Bennett is one of more than 80 Americans training Iraqi pilots at a flight school inaugurated this week at this U.S. military base set up on the ruins of a Saddam Hussein-era air base. The goal is to restore the Iraqi air force - once the sixth-largest in the world - to at least part of its former glory...
... "Our objective is to help them build the air force into something that can assist in counterinsurgency operations - through surveillance now, but also with light attack planes,'' said Brig. Gen. Bob Allardice, who heads the Coalition Air Force Transition Team... from the Guardian today
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In his prime-time press conference last week, which focused almost solely on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Sept. 11 eight times. He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11.
Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president. Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks. A New York Times/CBS poll this week shows that 45 percent of Americans believe Mr. Hussein was "personally involved" in Sept. 11, about the same figure as a month ago. ... from the Christian Science Monitor, March 14, 2003
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The photo is from the Google archive.
