BREMER: On the question of the Peshmerga, let me address it as a somewhat broader question relating to militia and armed forces that are not under the control of the central government. We have made clear in discussions with the Kurdish leaders and other political leaders that we believe there’s no place in an independent, stable Iraq for armed forces that are not under the control of the command structure of the central government. Kurdish leaders have understood and agreed with that.
Kurdish leaders in the northern autonomous area are refusing to disband their military forces, the peshmerga, and are pushing for a veto over any deployment of the Iraqi army in their region … Mustafa Sayid Qadir, the deputy commander of the PUK’s peshmerga, said: “After the Irbil attacks, security has become our number one concern. Our history has taught us the risks of leaving ourselves defenceless.”
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Halliburton?s construction-and-engineering subsidiary … Brown & Root was part of a consortium of four companies that built about eighty-five per cent of the infrastructure needed by the Army during the Vietnam War. At the height of the resistance to the war, Brown & Root became a target of protesters, and soldiers in Vietnam derided it as Burn & Loot … former Treasury Secretary Paul O?Neill charges that Cheney agitated for U.S. intervention well before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Additional evidence that Cheney played an early planning role is contained in a previously undisclosed National Security Council document, dated February 3, 2001. The top-secret document, written by a high-level N.S.C. official, concerned Cheney?s newly formed Energy Task Force. It directed the N.S.C. staff to co?perate fully with the Energy Task Force as it considered the ?melding? of two seemingly unrelated areas of policy: ?the review of operational policies towards rogue states,? such as Iraq, and ?actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.?
By refusing to make public its estimates of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has undercut international support for the US campaigns in those countries and has made the postwar stabilization of the two societies more difficult … the Pentagon has not fully disclosed in recent years accidental deaths and injuries inflicted upon civilian populations by American military forces. Its failure to do so has made it more difficult to predict how local populations will receive the United States after a conflict … The report says the US military has wrongly given the impression that its high-tech form of warfare is extremely low risk, creating unrealistic expectations that war produces very low casualties.
Report Summary, Full Text.
Photos of happy newlyweds in San Francisco.
Rikers Island sits in the East River at the opening of Bowery Bay. Once it was small and bucolic and green, an 87-acre patch of land owned since 1664 by a family of early Dutch settlers named Rycken. The city bought the island in 1884 and used it as a dump for old metal and cinders. It was one of the first designated dumps in New York. Rikers Island worked as an antidote to the city’s garbage problem until people began to complain about Rikers Island itself. Very soon, it had grown into a 415-acre island ? a mass of garbage on and surrounding the original island … Rats from all over the city came to Rikers Island, arriving on the fleets of garbage scows. Within the island was a huge lake of stagnant water, and the rats lived along the shore, feeding on garbage, drinking in the refuse-infused lake; in its putrid isolation, Rikers Island was a rat utopia.
Earlier here.
