TV News LIES

Lies aren't used just to start wars, but also to escalate them, continue them, and even reduce or end them. And we got a pile of war lies from the president Tuesday evening.

Obama claimed the war on Iraq was initially a war to disarm a state. Really? And then "terrorist" Iraqis attacked our troops in their country. Yet if they had done that in our country, I suspect they would still be the terrorists. And then it became a civil war which we were innocently caught up in. Uh huh.

Three bombs ripped through a Shiite Muslim religious procession in the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore on Wednesday, killing 18 people and wounding at least 150 others, officials said.

The explosions appeared to be the latest in a string of attacks by Sunni extremists against the minority Shiites they consider infidels. Allied with al-Qaida and the Taliban, the bombers are also seeking to destabilize Pakistan's U.S.-backed government.

A Pakistani air strike targetting fighters believed to have been preparing for imminent suicide attacks has killed between 40 to 45 people in a northwestern the country. "Security forces today carried out a successful operation against militants in the Tirah valley of Khyber Agency," a senior Pakistani security official told AFP news agency on Tuesday.

"Militant hideouts, a training centre, an illegal FM radio station and eight vehicles prepared for suicide attack were destroyed in air strikes," he added. "The air strikes were carried out after intelligence information that militants were preparing to launch suicide attacks in Peshawar and other parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province during the next week."

On the charts that the American military provides, those numbers are seen as success, from nearly 4,000 dead in one month in 2006 to the few hundred today. The Interior Ministry offers its own toll of war — 72,124 since 2003, a number too precise to be true. At the morgue, more than 20,000 of the dead, which even sober estimates suggest total 100,000 or more, are still unidentified.

Twenty-two American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan over the past five days, a sudden end-of-August spike that follows record-high death tolls for U.S. troops in June and July.

Five of the troops were slain Tuesday, including four killed by two improvised explosive devices in the east and one during an insurgent attack in the south, according to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Roadside bombs killed seven American troops on Monday - including five in a single blast in Kandahar - raising to more than a dozen the number who have died in the last three days. The spike in deaths comes as President Hamid Karzai has publicly raised doubts about the U.S. strategy in the war, saying success cannot be achieved until more Afghans are in the front lines and insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan are shut down.

NATO gave no details of the Monday blasts except that they occurred in the south, the main theater of the conflict, and that five were killed in a single blast.