 |
|
Police takes control of Najaf I miscalculated Iraq post-war
conditions: Bush CIA ‘directed’ prisoners’ abuse Indian deported, recalled
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Aziz elected Pak PM Bandh against
mega-projects in Baluchistan
|
|
Police takes control of Najaf
Najaf, Iraq, August 27 Under the terms of a deal reached yesterday to end three weeks of fighting in Najaf, armed militants were to leave the shrine and Iraqi police take over responsibility for security. Meanwhile, car bomb exploded near a US military convoy in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul today, injuring at least 10 Iraqi civilians, police and hospital officials said. The US military said it had no reports of American casualties. One US military vehicle had been damaged. The hospital officials said 10 injured civilians had been brought in for treatment. US soldiers had cordoned off the area.
— Reuters |
|
I miscalculated Iraq post-war conditions: Bush
Washington, August 27 In what the daily said was the US president’s first acknowledgement on the issue. He said the miscalculation was an unintended byproduct of a “swift victory,” adding that Saddam Hussein’s forces quickly went into hiding in Iraqi cities where they mounted a rebellion far faster than the Americans had anticipated. The daily said Bush refused to go into detail on what went wrong, saying that it was a task best left to historians. Bush said his policies on Iraq, where he fought a war despite strong international opposition, were “flexible enough” to respond to the insurgency. Even now “we’re adjusting to our conditions,” in places like the holy city of Najaf, where US and Iraqi forces have been battling the militias of Muslim cleric Moqtada Sadr for weeks, he added. On North Korea and its alleged nuclear weapons ambitions, the daily said Bush took issue with his Democratic rival in the November 2 presidential election John Kerry, who argued that the US-led war in Iraq gave Pyongyang the opportunity to expand its nuclear capability. “Showing none of the alarm about the North Korea’s growing arsenal that he once voiced regularly about Iraq,” said the daily, Bush “opened his palms and shrugged” when asked about intelligence reports indicating that North Korea may now have the fuel to produce six or eight nuclear weapons.
— AFP |
|
CIA ‘directed’ prisoners’ abuse
Washington, August 27 The probe by Maj-Gen George R. Fay and Lieut-Gen Anthony R. Jones has found that the agency was involved in abuse and improper detention. CIA’s detention and interrogation practices in Iraq “led to a loss of accountability, abuse, reduced interagency cooperation and unhealthy mystique that poisoned the atmosphere” at the prison in which detainees were maltreated, General Fay told reporters here. In one example of the CIA methods cited by General Fay, a CIA officer deliberately drew his pistol and prepared to fire it in the presence of a detainee under interrogation, a clear violation of Army rules that barred weapons in interrogation rooms, the Washington Post reported. The report said CIA officers were able to convince two key military intelligence officers — Lieut-Col Stephen L. Jordan, the head of Abu Ghraib’s interrogation centre, and Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, commander of the 205th Military Intellience Brigade at the prison—that the CIA could “operate outside the established local rules and procedures.” The CIA’s relative impunity contributed to “a loss of accountability” and “encourged soldiers to deviate from prescribed
interrogational techniques,” according to a report written separately by Lieut-Gen Jones and the executive summary he released yesterday with General Fay. In addition to detailing the presence of multiple CIA field officers at Abu Ghraib when an Iraqi detainee was found dead in a shower stall, an event that was previously reported and photographed, the report alleges that the CIA was involved in the improper detention of three Saudi medical workers aiding the US-led coalition in Iraq. For reasons not explained by General Fay’s report or by the CIA, the three men were imprisoned by the CIA at Abu Ghraib under false names. In this way, they became part of a pool of “ghost detainees” sometimes dropped off at Abu Ghraib by the CIA—their presence never properly recorded in jail house records and their detention kept secret from visiting delegations of the International Red Cross. After a Saudi general was unable to learn the whereabouts of the three people, efforts to locate them were made by L. Paul Bremer, the top US civilian official in Iraq, officials of the US Embassy in Riyadh and Secretary of State Colin Powell. But they were not told the men were in custody. Only when a soldier at Abu Ghraib recalled seeing three men arrive together were they finally tracked down and released, Fay’s report states. The episode, the Post noted, is presented as an example of the swaggering style that CIA field officers adopted at Abu Ghraib, a US army-run prison where officers came and went without revealing their identities.
— PTI |
|
Indian deported, recalled
London, August 27 Having flown thousands of miles, Jorowar Singh Dhillon (34) was told to retrace his journey as soon as his plane landed in India. “The immigration service are investigating the circumstances and his removal from the UK,” a Home Office spokesperson said. Mr Dhillon, arrived in the UK in July 1996 and was refused asylum, in September 1996 and again in September 1998, which he applied for on grounds that he would face prosecution in India. His lawyer said having applied for asylum under the new human rights legislation meant he could not be deported. But when he went for his routine visit to immigration officials on Wednesday, he was detained. Hours later his legal team secured an injunction from high court forbidding his removal from the UK, but despite the order his deportation went ahead. As he was on the plane a second injunction was passed, ruling that he could not pass through immigration at Delhi but return to the UK immediately, the paper claimed.
— PTI |
|
Aziz elected Pak PM Islamabad, August 27 Aziz (55), who won 191-0 in the 342-member National Assembly, would be sworn in by Musharraf tomorrow along with his cabinet. He would seek the vote of confidence in parliament tomorrow itself. |
|
Bandh against
mega-projects in Baluchistan
Islamabad, August 27 The party felt that the projects, including the Gwadar port being built with Chinese aid, would result in mass migration from neighbouring Punjab province and other parts of Pakistan and exploitation of its natural resources. Baluchistan’s provincial capital Quetta and other major towns wore a deserted look as shops and business establishments downed shutters in response to the strike call. Over 4,000 police personnel were deployed in Quetta to prevent any untoward incident and a large number of protesters were arrested. Baluch nationalist parties and groups had been agitating for several years, complaining that the province bordering Iran and Afghanistan was getting a raw deal as its rich natural resources like minerals and natural gas were extensively used by other provinces and the benefits were not passing on to the locals.
— PTI |
| HOME PAGE | |
Punjab | Haryana | Jammu & Kashmir |
Himachal Pradesh | Regional Briefs |
Nation | Opinions | | Business | Sports | World | Mailbag | Chandigarh | Ludhiana | Delhi | | Calendar | Weather | Archive | Subscribe | Suggestion | E-mail | |
Washington, August 27
