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A top Army contracting official who criticized a large, noncompetitive contract with the Halliburton Company for work in Iraq was demoted Saturday for what the Army called poor job performance.

Americans were as wrong about the health of Iraq's infrastructure as they were about their welcome as liberators and the insurgents know that depriving Iraq of power is at least as effective as killing soldiers and policemen.

According to reports, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Honeywell and United Technologies posted all-time best-ever profits in the first half of this year and they still have a huge list of orders.

Despite the relatively small number of American armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, the war effort is rapidly shaping up to be the third-most expensive war in United States history.

Commander of the Army Corps, told Bunnatine H. Greenhouse last month that she was being removed from the senior executive service, the top rank of civilian government employees, because of poor performance reviews.

Under the guise of helping get Iraq back on its feet, the US is setting out to totally re-engineer the country's traditional farming systems into a US-style corporate agribusiness. They've even created a new law - Order 81 - to make sure it happens.

The cost goes well beyond -- ongoing current costs, foreign aid to reward cooperation in Iraq, inducements for recruits and for military personnel serving second and third deployments, replacing military hardware and long-term costs for disability and health payments of returning troops bring the price tag to over $1 trillion.

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.

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.

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