KBR, Inc. is a U.S. based company operating in fields of science, technology and engineering.
Academi, formerly known as Blackwater and Blackwater Worldwide, is an American private military contractor founded on December 26, 1997, by former Navy SEAL officer Erik Prince. It was renamed Xe Services in 2009, and was again renamed to Academi in 2011, after it was acquired by a group of private investors. In 2014, Academi merged with Triple Canopy to form Constellis Holdings.
During the early stages of the Iraq War, members of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These abuses included physical abuse, sexual humiliation, physical and psychological torture, and rape, as well as the killing of Manadel al-Jamadi and the desecration of his body. The abuses came to public attention with the publication of photographs by CBS News in April 2004, causing shock and outrage and receiving widespread condemnation within the United States and internationally.
Criticism of the war on terror addresses the morals, ethics, efficiency, economics, as well as other issues surrounding the war on terror. It also touches upon criticism against the phrase itself, which was branded as a misnomer. The notion of a "war" against "terrorism" has proven highly contentious, with critics charging that participating governments exploited it to pursue long-standing policy/military objectives, reduce civil liberties, and infringe upon human rights. It is argued by critics that the term war is not appropriate in this context, since there is no identifiable enemy and that it is unlikely international terrorism can be brought to an end by military means.
James Risen is an American journalist for The Intercept. He previously worked for The New York Times and before that for Los Angeles Times. He has written or co-written many articles concerning U.S. government activities and is the author or co-author of two books about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a book about the American public debate about abortion. Risen is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Toll Brothers is a financial company, which finance for residential and commercial properties in the United States. In 2020, the company was the fifth largest home builder in the United States, based on homebuilding revenue. The company is ranked 411th on the Fortune 500.
The Iraq War, also referred to as the Second Gulf War, was a prolonged conflict in Iraq lasting from 2003 to 2011. It began with the invasion by a United States-led coalition, which resulted in the overthrow of the Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict persisted as an insurgency arose against coalition forces and the newly established Iraqi government. US forces were officially withdrawn in 2011. In 2014, the US became re-engaged in Iraq, leading a new coalition under Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve, as the conflict evolved into the ongoing insurgency.
Gunmen kidnapped Jalal Sharafi, the second secretary of the Iranian embassy, as he drove through Karrada district in central Baghdad, Iraq on 6 February 2007. The gunmen wore uniforms of the Iraqi 36th Commando Battalion, a special Iraqi unit under United States direction. The U.S. military denied any involvement in the kidnapping. After his release on 3 April 2007, the diplomat claimed he was tortured by Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives. The U.S. government denies that they had involvement in the kidnapping and alleged torture of Sharafi.
Con Coughlin is a British journalist and author, currently The Daily Telegraph defence editor.
Larry Elliot Klayman is an American attorney, right-wing activist, and former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor. He founded both Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch.
The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), is a global military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks in 2001, and is the most recent global conflict spanning multiple wars. Some researchers and political scientists have argued that it replaced the Cold War.
Stephen Soldz is a psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, professor, and anti-war activist. Soldz is director of the Social Justice and Human Rights program at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.
Emad Khudhayir Shahuth al-Janabi was an Iraqi blacksmith detained in Abu Ghraib prison where he alleges he was abused by American military personnel and defense contractors.
James Elmer Mitchell is an American psychologist and former member of the United States Air Force. From 2002, after his retirement from the military, to 2009, his company Mitchell Jessen and Associates received $81 million on contract from the CIA to carry out the torture of detainees, referred to as "enhanced interrogation techniques" that resulted in little credible information.
John Bruce Jessen is an American psychologist who, with James Elmer Mitchell, created the so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" that were used in the interrogation and torture of CIA detainees and outlined in the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on CIA torture. In that report, he was mentioned under the pseudonym "Hammond Dunbar." His company, Mitchell Jessen and Associates, earned US$81 million for its work.
Susan L. Burke is an American lawyer noted for her work to reform the military system of prosecuting rape and assault and in representing plaintiffs suing the American military or military contractors, such as the Abtan v. Blackwater case. She represented former detainees of Abu Ghraib prison in a suit against interrogators and translators from CACI and Titan Corp. who were tasked with obtaining military intelligence from them during their detention. Her work was featured in the documentaries The Invisible War and Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. In 2015, the National Law Journal named Burke one of the top 75 female attorneys in the nation.
Amir Mirza Hekmati ; is a United States Marine veteran who was arrested in August 2011 for allegedly spying for the CIA in Iran. On January 9, 2012, he was sentenced to death for the charges. On March 5, 2012, the Iranian Supreme Court overturned the death sentence and ordered a retrial, saying the verdict against Hekmati was "not complete". On January 16, 2016, Hekmati was released and allowed to leave Iran as part of a prisoner trade between the U.S. and Iran. He returned to the United States on January 21, 2016. He sued the Government of Iran on May 11, 2016. He received a default judgment of $63 million on October 3, 2017. In November 2019 he sued the government for unpaid compensation. According to the assistant attorney general they are reconsidering if he is eligible.
Dennis Lee Montgomery is an American software designer and former medical technician who sold computer programs to federal officials that he claimed would decode secret Al-Qaeda messages hidden in Al Jazeera broadcasts and identify terrorists based on Predator drone videos. A 2010 Playboy investigation called Montgomery "The man who conned the Pentagon", saying he won millions in federal contracts for his supposed terrorist-exposing intelligence software. The software was later reported to have been an elaborate hoax and Montgomery's former lawyer called him a "con artist" and "habitual liar engaged in fraud".
Diane Roark is an American whistleblower who served as a Republican staffer on the House Intelligence Committee from 1985 to 2002. She was, right after 9/11, "the House Intelligence Committee staffer in charge of oversight of the NSA". In late 2001, Roark was informed by NSA official William Binney about the Bush administration's domestic surveillance programs, including Stellar Wind. Along with Binney, Ed Loomis, and J. Kirk Wiebe, she filed a complaint to the Department of Defense's Inspector General about the National Security Agency's highly classified Trailblazer Project. Her house was raided by armed FBI agents in 2007 after she was wrongly suspected of leaking to The New York Times reporter James Risen and to Siobhan Gorman at The Baltimore Sun in stories about NSA warrantless surveillance. This led her to sue the government in 2012 for not having returned her computer, which they had seized during the raid, and because the government failed to clear her name. The punitive treatment of Roark, Binney, Wiebe, and Loomis, as well as, and, in particular, then still-active NSA executive Thomas Andrews Drake, who had gone in confidence with anonymity assured to the DoD IG, led the Assistant Inspector General John Crane to eventually become a public whistleblower himself and also led Edward Snowden to go public with revelations rather than to report within the internal whistleblower program.
A rocket attack was carried out on the K-1 Air Base in Kirkuk province in Iraq on 27 December 2019. The air base was one of many Iraqi military bases that host Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) personnel and, according to the coalition, was attacked by more than 30 rockets. The attack occurred during the 2019–2021 Persian Gulf crisis and preceded a series of events that eventually brought Iran and the United States to the brink of open conflict.
