By HOPE YEN and PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writers 1 hour, 31 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - The U.S. government wasted tens of millions of dollars in Iraq reconstruction aid, including scores of unaccounted-for weapons and a never-used camp for housing police trainers with an Olympic-size swimming pool, investigators say.
The quarterly audit by Stuart Bowen Jr., the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, is the latest to paint a grim picture of waste, fraud and frustration in an Iraq war and reconstruction effort that has cost taxpayers more than $300 billion and left the region near civil war.
"The security situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, hindering progress in all reconstruction sectors and threatening the overall reconstruction effort," according to the 579-page report, which was being released Wednesday.
more...by Bill Ickes 1 hour, 50 minutes ago
BAGHDAD (AFP) - Insurgents have killed three more US troops in Iraq as brutal sectarian violence on the last day of Ashura, the holiest ceremony on the Shiite calendar, left dozens of people dead in the strife-torn country.
In the latest attack against Iraq's security forces, a suicide bomber blew up a fuel truck at an army base on Wednesday, wounding 12 soldiers, a security source said Wednesday.
The fresh casualties came as the US admiral set to command Middle East forces warned Congress that time was running out to turn things around in Iraq.
Snip...
The three US troops were killed in "enemy action" on Tuesday in Al-Anbar province, the bastion of Iraq's Sunni Arabs in the west of the country.
The fatalities took US military losses this month to at least 85 and to 3,078 since the March 2003 invasion, according to an AFP count based on
Pentagon figures.
more...By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer 26 minutes ago
WASHINGTON - Training the police is as important to stabilizing Iraq as standing up an army there, but the United States has botched the job by assigning the wrong agencies to the task, two members of the Iraq Study Group say.
"The police training system has not gone well," former Rep. Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the bipartisan commission, said in remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday to the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was joined in his statements by another member of the study group, Edwin Meese III, who was attorney general during the Reagan administration.
The U.S. erred by first assigning the task of shaping the judicial system in a largely lawless country to the State Department and private contractors who "did not have the expertise or the manpower to get the job done," Hamilton and Meese said in testimony obtained by The Associated Press.
In 2004, the mission was assigned to the Defense Department, which devoted more money to the task. But department officials also were insufficiently trained for the job, Hamilton and Meese said.
more...
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