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/ 24 January 2005
The British Army officer, Major Dan Taylor, who devised Operation Ali Baba, will not be disciplined, United Kingdom Ministry of Defence officials said last Wednesday. Taylor who was in charge of the humanitarian aid base Camp Breadbasket, near Basra, told soldiers there to catch the looters who had been stealing food and ”work them hard”.
Scarcely noticed, the United States last month deployed its first ground-based missile interceptor at Fort Greely in Alaska. It was a significant step in the Bush administration’s ambitious and hugely expensive missile defence system — a true ”son of star wars” with profound implications for the rest of the world.
Arms-exporting governments are reneging on their promises by failing to take into account the impact that the trade has on poverty, Oxfam says in a report published this week. The report, Guns or Growth, says six developing countries — Oman, Syria, Burma, Pakistan, Eritrea and Burundi — spend more on arms than they do on health and education combined.
Armed police began patrolling Madrid’s underground rail and bus networks last week as the hunt continued for six members of the radical Islamist group behind the previous Saturday’s joint suicide bombing and the train bombings that killed 190 people last month. Police were on high alert as Islamists threatened an ”inferno” and ”rivers of blood”.
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/ 11 November 2003
The shooting down of a Chinook helicopter — the warhorse in the United States’s operations in Iraq — the weekend before last highlighted the threat of the sizeable quantities of missiles in the country falling into the hands of opposition groups using guerrilla tactics.
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/ 17 September 2003
Cluster weapons were on show last week at the opening of Europe’s largest arms fair in London Docklands despite an appeal from the organisers to hide them away. The controversial weapons were on offer at the stand of an Israeli arms company, Israel Military Industries (IMI).
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/ 1 September 2003
Geoff Hoon, the British Defence Secretary, last week appeared to undermine Downing Street’s carefully crafted defence for the Hutton inquiry when he insisted that key officials in No 10 were intimately involved in the ”naming strategy” that led to the unmasking of Dr David Kelly.
Tony Blair’s hopes of leading Britain into the single currency before the next general election are in ruins after Labour loyalists admitted this week that Downing Street’s battle with the BBC has ”derailed” the pro-euro campaign.
The sequence of events surrounding the leaking of David Kelly’s name prior to his suicide implicates the UK’s Ministry of Defence and Blair’s office. Now, fingers are being pointed left, right and centre. Whose head will roll?
Britain’s intelligence community faces an unprecedented crisis of credibility in the wake of the Commons’s foreign affairs committee’s report on the decision to go to war in Iraq.