American troops have suffered their highest number of deaths of any day in the Iraq war, while six Australian soldiers were injured in Iraq on the same day.

37 US troops were killed in a single day, with most casualties coming from a helicopter crash. Six Australian soldiers were injured in an apparent suicide bomb attack. In a seperate incident, Iraqis fired on Australian soldiers near the Australian embassy in Baghdad.

(Source: MX)

 

An American jury has awarded over $US3 million in total to two policeman accused of involvement in the videotaped beating of a 16 year old boy.

Sacked former police officer Jeremy Morse had alleged he was treated unfairly when he was fired from the Inglewood Police Department, while his partner claimed his 10-day suspension over the incident was excessive.

Morse was tried twice on criminal charges stemming from the July 2002 incident that stirred racial tensions in Los Angeles.

But the jury deadlocked both times and prosecutors eventually dismissed the case against Morse, although he was dismissed by Inglewood police.

His partner, Bijan Darvish, was acquitted of filing a false police report in connection with the confrontation, in which Morse was seen slamming 16-year-old Donovan Jackson on the boot of a police car.

The jury in the civil suit awarded Morse $2.1 million, while Darvish was awarded $1 million.

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

Freed Australian Guantanamo Bay prisoner Mamdouh Habib may be prevented from selling his story to newspapers under 'anti-terrorism' laws, despite being released without charge.

Mr Habib has been detained without charge for more than three years on suspicion he knew about the September 11 terrorist attacks and had trained with al-Qaeda. He will be released after the US government said it would not charge him.

Mr Habib says that US officials tortured him while he was in custody. However anti-terrorism laws passed last year prevent anyone implicated in any terror offences from selling their story.

(Source: The Age)

 

Queenslanders are being stripped naked and searched by police at the rate of one an hour, new official figures reveal.

Grandmothers, children, pensioners and teenagers are among thousands of people being subjected to strip-searches for crimes as trivial as unpaid parking fines and train tickets.

9684 strip-searches were carried out by Queensland police between June 1, 2003 and June 30, 2004 - 744 a month, or more than one every hour.

The figures have prompted claims that police use strip-searches to humiliate and intimidate people in custody.

Queensland Council of Civil Liberties vice-president Terry O'Gorman said that "police are obviously still abusing their strip-search powers."

In a 2000 report following a major inquiry, the Criminal Justice Commission recommended sweeping changes to police guidelines to end routine strip-searches.

Gold Coast lawyer Bruce Simmonds said many searches were unnecessary, and used to humiliate and intimidate people.

"Sometimes male police get off on it and perve, so to speak, on the process. For some of them, it's a power trip," he said.

Grandmother and pensioner Leonie Gosden, 49, is suing police after she was strip-searched over $230 in unpaid parking fines that were not hers.

Ms Gosden is one of at least four people who have complained about being strip-searched at Beenleigh watchhouse since 1998. Others included Lauren Lucas, 19, who was ordered to "flash" her body, remove her underwear and squat after being detained over an unpaid parking ticket.

Brisbane mother Michelle Rogerson, 39, was stripped when she went to pay a parking fine, while Brisbane man Daniel Palmer complained when he was strip-searched after being arrested on warrants for another man. And in 2003 Helena Schmidt, of Ipswich, was awarded almost $200,000 after she was wrongly arrested then told to "waddle like a duck" during a strip-search.

(Source: Sunday Mail)

 

Two US defence contractors being sued over allegations of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison have been awarded valuable new contracts by the Pentagon.

Three employees of CACI International and Titan - working at Abu Ghraib as civilian contractors - were separately accused of abusive behaviour.

The report on the Abu Ghraib scandal implicated three civilian contractors in the abuses: Steven Stefanowicz from CACI International and John Israel and Adel Nakhla from Titan.

Stefanowicz was charged with giving orders that 'equated to physical abuse', Israel of lying under oath and Naklha of raping an Iraqi boy.

It was also alleged that CACI interrogators used dogs to scare prisoners, placed detainees in unauthorised 'stress positions' and encouraged soldiers to abuse prisoners. Titan employees, it has been alleged, hit detainees and stood by while soldiers physically abused prisoners.

Investigators also discovered systemic problems of management and training - including the fact that a third of CACI International's staff at Abu Ghraib had never received formal military interrogation training.

CACI International has been awarded a $16 million renewal of its contract. Titan has been awarded a new contract worth $164m.

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

Three British soldiers carried out "shocking and appalling" physical and sexual abuse of Iraqi prisoners that was photographed by servicemen, a court martial has heard.

Among the twenty-two photographs released by a military court is a picture of two naked Iraqi men simulating anal sex with their thumbs raised up to the cameras. There is also a close-up picture of two Iraqis simulating oral sex.

The soldiers are accused of abusing detainees who had attempted to steal food and powdered milk from a warehouse at an aid camp they were guarding outside Basra, in southern Iraq in May 2003, weeks after Saddam Hussein was toppled.

The court heard that the camp's commander, Major Dan Taylor, had ordered that looters should be "worked hard" in a crackdown codenamed Operation Ali Baba.

(Source: The Guardian [UK])

 

A dehydrated child who waited four hours for treatment in a country emergency department was among 21 people who died through errors in Victoria's public hospitals last financial year.

According to a report, inexperienced staff failed to accurately monitor the deteriorating condition of the child, whose age and gender is not known. The report said that the busy emergency department of the unnamed hospital had no clear plans for the monitoring of young patients.

The case is one of 85 significant medical errors reported to the Department of Human Services in 2003-04 that are contained in the Sentinel Event Program report, obtained under freedom of information laws.

The report details medical procedures on the wrong patient, procedures on the wrong body part, medication errors, infection control breaches and cases in which instruments or materials were left in patients after surgery.

The other deaths involved 10 mostly elderly people who died after falls (three in hospital-run residential aged-care facilities), four people given the wrong drug or an incorrect drug dosage, two due to a catheter fatally damaging an artery in the heart during routine surgery, and two women dying during childbirth. Two patients - one had absconded - committed suicide.

The number of sentinel events - rare, clear-cut incidents that can have a catastrophic outcome for patients - was up slightly on the previous year, but it is regarded by experts as being only a fraction of the serious or deadly mistakes made by hospital medical staff. The figures do not include errors in private hospitals.

The report said two non-English-speaking patients not given access to an interpreter had surgery on the wrong parts of their bodies. One had a cataract operation on the wrong eye, the other had an operation to remove a skin cancer on the wrong leg.

Four people died due to drug errors, including two patients who were given too much anticoagulant after heart surgery.

Ten complications due to surgical errors included a case in which a patient's bowel was reconnected in the wrong place.

Six complications due to anaesthetic management included a patient whose lungs collapsed after equipment broke down before a brain operation.

Instruments or gauze packs were left behind after eight operations. In one case, surgeons sewed up a woman after an emergency caesarean section despite a count that revealed one gauze pack was missing.

Two people hurt in car accidents were further injured when staff at country hospitals who were inexperienced in trauma cases failed to detect spinal injury in the neck.

(Source: The Age)

 

US commandos are already operating in Iran, and have been authorised by President Bush to attack targets in up to 10 countries, according to a new report.

Seymour Hersh, who exposed prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004, wrote in the New Yorker magazine that he was repeatedly told by US intelligence and military sources that "the next strategic target was Iran".

Hersh wrote that US commandos have been operating inside Iran since mid-2004, selecting suspected weapons sites for possible air strikes.

"This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign," a former high-level government intelligence official told the magazine.

"The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we're going to have the Iranian campaign. We've declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy," the official said.

The US government attacked the article, but said nothing about Hersh's claim that President George W Bush has authorised US commandos to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia, including Iran.

According to The New Yorker, secret spying missions have been going on inside Iran for at least six months on declared and suspected nuclear, chemical and missile sites.

The goal is to "identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids," Hersh wrote.

A top government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told the magazine that Pentagon civilians, especially Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz, "want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible".

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz believed Iran's clerical regime could not withstand a military blow and would collapse, the magazine reported.

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

Quote of the Moment:

"Don't cheerleaders all over America make pyramids every day?".

The lawyer for Specialist Charles Graner Jr, accused of torturing prisoners at Abu Gharib, doesn't see what all the fuss is about.

 

The Australian Shareholders Association has expressed disapproval at companies pledging money to the tsunami relief effort in Asia.

Association spokesman Stephen Matthews says firms should not generally give without expecting something in return.

Mr Matthews said that in most circumstances, donations should only be made in situations that are likely to benefit the company through greater market exposure.

(Source: ABC News website)

 

A US warplane accidentally bombed a house in northern Iraq.

The attack is believed to have killed 14 civilians.

The US Army issued a statement saying it regretted the loss of "possibly innocent lives".

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

A US army platoon sergeant who ordered his soldiers to throw Iraqis into the Tigris River, drowning one, was sentenced to six months in military prison and will not be discharged.

Sergeant 1st Class Tracy Perkins also was reduced by one rank to staff sergeant, which cuts his pay and responsibilities.

He did not testify during his trial, but told the jury of army officers and enlisted members earlier today that his actions were wrong - although he did not apologise to the Iraqis.

Perkins and another soldier were accused of ordering soldiers to push the two Iraqis into the river in Samarra in January 2004. Prosecutors say Zaidoun Hassoun, 19, drowned and his cousin, Marwan Hassoun, climbed out of the river.

Marwan Hassoun testified that he tried to save his cousin by grabbing his hand, but the powerful current swept Zaidoun away. Marwan said the body was found in the river nearly two weeks later.

Perkins said the man had made a gesture of slitting his throat. He said he never meant to injure or kill the Iraqi by throwing him in the river; and he ordered him thrown in the river to teach him a "hard lesson" about threatening US troops. He testified he saw the man climb out alive.

"Basically the enemy would test your resolve. ...I didn't want them to think we were soft or weak," Perkins said.

Several of Perkins' commanding officers testified today that Perkins was an outstanding soldier who tried to find non-lethal ways to deal with defiant Iraqis in the increasingly dangerous region.

"I will always consider him a war hero. ...No one can ever take away his outstanding service over there," said Lieutenant-Colonel Nathan Sassaman.

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald)

 

Quote of the Moment:

"The US Government has so far pledged $US350 million ($A460 million) to the victims of the tsunamis, and the British Government $US96 million. The US has spent $US148 billion on the Iraq war and Britain $US11.5 billion. The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one-and-a-half days' spending in Iraq. The money Britain has given equates to five-and-a-half days of the British involvement in the war.

It looks still worse when you compare the cost of the war to the total foreign aid budget. Britain has spent almost twice as much on creating suffering in Iraq as it spends annually on relieving it elsewhere. The United States gives just over $US16 billion in foreign aid: less than one-ninth of the money it has burnt so far in Iraq."

George Monbiot.

 

An Australian official stood by and watched while US agents tortured and humiliated Australian terror suspect Mamdouh Habib, a newly released legal document revealed today.

Mr Habib received electric shocks, was beaten, kicked and subjected to water torture at the hands of his American captors, Mr Habib's American lawyer Joe Margulies alleged.

The allegations are contained in an affidavit supporting a restraining order against the US government to prevent Mr Habib being sent from Guantanamo Bay back to custody in Egypt.

Mr Habib, from Sydney, has been imprisoned without charge since he was captured in Pakistan in early October 2001, accused of aiding al-Qaeda.

He was held initially in Pakistan before he was sent to Egypt and then to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where another Australian, David Hicks, is also imprisoned.

The affidavit said a man who had previously introduced himself to Mr Habib as an Australian consular official watched while an American agent stood on Mr Habib's neck and had his photograph taken.

Habib was handcuffed throughout the ordeal, which took place at an airfield in Islamabad about October 29, 2001.

"The person with his foot on Mr Habib's neck explained, in unaccented American English, that he planned to send one picture to his girlfriend and another to his sister," it said.

"After this gratuitous photo shoot, they brought Mr Habib to his feet. When they did, Mr Habib saw both the American and Australian men who had been present at (an earlier interrogation)."

After his detainment in Pakistan, Mr Habib was flown to Egypt at the end of October 2001 and imprisoned there for just under six months.

During that time, he was subjected to horrific torture by his captors, the affidavit revealed.

"Mr Habib, always handcuffed and sometimes suspended from hooks on the wall, was kicked, punched, beaten with a stick, and rammed with what can only be described as an electric cattle prod," it said.

"If he lapsed into unconsciousness, they would revive him and continue the beatings."

Amid the torture, Mr Habib said he was forced into false confessions, such as admitting to training al-Qaeda fighters in martial arts, despite only holding a yellow belt.

The affidavit said the Egyptian authorities were particularly brutal towards Mr Habib and would place him in one of three rooms and gradually fill it with water, leaving only his head exposed and forced him to stand on tiptoe for hours.

He was also threatened with German shepherd dogs.

(Source: The Age)

 

Primary school children who can barely read, including children with dyslexia, are passing the Federal Government's national literacy benchmarks.

The New South Wales Department of Education and Training says 92 per cent of the state's year 3, 5 and 7 students have passed the benchmarks.

However this figure includes children who have been diagnosed with severe learning difficulties such as dyslexia.

One mother of a dyslexic boy was surprised to find he had met the national literacy benchmark for year 3 despite independent experts telling her he was 24 months behind his classmates in reading, was at in the bottom 17 per cent of the state, in need of "considerable assistance in literacy", and had previously been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and language disability.

(Source: Sydney Morning Herald).