or injured since the war in Iraq began.
Six U.S. soldiers were killed Monday in two roadside bombings in Afghanistan.
Four were killed in an attack in the northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz, the U.S. military said. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, saying it struck a military vehicle, killing five "foreign" soldiers and wounding two others. Two other U.S. soldiers were killed in an improvised explosive device attack in southern Afghanistan.
The use of unmanned drones as weapons of war in conflicts around the world has been called into question by one of Britain's most senior judges. Lord Bingham, until last year the senior law lord, said that some weapons were so "cruel as to be beyond the pale of human tolerance".
The Americans wanted someone to build a police station in Abu Ghraib, another no-go zone for Western contractors. They were willing to pay $700,000 for the construction of the station, which they named Victory and Peace.
“We made a deal with the local leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq,” Mr. Mohsin said. “They agreed not to destroy the station, and we promised to cut them in on the profit.” When the project was completed, however, he gave the Qaeda leader’s name to the Americans, and the man was arrested, Mr. Mohsin said, adding that he kept the entire $350,000 profit.
TVNL Comment: Any of you unemployed out there in the good old USA? Here's where your tax dollars went...and this is just one story of thousands.
A confidential record of a meeting between President Bush and Tony Blair before the invasion of Iraq, outlining their intention to go to war without a second United Nations resolution, will be an explosive issue for the official inquiry into the UK's role in toppling Saddam Hussein.
The memo, written on 31 January 2003, almost two months before the invasion and seen by the Observer, confirms that as the two men became increasingly aware UN inspectors would fail to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) they had to contemplate alternative scenarios that might trigger a second resolution legitimising military action.
Bush told Blair the US had drawn up a provocative plan "to fly U2 reconnaissance aircraft painted in UN colours over Iraq with fighter cover". Bush said that if Saddam fired at the planes this would put the Iraqi leader in breach of UN resolutions.
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