US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made a surprise visit to Baghdad yesterday, flying into the eye of the storm over Americans torturing prisoners that has sapped Washington's credibility in Iraq.
Hours after US lawmakers viewed "sadistic" new photographs of US troops torturing Iraqis, the embattled secretary met Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the US commander in Iraq, and Major General Geoffrey Miller, the new head of US prisons there.
It was not clear whether he would visit the nearby Abu Ghraib jail itself, where seven military police reservists are charged with sexually and physically tormenting detainees.
PHOTO: AP
His trip looked like a robust answer to critics who say Rumsfeld, one of the architects of the Iraq war, should resign, six months before US President George W Bush seeks re-election.
As international anger at US conduct in Iraq -- and at its Guantanamo Bay prison on Cuba -- mounts, General Richard Myers, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff who visited with Rumsfeld, said: "We absolutely have the high moral ground."
Once notorious as Saddam Hussein's torture chamber, Abu Ghraib has become a symbol of the US failure to win over many Iraqis despite ridding them of Saddam a year ago. With just seven weeks to go until Washington hands sovereignty back to an Iraqi government, that is a serious problem for Rumsfeld.
Efforts by the Bush administration to contain the damage to the seven soldiers charged have been buffeted by reports from the Red Cross and other groups saying that Washington was warned about systematic and widespread torture many months ago.
Not only are Arabs dismayed at evidence that the troops who overthrew Saddam's dictatorship were inflicting torments themselves on thousands of Iraqis but US allies, many of whom opposed the war, are also becoming more vocal in criticism.
"It all gives the impression of a total lack of direction," French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier told Le Monde newspaper in unusually tough comments about Iraq under US occupation.
Prisoner abuses and persistent violence showed the country and region were spinning out of control, Barnier said.
In the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala, where US troops are facing an uprising by a Shiite Muslim militia loyal to radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, there was renewed fighting.
Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army fighters stormed the main police station in Najaf overnight and emptied the weapons store, police said, before they were driven off by US tanks.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest foundry service provider, yesterday said that global semiconductor revenue is projected to hit US$1.5 trillion in 2030, after the figure exceeds US$1 trillion this year, as artificial intelligence (AI) demand boosts consumption of token and compute power. “We are still at the beginning of the AI revolution, but we already see a significant impact across the whole semiconductor ecosystem,” TSMC deputy cochief operating officer Kevin Zhang (張曉強) said at the company’s annual technology symposium in Hsinchu City. “It is fair to say that in the past decade, smartphones and other mobile devices were
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS