TV News LIES

A U.S. contractor who has continued to receive government contracts despite criticism of its work in Afghanistan was given low ratings for its performance on two more high-profile projects in the war-torn country.

McClatchy has learned that the U.S. government criticized Black & Veatch for its poor oversight and delays of a Kabul power plant project and for a study of the viability of developing a natural gas field in the Sheberghan region in northern Afghanistan.

Taliban insurgents armed with bombs, automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades attacked the Kandahar police headquarters Saturday during a bloody assault on the southern Afghan city that killed at least 21 people and wounded dozens more.

The bold afternoon raid showed insurgents are still able to launch deadly strikes on heavily fortified government institutions despite the past year's influx of U.S. troops into Kandahar province, the Taliban's birthplace. The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack.

At least seven people have been killed in three near-simultaneous car bombings in the northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk. Dozens of bystanders were also injured as the blasts, which detonated around 10:25am local time, tore through the offices of Kurdish internal security forces - as well as targeting a police patrol and a senior police officer's convoy.

Police officials were quick to blame an armed group and promised a strong response. '"We are certain that this terrorist group, Ansar Al-Islam, is behind this attack," Major General Jamal Taher Bakr, the city police chief, said.

Six months ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States had little hard evidence and relied heavily on analytic assumptions and judgment in assessing what it knew about Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, according to declassified U.S. intellilgence report.

The September 5, 2002 report from the Glen Shaffer, the Director of Intelligence - which was initially classified as "secret" - at the time showed the U.S. knew about Iraq's internal expertise in building nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons and ballistic missiles.

Former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remains largely defiant about the Iraq war, saying in a new book that had Saddam Hussein remained in power, the Middle East would be "far more perilous than it is today".

Mr Rumsfeld, 78, has written an autobiography due out next week.He concedes he could have sent more troops, and that internal US rivalries hampered post-war reconstruction. Leaked excerpts have been published by the Washington Post and New York Times.

Elite security forces under the control of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are operating secret detention sites in Baghdad at which prisoners are being abused, according to a report by the watchdog group Human Rights Watch released Tuesday. One of the sites is at a military base where U.S. forces maintain an advisory team, the U.S. military confirmed.

Former prisoners who were held at another of the facilities, a military base in the Green Zone that was vacated by U.S. troops last summer, have told Human Rights Watch researchers that detainees there were regularly abused, by being hung upside down, beaten and given electric shocks to various body parts, including the genitals.