US/IRAQ: President Bush has asked Congress for an additional $80 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, bringing the total war expenditure to over $300 billion, US officials said.
The request came as Democrats voiced sharp criticism of the war during a bitter floor fight in the Senate over Mr Bush's nominee for Secretary of State, Dr Condoleezza Rice.
White House spokesman Mr Scott McClellan said the funds were needed for US troops and "to support the Iraqi people as they move forward on building a democratic and peaceful future".
The request underscores how much spending has soared past initial White House estimates.
In December 2002 Mr Bush's chief economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey was fired for saying war costs could rise to $200 billion. The total cost of $300 billion, when translated into today's dollar values, is now nearly half that of the Vietnam War and of US spending in the second World War.
The strain on US finances is likely to continue for years, according to the forecast of Gen James Lovelace, director of army operations, who said 120,000 US soldiers would be needed in Iraq until 2007, just 30,000 fewer than current levels.
Dr Rice, who was approved 16-2 by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week, is assured of confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate in a vote expected today.
However, the former national security adviser will be the first Secretary of State designate not to get unanimous approval since Alexander Haig in 1981.
One after another Democratic senator rose to accuse Dr Rice of misleading them and the country in the run-up to the war in Iraq by hyping Iraq's weapons programme and links with al-Qaeda.
In a departure from Senate practice where the word "lying" is rarely heard, Senator Mark Dayton accused his Republican colleagues of allowing top administration officials "to get away with lying, lying to Congress and to me and the American people" to justify a war that had cost the lives of 1,372 US troops, and said they must not promote the officials.
"I don't like impugning anyone's integrity but I don't like being lied to, repeatedly," he concluded. He repeated outside the chamber that he believed Dr Rice had lied.
Senator Edward Kennedy said that "as a principle architect of a failed policy, Dr Rice is the wrong choice" and was "not qualified" for the office. She was "wrong" when telling the Senate before the war that UN inspectors had been fully briefed on US intelligence, and if this information had been shared, "the rush to war might have been stopped".
Defending Dr Rice, Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas said she had kept a steady focus on what had to be done in the war on terrorism and "helped the President see all the minefields out there".
In the morning session, Senators Carl Levin, Robert Byrd and Evan Bayh also said they would vote against Dr Rice, while two Democrats, Joseph Lieberman and Ken Salazar, spoke in her favour.
In a new report yesterday Human Rights Watch alleged that 20 months after the fall of Baghdad, Iraqis were again being routinely beaten, hung by their wrists and shocked with electrical wires by Iraqi security forces. Many agents from the old regime were "committing systematic torture and other abuses" of detainees, the New York-based organisation said.
Also yesterday documents obtained by American civil liberties groups showed that most US army personnel who admitted to ill-treating and robbing Iraqis have not been charged with criminal conduct.
In the case of Hadi Abdul Hasson, an Iraqi who died in US custody, army investigators were unable to locate any records and the case was closed.
The US military disclosed separately that 23 Guantanamo Bay detainees tried to hang or strangle themselves in 2003 during a week-long protest. Since then seven have been transferred to other countries. There were 350 "self-harm" incidents that year, including 120 so-called "hanging gestures", said spokesman Lieut Col Leon Sumpter, and last year there were 110 "self-harm incidents".
The rash of suicide attempts came after Maj Gen Geoffrey Miller took command with instructions to get more information from interrogations.