TV News LIES

Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs' big talk about killing Afghan civilians and getting away with it made him stand out when he joined a new platoon at an Army base in southern Afghanistan a year ago, according to written statements from his comrades.

Some of his Stryker platoon mates from Joint Base Lewis-McChord told investigators they didn't know what to make of him. They thought he must be kidding. Now Gibbs is at the center of an Army war crimes investigation that netted 11 of his comrades from the 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division. They await their own trials for misdeeds they allegedly committed under Gibbs' direction. Five soldiers, including Gibbs, are charged with murder.

At the Pentagon, the draft of a war assessment to be submitted to Congress this month cites a shift in momentum in some areas of the country away from the insurgency.

But as a new White House review of President Obama’s strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan gets under way, the rosy signs have opened an intense debate at the Defense Department, the White House, the State Department and the intelligence agencies over what they really mean.

The CIA's influence is such that it can successfully forbid other agencies of government to conceal its crimes if they find out about them. Example: “The Drug Enforcement Administration(DEA) knew about and helped cover up the CIA's involvement in Guatemala's drug war murders, a former DEA agent said,” the AP reported on July 23, 1996. Although the DEA denied the allegations, Celerino Castillo, who was a special DEA agent assigned to Guatemala, said he and other DEA agents there “were aware of specific murders committed by the Guatemala military with CIA involvement and were ordered to lie to keep the crimes secret.” AP said the Intelligence Oversight Board issued a report stating CIA agents in Guatemala “were credibly alleged” to have ordered, planned or participated in human rights violations such as murder, torture and kidnapping.” (I.e., Castillo's charges were true.) So it has long since gotten to the point that officials of other U.S. agents cannot report the CIA's crimes either, as if they were under a Mafia oath of secrecy.

Secret documents reveal that government-funded experts were warned nearly 30 years ago that tranquillisers that were later prescribed to millions of people could cause brain damage.

The Medical Research Council (MRC) agreed in 1982 that there should be large-scale studies to examine the long-term impact of benzodiazepines after research by a leading psychiatrist showed brain shrinkage in some patients similar to the effects of long-term alcohol abuse.

Last Wednesday was a hinge point in history. The United States decided to drop all pretence of being interested in leading – or even being part of – a coordinated global policy response to the most serious economic crisis in more than 70 years.

Up until now, the rest of the world has been willing to tolerate unprecedented money-printing by the US – and the UK for that matter. QE has been used to help various financial institutions avoid facing up to their losses, while covertly recapitalising Western banks that are, to all intents and purposes, insolvent. Money-printing has also pumped up equity prices. After the latest Fed-induced "sugar rush", the FTSE global all-share index hit a two-year high.

In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie. But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

Israeli police demolished an illegally built mosque in this impoverished Arab town on Sunday, touching off rock-throwing protests by residents and fueling new grievances against the government by the country's Arab minority.

Before dawn, police armed with clubs and shields surrounded the area as a bulldozer knocked down the mosque in the southern desert town of Rahat. Arab residents shouted in protest and prayed close to the site. Later some hurled rocks at police, said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld. There were no injuries and five people were arrested, he said.

The revelation by Wikileaks of a US military order directing US forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis has been treated in news reports as yet another case of lack of concern by the US military about detainee abuse.

But the deeper significance of the order, which has been missed by the news media, is that it was part of a larger US strategy of exploiting Shia sectarian hatred against Sunnis to help suppress the Sunni insurgency when Sunnis had rejected the US war.