AFP — Two US soldiers in Afghanistan died Thursday after separate insurgent attacks, NATO said, compounding the bloodiest year yet for American forces in the Afghan war. NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said both had died following insurgent attacks, one in the country’s east, the other in the south.ISAF confirmed to AFP that both were Americans.A total of 326 US soldiers have been killed in the Afghan war in 2010, compared with 317 for all of 2009, according to AFP figures based on the independent icasualties.org website. Read Article
Digital Journal – US Army officials expect an increase of unmanned aircraft flights in Iraq despite the government’s decision to withdraw some of its American combat troops. The US Army is predicting flight hours for drones will increase as the mission in Iraq changes due to a much-publicized troop withdrawal, even as President Barack Obama announced on Saturday that “the war is ending.” Read Article
The Independent – An apparent air strike by foreign forces killed six election campaign workers in Afghanistan’s north today, a government spokesman said, and NATO-led forces said hey were investigating the incident. Civilian casualties caused by foreign forces while hunting militants have been a major source of tension between President Hamid Karzai and Western nations. Violence across Afghanistan is at its worst since the Taliban were ousted in late 2001. Today’s attack happened in the Rostaq district of Takhar, a relatively peaceful province in the north near Tajikistan, said a spokesman for the provincial governor, unlike areas in the south and east where the resurgent Taliban are mostly active. Read Article
Reuters – Pakistani government air raids have killed up to 45 militants, their family members and other civilians with no ties to the fighters, officials said on Wednesday. Three strikes on Tuesday night targeted Pakistani Taliban militants in one of their strongholds in the Tirah Valley in the northwestern Khyber region on the Afghan border. Read Article
AFP — The number of US soldiers killed in the Afghan war in 2010 is the highest annual toll since the conflict began almost nine years ago, according to an AFP count Wednesday. A total of 323 US soldiers have been killed in the Afghan war this year, compared to 317 for all of 2009, according to AFP figures based on the independent icasualties.org website. At 490, the overall death toll for foreign troops for the first eight months of the year is rapidly closing in the number registered in all of 2009, which at 521 was a record since the start of the war in late 2001. In all 1,270 American troops have lost their lives, out of 2,058 foreign military fatalities, since the conflict began with the US-led invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – A series of bomb attacks have badly hit US troops in eastern and southern Afghanistan in the past 48 hours, contributing to the toll. Violence is predicted to rise towards the September 18 parliamentary elections and as American troops begin operations west of Kandahar after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Deaths among the Nato-led coalition have reached 485 this year and are predicted to surpass 2009’s total of 521. Read Article
AP — Andrew White returned from a nine-month tour in Iraq beset with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia, nightmares, constant restlessness. Doctors tried to ease his symptoms using three psychiatric drugs, including a potent anti-pyschotic called Seroquel. Thousands of soldiers suffering from PTSD have received the same medication over the last nine years, helping to make Seroquel one of the Veteran Affairs Department’s top drug expenditures and the No. 5 best-selling drug in the nation. Several soldiers and veterans have died while taking the pills, raising concerns among some military families that the government is not being up front about the drug’s risks. Read article
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Hindustan Times – After a lull, a spike in US strikes within Pakistani territory since mid-August has meant that the number of unmanned drone attacks carried out by the Americans in the first eight months of 2010 has exceeded that for the whole of 2009. It also makes this year the most lethal since the drone strikes commenced in 2004. The latest strike was in the tribal agency of Kurram that targeted the Tehrik-e-Taliban or the Pakistan Taliban. That took the total for 2010 to 54 exceeding last year’s 53, according to figures from the Long War Journal, which tracks the strikes within Pakistan. Read Article
Daily Telegraph – The US has broadened financial sanctions against North Korea, freezing the American assets of four North Korean citizens and eight firms in part to punish it for the sinking of a South Korean warship. Read Article
Reuters – The U.S. military formally ends combat operations in Iraq on Tuesday as President Barack Obama seeks to fulfill a promise to end the war despite persistent instability and attacks that kill dozens at a time. U.S. troop numbers were cut to 50,000 in advance of the August 31 milestone in the 7-1/2-year-old war launched by Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, whose stated aim was to destroy Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. No such weapons was found. Read Article
Public Intelligence – Purpose. This Concept of Operations (CONOP) documents concepts and procedures for the use of biometric technologies to support identity superiority, protection and management in the entire USCENTCOM AOR. This CONOP focuses on the biometrics process and key systemic enablers. This CONOP contains UNCLASSIFIED and CLASSIFIED 100 annexes. The body of the CONOP is UNCLASSIFIED however, Annex E, “HUMINT Biometrics Management”, is CLASSIFIED SECRET//NOFORN. Read Article
Huffington Post – When federal investigators discovered that the manager of a Saudi Arabian company paid bribes to win two lucrative subcontracts supplying food to American troops in Iraq, they naturally wanted to know more. Did he act on his own? Had U.S. taxpayers been cheated? Five years later, investigators are still largely in the dark. They suspect similar activities by other subcontractors may have tainted contracts worth up to $300 million. But the investigators are unable to uncover even basic information, such as how the manager of the Saudi company had come up with $133,000 in bribe money. Read Article
BBC – A roadside bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan has killed four US soldiers, Nato said. AFP quoted spokesman James Judge as saying that a home-made bomb, one of the main weapons of the Taliban, was used in the attack. The attack comes a day after seven US soldiers were killed in two bomb attacks in southern Afghanistan. Read Article
Press TV – The US Army leadership needs to establish a new suicide prevention office to curb the record number of self-inflicted deaths among troops, a new report says. Officials failed to recognize disturbing trends and are often too distracted by planning the next military mission, the findings of an independent task force report ordered by Congress said.
The report found that more than 1,100 members of the armed forces killed themselves from 2005 to 2009. Experts studying the effects of prolonged war on the human psyche say repeated tours without sufficient time between deployments may be part of the problem. Read article
Press TV – China has said that its navy is preparing to hold a military exercise in the Yellow Sea next week, condemning recent and planned US-South Korean joint drills. A naval fleet will stage the drill this week from Wednesday to Saturday in the sea between China and the Korean peninsula, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the Chinese military as saying on Sunday. Read Article
Press TV – Israel is reportedly preparing to strike arms depots and weapons manufacturing plants in Syria, claiming they belong to the Islamic resistance movement Hezbollah, a report says. Tel Aviv has escalated its military presence in the occupied Golan Heights and the northern part of the Shebaa Farms, the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz said, citing a report in the Saturday edition of the Kuwaiti daily Al Rai. Read Article
Columbia Reports – Private military firm Blackwater violated U.S. arms trafficking regulations when training the Colombian military in 2005, a leaked State Department report shows. The controversial firm, renamed Xe Services LLC in 2009, was fined $42 million for violating US export and arms traffic laws on 228 occasions, mostly related to military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read Article
Washington Post – An exhaustive U.N. investigation into the history of violence in Congo has concluded that the Rwandan military and its allies carried out hundreds of large-scale killings of ethnic Hutu refugees during the 1990s that amounted to war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly genocide, according to a confidential copy of the report. Read Article
Herald Sun – SIX American soldiers were killed in a wave of Taliban attacks and bomb explosions this weekend in some of Afghanistan’s most volatile regions, NATO said today. Three soldiers were killed fighting insurgents in two separate battles in eastern parts of the country yesterdaythe alliance’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) said in a statement. Read Article
Courthouse News – The Vietnam Veterans of America asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on the Central Intelligence Agency, for failing to produce documents on the CIA’s testing of hundreds of kinds of drugs – including sarin and phosgene nerve gas and LSD – on thousands of soldiers. The Vietnam Veterans of America sued the CIA in January 2009, claiming the agency had experimented on soldiers at Edgewood Arsenal and Fort Detrick, Md., testing the effects of mind-controlling drugs. Read Article
ExecutiveGov – The national debt is the single biggest threat to national security, according to Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tax payers will be paying around $600 billion in interest on the national debt by 2012, the chairman told students and local leaders in Detroit. “That’s one year’s worth of defense budget,” he said, adding that the Pentagon needs to cut back on spending.“That’s one year’s worth of defense budget,” he said, adding that the Pentagon needs to cut back on spending. Read Article
AFP — Blackwater private security firm founder Erik Prince was questioned on Monday in Abu Dhabi in connection with a fraud lawsuit filed by former employees that seeks millions of dollars in damages. Read Article
AP — Iraq’s prime minister put his nation on its highest level of alert for terror attacks, warning of plots to sow fear and chaos as the U.S. combat mission in the country formally ends on Tuesday. The Iraqi security forces who will be left in charge of guarding the nation have been hammered by near-daily bomb attacks, prompting criticism of the government’s readiness for the American troop drawdown. Read Article
Wired – Inmates of the Pitchess Detention Center, watch your step. If you get out of line, you may get blasted with an invisible heat ray. The jail’s energy weapon is a small-scale version of the Active Denial System, the experimental crowd control device that the U.S. military brought to Afghanistan — and then quickly shipped back home, after questions mounted about the wisdom of blasting locals with a beam that momentarily puts them in agony. The pain weapon seemed at odds with the military’s efforts to appear more humane and measured in the eyes of the Afghan populace. Read Article
AP — Homemade bombs killed three U.S. troops in southern and eastern Afghanistan on Friday, and a roadside blast tore through a crowded market in the increasingly volatile north, killing three police and two civilians. No other details about the attacks on the U.S. troops were given by NATO and the identities of those killed were not immediately released. A total of 55 foreign troops have been killed in Afghanistan this month, including 35 Americans, according to a count by The Associated Press. July was the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the 2001 invasion, with 66 killed. Read Article
