“The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, told CNN Saturday [October 30, 2010] the Taliban’s momentum in Afghanistan has ‘broadly been arrested’ in some locations. ‘My assessment is that the momentum the Taliban enjoyed until probably late summer has broadly been arrested in the country,’ Petraeus said. ‘It doesn’t mean it’s been arrested […]
10/26/2010
“Tariq Aziz, a former top aide to Saddam Hussein and his urbane public relations representative to the world, was sentenced to death by an Iraqi court on Tuesday [October 26, 2010], convicted of crimes against members of rival Shiite political parties. …Mr. Aziz’s death sentence followed convictions on charges of persecution against members of the […]
10/26/2010
“Iraq’s high tribunal has passed a death sentence on Tariq Aziz, one of deposed leader Saddam Hussein’s most prominent deputies. The death sentence, announced on Tuesday [October 26, 2010], was the first to be handed to Aziz, who had previously been convicted for his role in the execution of dozens of merchants for profiteering. ‘The […]
10/25/2010
Afghan “President Hamid Karzai acknowledged on Monday [October 25, 2010] that he regularly receives bags of cash from the Iranian government in payments amounting to millions of dollars, as evidence mounted of a worsening rift between his government and its American and NATO supporters. …’They do give us bags of money–yes, yes, it is done,’ […]
10/22/2010
“Leaked Pentagon files obtained by the Guardian contain details of more than 100,000 people killed in Iraq following the US-led invasion, including more than 15,000 deaths that were previously unrecorded. British ministers have repeatedly refused to concede the existence of any official statistics on Iraqi deaths. US General Tommy Franks claimed in 2002: ‘We don’t […]
10/22/2010
“A grim picture of the US and Britain’s legacy in Iraq has been revealed in a massive leak of American military documents that detail torture, summary executions and war crimes. Almost 400,000 secret US army field reports have been passed to the Guardian and a number of other international media organisations via the whistleblowing website […]
10/22/2010
“Although US generals have claimed their army does not carry out body counts and British ministers still say no official statistics exist, the war logs [exposed by WikiLeaks on October 22, 2010] show these claims are untrue. The field reports purport to identify all civilian and insurgent casualties, as well as numbers of coalition forces […]
10/18/2010
An anonymous NATO official “pointed to an internal assessment that there are 500,000 to 1 million ‘disaffected’ men between the ages of 15 and 25 in the Afghan-Pakistan border region. Most are Afghan Pashtuns, and they make up some of the 95 percent of the insurgency who carry out attacks just to earn money, rather […]
10/18/2010
“Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are believed to be hiding close to each other in houses in northwest Pakistan, but are not together, a senior NATO official said. ‘Nobody in al Qaeda is living in a cave,’ said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the intelligence […]
10/15/2010
In October 2010, the CIA conducted a study of Afghanistan, and its ‘changes in security, government presence, and development.‘ “The assessment was based on statistics–among them the number of insurgent attacks and the number of Afghan security forces in the area–as well as input from the CIA’s network of Afghan informants. White House officials regarded […]