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NEW DELHI -- More than five thousand people marched under the banner of the India Climate Justice Forum (ICJF) from the Gandhi Samadhi, Rajghat to protest against climate injustice. The rallyists, who included the Mahila Jagriti Samiti, Delhi, and several cycle-rickshaw unions, the National Alliance of People's Movements and the National Fish Worker's Forum highlighted the serious deficiencies in the UN conference on climate change being held in New Delhi.
Retention of key combat personnel is being eroded by far better money offers from federally hired "private security companies" -- as their executives insist they be called. Once on board and back in the private sector of dangerous military operations in Iraq, these highly trained fighters and specialists can make up to a quarter of a million dollars or more (most of it tax-free) in a year's worth of salary -- certainly better than Army pay.
Some 50 Iraqi contractors listened recently at a Sunday bid meeting to Kellogg, Brown & Root project manager Glenn Powell via a translator. To get there, they had passed through four U.S. military checkpoints along a quarter-mile stretch through a heavily fortified Baghdad "green zone" for foreigners doing business in Iraq.
Neither Houston-based Halliburton nor its KBR subsidiary was named in the indictment.
Plumbers, electricians, truck drivers, food-service workers, logistics specialists and other professionals work 12-hour days providing support services to American troops. It's hard, dangerous work. But the pay is high. A year on the job can change the average person's financial life.
About 30 Ecuadorians have been enlisted to travel to Iraq as mercenaries by US recruiting firms at the US-occupied Manta air base, a Parliamentary source denounced Thursday.
Moves by the U.S. military to relinquish responsibility to Iraq's security forces raise big questions over who will safeguard the shattered country's reconstruction in what is the biggest effort since the Marshall Plan.
William, who learned to fight in the Canadian army, teaches counter-terrorism to Filipino trainees, then leads them in combat.
In a report the Pentagon submitted to Congress earlier this year, some partial figures have been released. From May 2003 through October 2004, U.S. authorities recorded at least 1,171 contractor casualties, including 166 contractors who were killed.
A lawsuit accusing North Carolina-based Blackwater Security Consulting of wrongful death and fraud in the deaths of four guards killed and mutilated in Iraq should be heard in a North Carolina courts, a federal judge has ruled.
Earlier this summer, Marines detained a group of private contractors in Iraq for allegedly firing on their positions in Fallujah; the contractors, who worked for North Carolina-based Zapata Engineering, were expelled from Iraq after their release. That highly publicized incident followed questions from lawmakers about oversight of contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Climate Justice Summit, October 26-28, 2002, Constitution Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi. Program
A former employee of the U.S. security contracting firm DynCorp International was quoted last month by the Los Angeles Times saying that he saw a booming global demand for his "private army," and a lucrative business opportunity in recruiting Colombians.
Since 2003, the disbursement of aid and reconstruction funds in Iraq has not been in the hands of the United Nations, and if anything the record is even more dismal.
Iraqi investigators have uncovered widespread fraud and waste in more than $1 billion worth of weapons deals arranged by middlemen who reneged or took huge kickbacks on contracts to arm Iraq's fledgling military, according to a confidential report and interviews with U.S. and Iraqi officials.
What a break for U.S. corporations, such as Monsanto. The important information about Iraqi Order 81 is that it was designed to have a major impact on the way farming is done in Iraq. This order prohibits Iraqi farmers from using saving seeds from one year to the next.
U.S. looking into Carlyle Group links to teacher funds.
Of the $18 billion budgeted for the Iraq Reconstruction Program, $7 billion is spent on securing the workers and the construction sites that are contracted and overseen by the Corps of Engineers Gulf Region District and the Project and Contracting Office.
No. 1 in dealing with Deputy Prime Minister Ahmad Chalabi: Never underestimate him. A year after observers pronounced him finished - spurned by one-time American sponsors and with no apparent political base in Iraq - Chalabi has emerged more powerful than ever.
One of the largest private security companies in Iraq, Triple Canopy, was born immediately after the invasion. Plenty of other companies have done the same, some that were more established before the American invasion, some less.