:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 12.05.2004 ::
:: "Musharraf: Bin Laden's Location Is Unknown" ::
Pakistani Presses U.S. on Rebuilding Afghan Army
By Robin Wright and Peter Baker
Washington Post Staff Writers
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said yesterday that the search for Osama bin Laden has gone completely cold, with no recent intelligence indicating where he and his top lieutenants are hiding.
More than three years after al Qaeda's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed almost 3,000 people, Musharraf insisted that Pakistani forces are still aggressively pursuing the world's most notorious terrorist. But he acknowledged that recent security force operations and interrogations have been able to determine only one fact -- that bin Laden is still alive.
"He is alive, but more than that, where he is, no, it'll be just a guess and it won't have much basis," Musharraf said in an interview with Washington Post editors and reporters. Pressed on whether the trail had gone cold, he said, "Yes, if you mean we don't know, from that point of view, we don't know where he is."
The United States shares major responsibility, Musharraf suggested, because the U.S.-led coalition does not have enough troops in Afghanistan, which has left "voids."
Read more here.
M e a n w h i l e . . .
U.S. to boost Iraq troops
Increase of 12,000 to highest level of war
By ROBERT BURNS
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON - The United States is boosting its military force in Iraq to the highest level of the war - higher than during the invasion in March 2003 - in order to bolster security in advance of next month's national elections in January.
The 12,000-troop increase is to last only until March, but it says much about the strength and resiliency of an insurgency that U.S. military planners did not foresee when Baghdad was toppled in April 2003.
Brig. Gen. David Rodriguez, deputy operations director of the Joint Staff, told reporters Wednesday that the American force will expand from 138,000 troops today to about 150,000 by January.
The previous high for the U.S. force in Iraq was 148,000 on May 1, 2003, when President Bush declared that major combat operations were over and most soldiers thought the war had been won. The initial invasion force included thousands of sailors on ships in the Persian Gulf and other waters, plus tens of thousands in Kuwait and other surrounding countries.
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 9:51:00 AM [+] ::
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