contributions

By Paul McGeough in Baghdad
Iyad Allawi, the new Prime Minister of Iraq, pulled a pistol and executed as many as six suspected insurgents at a Baghdad police station, just days before Washington handed control of the country to his interim government, according to two people who allege they witnessed the killings.
They say the prisoners - handcuffed and blindfolded - were lined up against a wall in a courtyard adjacent to the maximum-security cell block in which they were held at the (…)

One of America’s largest nuclear weapons research laboratories has suspended its activities after secret information went missing.
Officials are not saying what data has disappeared from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, but it is thought to be highly sensitive.
The laboratory was temporarily closed four years ago as forest fires got dangerously close to it.
Several security breaches have hit the birthplace of the first atomic bomb.
Its closure comes on the (…)

Thousands of Iraqi hostages — innocent men, women and children — are still held without charge or trial in unlawful jails or detention facilities of Iraq, including Abu Ghraib prison, after the so-called official end of the illegal occupation of Iraq on 28 June 2004. Some Iraqi hostages are housed in tents, and are suffering under the intense heat of Iraq’s summer.
The cases of Nahla Hafez Ahmad, a mother of four, and her sister Huda are typical. Nahla was detained by U.S. troops in the (…)

By Ori Nir
Cooperation between Israel and the United States helped produce a series of intelligence failures in the lead up to the Iraq war, according to separate reports issued by members of the Senate and the Knesset.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, in its report issued last week, blasted the Central Intelligence Agency for poor intelligence gathering and analysis, and concluded that the U.S. "intelligence community depended too heavily on defectors and foreign government services" (…)

By SARAH EL DEEB, Associated Press Writer
CAIRO, Egypt - Through Web sites, headlines and graffiti, the Arab world is celebrating the people of Fallujah as victors over a superpower.
This embrace of the Iraqi city has raised fears that it will become a magnet for recruits to al-Qaida’s anti-Western campaign. But many Arabs say Fallujah stands out more as a boost to their self-esteem after witnessing the Iraqi army barely put up a fight against the U.S. invasion last year.
U.S. Marines (…)

By Martin Crutsinger
An audit of Iraq’s oil revenues revealed a lack of adequate financial controls and an inability to get information on large non-competitive contracts, including one awarded to Halliburton, the board established to monitor Iraq finances reported Thursday.
The International Advisory and Monitoring Board on Iraq released an audit prepared by accounting firm KPMG, which cited concerns about an inability to track how much oil is being produced in Iraq and a lack of proper (…)

de Juan Cole
Wire services report that 32 Iraqis died in violence on Thursday.
Guerrillas assassinated the chief of security for the Iraqi foreign ministry as he and colleagues traveled north from Baghdad toward Kirkuk. Two other officials were injured, as their car was sprayed by machine gun fire from a grey Opel about 110 km. north of the capital.
The resistance in Haditha, a city northwest of Baghdad, detonated a car bomb at the police station, killing 10 Iraqi policemen and (…)

BY STEPHEN J. HEDGES
One of the nation’s top generals during the invasion of Iraq said Thursday that the insurgency took U.S. military leaders by surprise because they believed the assurances of Iraqi opposition groups and defectors that American forces would be welcomed.
Gen. John Keane, who served as the Army’s vice chief of staff during the war and who has since retired, told the House Armed Services Committee: "We did not see it coming. And we were not properly prepared and organized (…)

A top MP officer and the commander of military interrogators each gave testimony blaming the other for abuses at Abu Ghraib.
By Richard A. Serrano
A top military police officer and the commander of military interrogators at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq are blaming each other for improper treatment of prisoners who were stripped, abused and sexually humiliated.
Capt. Donald J. Reese, commander of the 372nd Military Police Company, told authorities that he was repeatedly assured by (…)

New cases of prisoner abuse by US soldiers in Iraq have come to light, three months after the abuse-scandal first shocked the world.
Emerging from a closed-door meeting with Pentagon officials on Thursday, John Warner, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said there had been more violations of the Geneva Convention governing the treatment of detainees.
"We are still uncovering, as late as this morning, other incidents, other cases that will be promptly investigated by the (…)