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NEW YORK (Reuters) - The chief executive and a managing partner of the collapsed Dubai private equity firm Abraaj Capital Ltd were arrested on U.S. charges that they defrauded their investors, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a federal prosecutor said on Thursday. Abraaj founder and Chief Executive Arif Naqvi was arrested in the United Kingdom last Friday, while managing partner Mustafa Abdel-Wadood was arrested at a New York hotel on Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrea Griswold said at a hearing in Manhattan federal court. Abdel-Wadood appeared at the hearing and pleaded not guilty to securities fraud, wire fraud...

An email made public through the organization WikiLeaks suggests that a company controlled in part by the family of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons mastermind donated to the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative before a different company controlled by the same family was awarded a 35-year no-bid lease to Port Canaveral’s cargo container terminal.

The suicide bombings in London raise questions of assimilation for the 3 million Muslims in the US. WASHINGTON - It's called the "Virginia Jihad" case: Iraqi-American medical researcher Ali al-Yimimi, who preached in northern Virginia mosques and disseminated his radical thinking on the Web, was sentenced to life imprisonment last week. His crime: inciting followers, many of them young American-born Muslims, to a violent defense of Islam and war against the United States and its intervention in Islamic countries. Mr. Timimi's sentencing in an Alexandria, Va., courtroom came against the backdrop of the London bombings, which British police now say...

Barack Obama did not tell the whole story this autumn when he tried to make the case that Bashar al-Assad was responsible for the chemical weapons attack near Damascus on 21 August. In some instances, he omitted important intelligence, and in others he presented assumptions as facts. Most significant, he failed to acknowledge something known to the US intelligence community: that the Syrian army is not the only party in the country’s civil war with access to sarin, the nerve agent that a UN study concluded – without assessing responsibility – had been used in the rocket attack. In the...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

Rats or Humans? Inside Saddam's Extermination Plant(August 29, 2002)This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/ He was introduced as director of research and development at Falluja, one of the remote factories where the United States claims Saddam Hussein could be making chemical and biological weapons. Asked if he had worked on any of Saddam's chemical weapons programs, Dr Mohammed Frah played a straight bat: "In the early 1980s I worked for five years on the chemical and biological programs at Al-Muthanna." This is the name of a critical centre in Saddam's weapons program - a huge pesticide complex that produced...

N THE AFTERMATH of September 11, more than several former national security and intelligence officials fashioned new careers as critics of the Bush administration's war on terror. Among the more prominent of these former officials is Daniel Benjamin, who worked for the National Security Council from 1994 to 1999. Benjamin's criticism flows from his belief that prior to the war in Iraq, as he wrote in Time magazine earlier this year, "there was no pre-existing relationship between Baghdad and al-Qaeda." Still worse, the invasion of Iraq has made us "less safe" and "above all, the invasion and occupation of Iraq--have...

WE'RE NOT in the habit of writing movie reviews. But the recently released film "Fair Game" - which covers a poisonous Washington controversy during the war in Iraq - deserves some editorial page comment, if only because of what its promoters are saying about it. The protagonists portrayed in the movie, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and former spy Valerie Plame, claim that it tells the true story of their battle with the Bush administration over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Ms. Plame's exposure as a CIA agent. "It's accurate," Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson:...

U.S. concentrating forces near Syrian border <!****************************Cut and Paste Headline Above*****************> SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COMWednesday, April 16, 2003 <!********************Cut and Paste Article Below********************>The United States has bolstered its military presence near the Iraqi- Syrian border. U.S. officials said Central Command has ordered a buildup of assets in western Iraq. They said the buildup is centered at Al Rutba and includes M1A1 main battle tanks, AH-64A attack helicopters and A-10 ground-support fighter-jets. The U.S. move aims to prevent the escape of Iraqi leaders and nonconventional military assets to Syria. They said U.S. forces will also ensure that Arab foreign volunteers...

WASHINGTON, May 4, 2006 – In an effort to give Iraqi scientists access to academic knowledge they have long been without, the Iraqi Virtual Science Library was publicly launched here yesterday. "This knowledge is essential to the rebuilding of Iraq's scientific and university communities, which were devastated by three wars and the regime of Saddam Hussein," Paula J. Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for global affairs, said at the National Academy of Sciences. The online library will provide Iraqi scientists, engineers, physicians, researchers, and students the ability to access more than 17,000 academic journals and millions of scientific articles. The free...

'Dr Germ' and 'Mrs Anthrax' released from Iraqi jail 19/12/2005 - 12:48:51 Notorious Saddam-Hussein-era officials have been released from jail in Iraq and some have already left the country, an Iraqi lawyer said today. A legal official in Baghdad said between 24 and 25 top former officials in Saddam Hussein’s government have been freed, including Rihab Taha, known as Dr Germ, and Huda Salih Ammash, known as as Mrs Anthrax. The Iraqi lawyer, Badee Izzat Aref, said some of those released were his clients. “The release was an American-Iraqi decision and in line with an Iraqi government ruling made in...

US sets Saddam's scientists free Huda Ammash was educated in the US Eight former aides to Saddam Hussein - including two women accused of making biological weapons - have been released from US custody in Iraq. The freed detainees no longer pose a security threat, a US spokesman said. They include Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash, nicknamed by the US "Mrs Anthrax" and Rihab Taha, also known as "Dr Germ". Reports have been circulating of a pre-election deal to free former regime figures in order to appease Iraq's Sunni Arabs, correspondents say. A US military spokesman in Baghdad said eight detainees...

GIS Special Topical StudiesIraq War 2003: Background, Lessons and Follow-On Return to main GIS index page  Return to Iraq War index page September 8, 2004 Reports of French Involvement in Niger-Iraq Uranium Case Not ReliableAnalysis. By Gregory R. Copley, Editor, GIS. Reports in The Sunday Telegraph of London on September 6, 2004, cited Italian sources as having alleged that French Government officials were behind the creation of a dossier of largely forged documents which had highlighted the purchase of uranium by Iran from Niger. The documents were subsequently shown to have included forged material, thus discrediting the US policy...

A Shia nuclear scientist said to be close to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is emerging as one of the frontrunners to become the new prime minister of Iraq. Hussain Shahristani spent a decade in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison for defying former dictator Saddam Hussein's command to turn his scientific expertise to the development of nuclear weapons. Lakhdar Brahimi, United Nations special envoy, and Robert Blackwill, a Bush administration official, are still finalising the composition of the new Iraqi government. Officials say that balancing the communal, religious and ethnic groups within the new government is proving difficult and fluid, and caution that...

<p>The CIA yesterday concluded that two truck trailers seized by coalition forces in northern Iraq were designed by Saddam Hussein's regime to produce biological weapons agents.</p> <p>A six-page agency white paper said an examination of the trailers' equipment showed that "BW [biological weapons] agent production is the only consistent, logical purpose for these vehicles."</p>

IDAHO FALLS -A former Iraqi nuclear scientist told a crowd here that Iraq was on the brink of having a nuclear bomb just before the 1991 invasion of the country by U.S. and allied forces. Mahdi Obeidi, who worked under Saddam Hussein, spoke to a full house gathered at the World Nuclear University Summer Institute Monday. "Iraq was on the verge of having a nuclear bomb," he said. "The world will never know what Saddam would have done." A centrifuge is a machine that spins at extremely high speed to enrich uranium, needed to build an atomic bomb. Obeidi spent...

ASSOCIATED PRESS An Iraqi scientist has told U.S. interrogators that her team destroyed Iraq's stock of anthrax in 1991 by dumping it practically at the gates of one of Saddam's main palaces, but never told U.N. inspectors for fear of angering the dictator. Rihab Rashid Taha's decision in 2003 to remain silent stoked suspicions of those who contended Iraq still harbored biological weapons, contributing to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq two years ago this month. "Whether those involved understood the significance and disastrous consequences of their actions is unclear," the CIA-led Iraq Survey Group says of Mrs. Taha and...

Fearing Saddam, anthrax scientist kept her secret - and chanced warLAST UPDATE: 3/28/2005 12:36:24 PM In early 2003, as war fever built in Washington, an Iraqi scientist faced a fateful choice. Rihab Rashid Taha could try to lower the heat by finally telling U.N. inspectors what happened to Iraq's "missing" anthrax. Or she could remain silent, rather than risk Saddam Hussein's wrath. The microbiologist's dilemma, she has told U.S. interrogators, was that her team 12 years earlier had destroyed the lethal bacteria by dumping it practically at the gates of one of Saddam's main palaces, and the feared Iraqi...

OSLO, Norway -- A scientist considered the father of Iraq's nuclear program said Thursday that his nation would have developed atomic weapons in the early 1990s had Saddam Hussein not ordered the invasion of Kuwait. The invasion sparked the U.S.-led Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which drove Iraq out of Kuwait and marked the end of Baghdad's nuclear and biological weapons program, said Jafar Dhia Jafar, the scientific head of Iraq's nuclear weapons program. "By the end of 1990, about 8,000 people were involved directly or indirectly in the nuclear program," said Jafar, presenting his new Norwegian-language book, "Oppdraget", which...

BAGHDAD -- An Iraqi lawyer said Friday that one of Saddam Hussein's former top scientists, known as "Mrs. Anthrax," has cancer and is dying in U.S. custody where she has been held for more than a year. A U.S. military spokesman for detainee operations in Iraq refused to comment on the report that Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash has cancer. "I am not able to discuss the health condition of our detainees," said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson. "Certainly we have medical care available to take care of any detainee." Ammash, a top Baath party official and biotech researcher who got her...