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Fittingly, a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction. Gone are the days of waiting for wars to break out and drawing up plans to pick up the pieces. The White House now has an office that keeps "high risk" countries on a "watch list" and assembles teams made up of private companies, NGOs and members of thinktanks - some will have "pre-completed" contracts to rebuild countries that are not yet broken.

Billing disputes with contractors in Iraq have sparked major questions about Pentagon reforms of the 1990s that streamlined acquisition programs but also cut down on oversight of performance and billing.

While the Iraqi army seems to be getting up to speed, the training of the 142,000-member police force is moving more slowly and fraught with bigger problems than reports by U.S. officials might suggest. The eventual goal is to have Iraqis training all of their security forces, but private contractors expect to continue working well into 2006. One small but revealing reason says one trainer: students suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. "They are the main targets of insurgents," he says. "It makes it difficult to maintain their attention span."

The U.S. Government has defended its decision to award a £293 million Iraq Security contract to British mercenary Tim Spicer, in reponse to concerns raised by the family of Belfast man Peter McBride, who was shot dead by Scots Guards soldiers under Spicer's command in 1992.

In a city that has been rocked by the Enron collapse and subsequent prosecutions, the indictment of Houston oil executive David Chalmers Jr. and a Houston-based Bulgarian oil trader serves notice that the probe of irregularities in the U.N.-supervised oil-for-food program will likely ensnare more energy industry figures before it is finished.

Many of the 800 U.S. military advisors in Colombia are assigned to Arauca where California-based Occidental Petroleum in a joint partnership with the Colombia state company Ecopetrol runs the main oilfield. Occidental lobbied heavily for this project, which marks a departure from the erstwhile U.S. policy of only assisting ostensible narcotics enforcement operations in Colombia.

Private contractors in Iraq say pay can top $100,000 for a year's work. But plenty of danger is often part of the bargain. Frank Atkins, who returned home in October, said danger was part of his job as a police adviser. Sometimes, the former Marine enjoyed the thrill of fighting off insurgent attacks alongside U.S. military personnel on his convoys.

Following the Sept. 11 attacks, there has been more acceptance that providing nonmilitary money to foreign countries is an essential part of fighting terrorism.

For the third time in nine months, the Bush administration has redrafted its project to rebuild Iraq, The need for the reallocation of money grew not only from unanticipated security costs but also from what many experts said were flawed assumptions by Pentagon planners and Congress when they set out to pepper Iraq with large infrastructure projects built by American companies.

The president and his aides do not believe that Severo Moto, the opposition leader, was behind the coup plot. They think he was a pawn in the hands of forces and interests stronger than him - probably businessmen and perhaps Western governments. One of the names mentioned in this connection is that of the British-Lebanese financier and oil broker Eli Calil.

On March 7, 2004, the Zimbabwe police detained a chartered plane and arrested 70 of the passengers. Most of those detained said they had been hired by a security consultancy company to guard a diamond mine in Congo. A few days later, the government of Equatorial Guinea announced that its police had arrested 20 people who were the vanguard for the force that was arrested in Harare. According to the announcement, the two groups were connected and had planned to topple the regime of President Teodoro Obiang.

The Defense Department is unable to track how it spent tens of millions of dollars in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the U.S. war on terrorism, Congress's top investigator said. While there was no doubt that appropriated funds were spent, "trying to figure out what they were spent on is like pulling teeth," he said, referring to an accounting effort that is under way for Congress.

Federal authorities in New York today charged David B. Chalmers, a Houston oil trader, and his company, Bayoil, with making millions of dollars in illegal kickback payments to Iraq while trading oil under the program. Separate charges were brought against Tongsun Park, a South Korean businessman who figured in a Washington influence-peddling scandal some 30 years ago, accusing him of acting as an unregistered agent for Iraq in behind-the-scenes negotiations in the United States to set up and administer the program.

In the thick of the reconstruction effort, American Energy Association's representative Charles Ebinger proposed, Afghanistan should jack up power tariff with a view to speeding up the revival of its economy hit by decades of war.

Pentagon auditors have questioned $212.3 million of $1.69 billion that a Halliburton subsidiary charged the government over the past few years, mostly for importing fuel to Iraq under a no-bid contract. Halliburton spokeswoman Beverly Scippa said in an e-mail that the questioning by auditors "is all part of the normal contracting process."

Just like workers in the United States, Iraqis employed by U.S. contractors in their country can collect workers' compensation insurance,but in a country where anti-American insurgents can scan the mail, many Iraqis receive their benefits in blank envelopes because a check from the United States can be a ticket to a worker's execution.

The Afghan government accused western aid agencies of hindering the growth of local firms and squandering billions of pounds earmarked for reconstruction efforts in the country.

Iraqi officials have crippled scores of water, sewage and electrical plants refurbished with U.S. funds by failing to maintain and operate them properly, wasting millions of American taxpayer dollars in the process, according to interviews and documents.