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FORWARD OPERATING BASE KALSU — Overnight rainfall and high winds boded ominously for the morning’s mission but as the sun rose, clear skies greeted Soldiers of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga. Soldiers of Company B, 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, conducted Operation Mauser Jan. 6, to re-familiarize themselves with an area just two kilometers southwest of Patrol Base Hawkes. Staff Sgt. David Springer, infantryman and squad leader with Company B, said he and his fellow Soldiers were going to an area where just a month prior they had received enemy contact. Even with sunlight...

WASHINGTON, June 14, 2007 – Expanded cooperation with the Iraqi police and army and the introduction of provincial security forces are helping stabilize Fallujah, Iraq, and the surrounding areas, a coalition commander said yesterday. Marine Col. Richard Simcock, commander of Regimental Combat Team 6, said on a call with military “bloggers” that his team is taking a two-pronged approach to Fallujah: conducting security operations hand in hand with the Iraqis and training the security forces in his area of operation. Increasingly the focus of training efforts is developing indigenous security forces that supplement the formal Iraqi police and army, Simcock...

WASHINGTON, April 8, 2006 – While acknowledging the importance of the Iraqis forming their new unity government, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last evening it's important not to apply too much pressure to speed up the process. "The Iraqis are going to form a government," Rumsfeld said on ABC's Sean Hannity Show two days before Iraqi Freedom Day, the third anniversary of the fall of Baghdad and Saddam Hussein's regime. The secretary disagreed with suggestions by some that President Bush should put more pressure on the Iraqis to move the process forward. "There's a risk in being too heavy-handed and...

WASHINGTON - The lawyer for a former Bush administration official arrested this week says authorities are using the charges to pressure her client to aid their investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff. David Safavian was arrested Monday and charged with making false statements and obstructing a federal investigation relating to a 2002 golf outing to Scotland with Abramoff, former Christian Coalition executive Ralph Reed, Rep. Bob Ney (news, bio, voting record), R-Ohio, and others. Safavian hid from investigators that Abramoff had business before the General Services Administration, where Safavian was chief of staff in 2002, when they took their Scotland trip,...

Faced with intense opposition to his ideas from Democrats, unease among many Republicans and skepticism from the public, Mr. Bush used a speech here to press doggedly on with his call for the creation of private investment accounts within the retirement system and cuts in the benefits now promised to middle- and upper-income workers. "Now is the time for Congress to come to the table and get something done," Mr. Bush said. In his remarks, to a conference of the Associated Builders and Contractors, Mr. Bush laid out a clear if risky strategy for prevailing on the issue. He said...

BEIRUT, Lebanon (AP) - The United States is increasing its pressure against Syria to force the Arab state to stop backing anti-Israeli resistance in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon, Syria's information minister said Saturday. Mahdi Dakhlallah also told the Al-Jazeera television network that President Bush and Sen. John Kerry are battling each other to prove who is the closer ally of Israel leading up to the Nov. 2 American presidential elections. The United States and United Nations have called on Syria to remove its troops from neighboring Lebanon. Washington has also accused Damascus of not doing enough to stop anti-coalition...