AP | WASHINGTON - Top Pentagon leaders are expected to recommend soon that Defense Secretary Robert Gates order hundreds of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan over the next month or so, according to a senior military official. The units are likely small and could include engineers, ordnance disposal troops and other support forces for fighting needs and training of Afghan forces. Officials have not ruled out ...

Memo Instructed CIA To Document Both Torture Techniques And Agents Participating In Interrogations NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union today obtained three redacted documents related to the Bush administration's brutal interrogation policies, including a previously withheld Justice Department memo authorizing the CIA's use of torture. The government was ordered to turn over the documents in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought in 2004 ...

By Carol Rosenberg | GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — In his seventh of month of U.S. captivity, Osama bin Laden's driver told a pair of FBI agents that it was America's fault that the al Qaida leader was alive. The message was, ''You had these opportunities, America. You didn't do anything,'' FBI agent George Crouch Jr. testified Friday at Salim Hamdan's war crimes trial. The United States could have ...

The total cost of the Iraq war is approaching the Vietnam War's expense, a congressional report estimates, while spending for military operations after 9/11 has exceeded it. The new report by the Congressional Research Service estimates the U.S. has spent $648 billion on Iraq war operations, putting it in range with the $686 billion, in 2008 dollars, spent on the Vietnam War, the second most expensive war behind World War II. ...

By Patrick J. Buchanan | As any military historian will testify, among the most difficult of maneuvers is the strategic retreat. Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, Lee's retreat to Appomattox and MacArthur's retreat from the Yalu come to mind. The British Empire abandoned India in 1947 – and a Muslim-Hindu bloodbath ensued. France's departure from Indochina was ignominious, and her abandonment of hundreds of thousands of faithful Algerians to the FALN disgraceful. ...

Jorge Cervantes, the World’s leading expert on Cannabis cultivation, has watched and influenced an entire sub culture that sprang from a relatively unexplored science. In 1983 he authored the first complete book about indoor cultivation which revolutionised the way gardeners produced medical Marijuana, with new and affordable technology emerging it was now possible for medicinal growers to utilise the same ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon Wednesday sought to play down the seriousness of growing violence in Afghanistan but declined to say the United States and NATO were winning their fight against Taliban insurgents. On a day when President Bush visited the Pentagon to discuss Iraq and Afghanistan with top officials, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell said the question of additional forces for Afghanistan may be left to Bush's successor. "It is a ...

KIRKUK, Iraq (AFP) - The son of a journalist at a popular weekly newspaper in northern Iraq was allegedly shot dead by US troops when his car appeared to veer wildly, local police said on Thursday. American soldiers shot dead Arkan Ali al-Nuaimi, 19, on Wednesday evening as he approached a checkpoint in his car in the oil city of Kirkuk, a police official told AFP. Iraqi police said the son ...

By Dana Hedgpeth | Auditors at a Pentagon oversight agency were pressured by supervisors to skew their reports on major defense contractors to make them look more favorable instead of exposing wrongdoing and charges of overbilling, according to an 80-page report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office. The Defense Contract Audit Agency, which oversees contractors for the ...

State crime lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona's DNA database when she stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles. The men matched at nine of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people. The FBI estimated the odds of unrelated people sharing those genetic markers to be as remote as 1 in 113 billion. But the mug shots of the two felons suggested ...

Real Women, Real Voices | Last week, leaders of the world’s richest countries, the Group of Eight (G8), met to chart the course of the global economy at the luxurious Windsor Hotel Toya Resort and Spa in Toyako, Japan. While President Bush and his colleagues discussed world hunger over a six-course lunch, women in Haiti were preparing cakes of dirt for their children’s dinner. Eating dirt, mixed with ...

The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into ...

By Jeff Stein | Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, who resigned last year after two years as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, today described the military commissions system as fatally "tainted" by politics and designed to produce guilty verdicts, no matter what the costs.        The possibility of the system delivering "credible verdicts is doubtful," Davis said Tuesday in a remarkable interview on NPR's Diane Rehm Show....

By Robert Parry | A conservative-dominated U.S. Appeals Court has opened the door for President George W. Bush or a successor to throw American citizens - as well as non-citizens - into a legal black hole by designating them “enemy combatants,” even if they have engaged in no violent act and are living on U.S. soil. The federal Appeals Court in Richmond, Virginia, ruled ...