"So you have both sides now attacking civilians, and that has caused the recent spike in violence", he said at a joint press conference yesterday with the US Secretary of Defence, Dick Cheney, who was on a surprise visit to Iraq. Asked if the violence might mean more troops in Baghdad, General Casey replied: "It may, yes."

Dozens have died in or around Baghdad during the past four days. The situation has been described as a low-level civil war.

On Sunday, more than 40 Sunni Arabs were massacred by Shia gunmen. The killings were prompted by the bombing of Shia shrines the previous day.

As in Iraq, U.S. officials have emphasized the importance of forming capable government security forces to take up the task of bringing law and order to a war-ravaged country. U.S. commanders in Iraq have pledged to have a 137,500-strong Iraqi army fully manned by the end of this year.

It has been almost five years since U.S.-led forces toppled Afghanistan's Taliban leaders, blamed for harboring the al Qaeda network responsible for the 2001 attacks on America, and U.S. forces have been helping build a new national army from scratch in a country battered by decades of strife.

Durbin, commander of Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, told a Pentagon briefing that Afghan security forces are making steady progress, but overcoming absenteeism and developing capable leaders remain "a challenge."

He said 3,500 U.S. troops out of an American force of 23,000 in Afghanistan are dedicated to training the Afghan army and police.

Afghanistan is experiencing the bloodiest phase of Taliban violence since 2001, as groups of Taliban fighters have entered large parts of the south and east and unleashed a fierce wave of bombings, ambushes and raids.

SHORTAGE OF POLICE EQUIPMENT

Durbin said there are about 62,000 police officers in Afghanistan. About 58,000 are considered trained but only 37,000 are considered equipped. He said 86,000 vehicles are needed for the national police, and there are only 2,000 now.

He said will take "at least the next year or two" to make the police force fully trained and equipped.

Asked why it will take three more years to have the all-volunteer Afghan army at full strength, Durbin said, "Based on how we have put the program together, we feel that the 1,000 a month is appropriate to retain the quality and establish the quantity that we feel is effective."

Durbin said some of the first Afghans who volunteered for three-year stints in the army are reaching the end of these terms, and about 35 percent are re-enlisting, well below the goal of 50 percent.

Durbin cited illiteracy in the ranks as an issue facing Afghan forces.

"We must all be clear to understand that illiterate definitely does not mean stupid. It means a different learning technique. And the Afghan soldiers are very quick to learn and to pick up the training. They are very intelligent in that respect," he said.

Durbin said U.S. trainers are mindful about weeding out corruption in the police forces.

"There are perhaps many bad lessons or behaviors that these policemen have learned, and they don't understand the true essence of rule of law and to serve and protect," Durbin said.

Defense Minister Abdul Rahim Wardak was quoted this week as saying an Afghan army of 150,000 to 200,000 would be needed to secure the country.

Durbin said that while the plan is for an army of 70,000, he did not rule out a larger force sometime in the future. "The government of Afghanistan, in consultation with the international community, may revisit that number," he said.

"The illegal citizens, I would recommend they leave," said Mayor Lou Barletta, who said he wore a bulletproof vest to the vote as a precaution because the issue was emotionally charged.

The measure has divided the former coal town about 80 miles northwest of Philadelphia and thrust the 31,000-population city to the fore of the national debate on illegal immigration. After the vote, hundreds of people on both sides of the issue congregated outside City Hall, separated by a line of police officers brought in anticipation of any trouble.

Barletta proposed the Illegal Immigration Relief Act last month as a response to what he said were Hazleton's problems with violent crime, crowded schools, hospital costs and the demand for services. Opponents argued it was divisive and possibly illegal, but supporters argued illegal immigrants' growing numbers have damaged the quality of life in this northeastern Pennsylvania city.

"What you see here tonight, really, is a city that wants to take back what America has given it," Barletta said.

Outside City Hall, about people gathered with opponents of the measure, some with signs that read "Bias," separated by a line of police from supporters, some waving American flags.

Anna Arias asked the council, "Are any of us ready to support U.S. citizens born of someone who is undocumented?" Several people in the audience responded, "Yes!"

She warned the council that approving the ordinance would make Hazleton "the first Nazi city in the country."

The ordinance adopted at the meeting had been extensively amended from an earlier draft; one change would deny a license to any business that provides goods or services to an illegal immigrant. City solicitor Christopher B. Slusser said the provision would likely be invoked only against business people who knowingly violated it, and the city would deal with violators "on a case-by-case basis."

The number of Hispanic residents in Hazleton has increased dramatically in the past six years. City officials acknowledge they do not know how many are illegal immigrants, whom Barletta has blamed for higher crime rates, failing schools and a diminished quality of life.

In a letter sent to Barletta earlier this week, attorneys with the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund threatened to sue on the grounds that the ordinance infringes upon the federal government's power to regulate immigration.

Other municipalities across the country also have considered acting to address illegal immigration. Ordinances similar to the Hazleton measure have been proposed in the Florida communities of Palm Bay and Avon Park and the California towns of Escondido and San Bernardino.

Carolina Taveras, a 30-year-old naturalized citizen from the Dominican Republic who moved to Hazleton from New York City a year ago, said the mayor's proposal has made her feel unwelcome.

A few doors down from where Taveras was getting her hair done at a downtown beauty salon that caters to Hispanic women, restaurant owner George Giannakouros said he is sympathetic to Barletta's approach.

"I agree with the mayor, there is a problem," Giannakouros said. "I work at my business at night, I like to feel safe."

"Mercenaries 2: World in Flames," created by Los Angeles based Pandemic/Bioware Studios, simulates a mercenary invasion of Venezuela in the year 2007. Pandemic is a subcontractor for the US Army and CIA funded Institute for Creative Technologies, which uses Hollywood techniques to mount war simulations in California's high desert in order to conduct military training.

"Mercenaries 2: World in Flames" simulates destruction in downtown Caracas, and promises to leave no part of Venezuela untouched.

Elevation Partners is an investment firm that Bono helped create in order to exploit marketing opportunities between U2 and its fans, including projects from Pandemic/Bioware Studios. Pandemic states that as a partner in Elevation Partners, Bono "has visibility into all projects at Pandemic and Bioware."

Pandemic's target market is young men of military recruitment age and indeed this is not Pandemic's first military adventure. MSNBC reported that the videogame "'Full Spectrum Warrior' was created through the Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina Del Rey, Calif., a $45 million endeavor formed by the Army five years ago to connect academics with local entertainment and video game industries. The institute subcontracted work to Los Angeles based Pandemic Studios."

One cannot escape the irony that today, July 5, Venezuela celebrates its independence - just one day after the US celebrated its own. The most enduring aspect of an independent country is assertion of its sovereignty and demand that the world recognize international laws protecting that sovereignty. Yet, amid relentless US threats against Venezuela, a US-based company, Pandemic, which collaborates with the US Army to promote war, plans to market a videogame which advocates a most violent violation of Venezuela's sovereignty.

Although Bono remains silent on the matter and Pandemic insists that "Mercenaries 2: World in Flames" is "a work of fictional entertainment" and "Venezuela was chosen for the setting of Mercenaries 2 (because it) is a fascinating and colorful country full of wonderful architecture, geography and culture," members of the Venezuela Solidarity Network are appalled by the game's openly racist, interventionist attitude. Says Chuck Kaufman, of Alliance for Global Justice, "if it's 'just a game' and it's all about selecting fascinating and colorful locales, why didn't Pandemic select Dublin or Washington, D.C.? Because people would be outraged, that's why. Pandemic is simply capitalizing on negative and inaccurate U.S. press stories about Venezuela and its leader, Hugo Chavez, in order to make a quick buck. It's another piece of anti-Venezuelan propaganda that serves only the U.S. military, pure and simple."

Gunnar Gundersen of the Oregon Bolivarian Circle says, "We have family and friends in Venezuela and many of us have walked and stayed in the places featured in the war game. To us, these are not just clever abstract pictures. They are scenes of a place we consider our second home. Please try to imagine how Venezuelans must feel viewing a bulky, blonde, military man laying waste to their country, a country that is finally rising above a 500-year history of oppression and exploitation by foreign powers."The Venezuelan Solidarity Network calls for Bono, who has appealed to the world on many occasions for peace and poverty reduction, to apply those same values to block the manufacture and distribution of this videogame.

"Let me thank everybody involved in making this genuine dream a reality and in so doing serve our country in a way that transcends any individual honor involved in the production of this mind-boggling vessel," he said.

Bush also thanked the shipbuilders for their hard work. "It is an absolutely amazing piece of work up till now, and I just can't wait to be back in October for the christening. I salute all -- these are the best shipbuilders, the best workers we have."

Bush and the Prospective Commanding Officer for CVN 77, Capt. Kevin O'Flaherty, placed their naval aviator wings underneath the island during the ceremony. This custom, called "stepping the mast," dates from antiquity and consists of placing coins under the step or bottom of a ship's mast during construction. One belief from Greek mythology is that should the ship be wrecked during passage, the coins would ensure payment of the crew's wages for their return home. Since at least the construction of USS Constitution in the 1790s, this tradition of placing coins or other items of significance has been passed on as a symbol of good luck for U.S. Navy ships.

"I am quite honored to participate in the island landing event as a member of the pre-commissioning crew," O'Flaherty said. "It's a significant milestone for the shipyard, and it's the first opportunity for a member of the commissioning crew to contribute a symbol of the Navy's aviation heritage to the ship."

Other ceremony participants were Bush's daughter and Ship's Sponsor, Doro Bush Koch; the Secretary of the Navy, Dr. Donald C. Winter; Northrop Grumman Newport News President Mike Petters; and CVN 77 shipbuilders and sailors.

"This is the final island landing on a Nimitz-class," Petters said. "So today, in some respects, we're witnessing the end of an era. This ship is the tenth and last of the class that has served America for the last 26 years and will continue to serve for the next half-century."

Northrop Grumman's Newport News sector is building the George H. W. Bush using modular construction, a process where smaller sections of the ship are welded together to form units called "super lifts."

These super lifts are pre-outfitted and then lifted into the construction dry dock with the sector's massive 900-ton gantry crane. The island is the 162nd and final super lift in the ship's construction schedule.

The George H. W. Bush is the nation's tenth and final Nimitz-class aircraft carrier. The ship's keel was laid Sept. 6, 2003. The christening will occur October 7, 2006 with delivery to the U.S. Navy in late 2008.

A former government contractor assigned to an earlier incarnation of the upgrades was sentenced Thursday to three years of probation, six months' home detention and $20,000 in restitution after pleading guilty in March to "exceeding authorized access" to FBI records, the agency said. According to court filings, he abused his network administrator privileges and used free hacking software that's readily available on the Internet to crack 30,000 agency user names and passwords.

Despite that latest embarrassment, the FBI says a turnaround is near.

The bureau in March sealed a six-year, $305 million deal with prominent defense contractor Lockheed Martin to start over. For the upcoming year, it's requesting $100 million from Congress to launch the four-phase, 42-month overhaul, known as Sentinel, with the target completion date set for 2009.

"In the past few years we have struggled with our information technology programs," FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Senate committee in May. "However, we have learned hard lessons from our missteps, and we are doing things very differently this time."

For now, Sentinel "appears to be on the right track," with a new crop of management and oversight processes already in place, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine assured the senators in May. But his office has already flagged potential obstacles, such as incomplete staffing, the agency's ability to track and control the project's costs, and the possibility that systems won't be compatible with those of other investigative agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security.

With that in mind, auditors plan to "aggressively monitor" the project as it proceeds, Fine added.

Critics aren't convinced yet. Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Judiciary Committee's Democratic co-chairman, said at the May hearing that he remained "very concerned" about progress on what he called an "essential task."

"The bureau's effectiveness hangs in the balance," he said, "and the American people cannot afford another fiasco."

There are plenty of skeptics off Capitol Hill as well. Jim Harper, director of information policy studies at the Cato Institute, said he didn't see any reason to believe the Sentinel project will be better managed than its predecessors.

"The problem is institutional; when an organization's membership doesn't enjoy feast or famine based on the success of the organization, very little can bring it into focus and create success," he said in an e-mail interview with CNET News.com. "Congressional and public oversight is a weak, weak substitute for competitive pressure."

Computer blamed

The push for computer upgrades at the FBI picked up after the Sept. 11 attacks. Critics, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft, blamed neglected, incompatible systems for possibly hindering investigators' ability to gather and share intelligence on terrorists.

Those scathing assessments have already led to some changes.

By April 2004, the FBI completed the first two components of a now-defunct project called Trilogy. After forking over $337 million--nearly $100 million more than originally projected--the agency replaced its employees' desktop computers, more than 13,000 of which were already between 4 and 8 years old during the late 1990s.

The bureau also scrapped an even older network, bearing speeds roughly equivalent to those of a 56Kbps (kilobits per second) modem, and deployed a new "wide area network" that it said enhances the ability of FBI offices and other law enforcement organizations to communicate.

"Without getting into sensitive and classified information," Mueller told senators at a February 2005 hearing, "I can assure you that our ability to intercept and decipher communications and to otherwise monitor criminal activity and gather intelligence is among the best in the world."

But agents continue to struggle with day-to-day tasks related to managing case files and records through a mainframe system that dates to the 1980s. Officials and auditors have called that Automated Case Support, or ACS, system cumbersome, ineffective, "severely outdated" and insufficiently user-friendly.

The ACS system is essentially a repository of hard-copy documents, manually scanned and uploaded for electronic viewing. Information is not readily searchable, and "agents and analysts cannot easily acquire and link information across the FBI," said an Inspector General's report from March.

On average, it takes 13 keystrokes just to bring up a single document, FBI Chief Information Officer Zalmai Azmi said in a phone interview. With single case files containing as many as 100,000 separate documents and pieces of evidence, that's bound to be a serious shortcoming, auditors have said.

"You have to put commands in there; you have to do everything manually," Azmi said, acknowledging that "we don't have any mouse interaction with that version."

The first phase of Sentinel, according to planning documents, is supposed to yield a Web-based portal that will allow investigators a more streamlined way of accessing and entering data in the existing case-management system.

Later, the agency plans to begin a transition to a fully paperless process and to install a more sophisticated database designed to allow agents to "connect the dots" among cases. The final goal is to retire the ACS system in favor of an entirely new--and exclusively electronic--case management system that eradicates the need for paper files.

That objective is not unlike that of the failed Virtual Case File, or VCF, project, which the FBI discontinued last year after three years of development, expenditures of $104.5 million and harsh criticism from auditors. Although VCF and Sentinel have seemingly similar aims--namely, a Web-based, ultimately paperless interface--the Inspector General's March report said it was unclear how much of the investment in VCF could be directly applied to Sentinel.

The FBI, for its part, has made a concerted effort to distance Sentinel from its predecessors.

Speaking before senators in May, Mueller said he expected the new project to offer "greater capabilities" and said he wanted "to emphasize that the Sentinel program is not a reincarnation of the Virtual Case File."

Keeping costs in check has not been the FBI's strong suit, according to auditors of its activities.

Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office issued a report that faulted the FBI for squandering $10.1 million on "questionable contractor costs," including customized ink pens and highlighters for training sessions, and misplacing more than $7 million in equipment related to the Trilogy project.

The agency said it's determined not to repeat those mistakes with the Sentinel program. Among its plans are frequent meetings with the contractors, biweekly updates on the variations in the intended project schedule, financial incentives for meeting performance standards, and a new program office slated to include 76 staffers dedicated exclusively to the project.

The goal, CIO Azmi said, is to reverse previous pitfalls "so there are no rogue operations and there are no ad hoc developments within the bureau."

"He's a Republican mole in the Democratic party," says Pravil Banker, director of a financial company and a man who in other circumstances might be a natural Lieberman supporter.

"He's the guy who goes on [Republican-supporting] Fox News. He's the tame Democrat that even conservatives can stomach.

"He's too much a part of the Washington establishment. We must have someone who's in touch with us."

The setting for those forthright words is a an Indian restaurant in downtown Stamford, a booming town in the richest county of super affluent Connecticut, where representatives of the state's 50,000-strong Indian-origin community are hosting a 'get-to-know-you' event for Mr LiebermanÕs potential nemesis, a wealthy cable network executive called Ned Lamont.

As a primary opponent, Mr Lamont is surely an incumbent's worst nightmare. He is articulate and charming, a boyish 52-year old who graduated from Harvard and built an impressive business career, yet who finds time for pro-bono work at local schools.

His great grandfather was chairman of JP Morgan, bluest of Wall Street blueblood firms. His father served in the Nixon administration.

Only last year, Mr Lamont was a Lieberman contributor. He has switched from friend into foe - but in sorrow rather than anger. "I kept thinking Joe was going to change on Iraq, that he'd stand up and say it isn't right," he says. "But he did the opposite, and that inspired me to get into the race."

On Iraq, he says: "We've distanced ourselves from our traditions, we've ignored our values and are the weaker for it." But he rejects the Lieberman camp's charges that he's a single-issue candidate. "Iraq is only a part of it, there's a whole range of areas where the country has made bad decisions."

Among them are jobs, energy policy, and the country's failure to provide 47 million Americans - one in six of the population - with health coverage. "We have to insist on universal health care, and not go on spending $250m a day in Iraq."

And the message is getting through. At the start of the year, Mr Lamont trailed his opponent by more than 30 per cent. According to one recent poll, the gap is now down to 6 per cent among likely voters. And in the process, a local primary election has suddenly become a bellwether of the times.

The Lamont-Lieberman struggle is a battlefield in the civil war within his party. The race will set the tone for the mid-term election campaign this autumn, and have a large bearing on the contest for the Democratic nomination for the White House in 2008.

If all that sounds oddly familiar, it is. In 2004, a similar conflict played out, as the populist Howard Dean, a previously little known governor of Vermont became the darling of the activists. Propelled by internet-raised millions and the enthusiasm of his volunteer supporters from across the country, the governor briefly seemed a sure thing for his party's nomination.

Moderates were horrified. A vote for Mr Dean, warned Mr Lieberman, would be "a ticket for nowhere", that could sent the party "back to the political wilderness for a long time".

Today the roles are reversed. The bloggers and activists have rallied behind Mr Lamont, making him the symbol of what Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos, current king of the liberal blogs, calls "the people-powered movement".

Daily Kos, and organisations like Moveon.org, have thrown all their energies into toppling Mr Lieberman. The primary outcome will thus also be a measure of the true influence of the blogs, held by some to be the new arbiters of American politics. Alas however, even the vote count on the evening of 8 August may not settle things.

In an extraordinary admission of weakness, Mr Lieberman has said he will run as an independent in the November general election if he loses the primary, and is already collecting signatures to that end.

Even he does lose, the likelihood is still that the next Senator of Connecticut will be named Joseph Lieberman. As a centrist, he is well placed to scoop up independent, even moderate Republican voters. One poll gives him 44 per cent in a three way general election, as much as Lamont and the official Republican candidate combined.

But in other ways, the damage is already done. The primary has rubbed raw Democratic divisions over Iraq, offering a precious opening for Republican master strategist Karl Rove. Once again the man called 'Bush's Brain' is casting the upcoming midterm elections as a referendum on national security, traditionally the weak point of the Democrats. Once again charges are flying that Democrats will just "cut and run" from Iraq and the rest. And if the 'kiss of death' helps that strategy, then from Mr RoveÕs point of view, so much the better.