TV News LIES

The Pentagon is pouring millions of dollars into equipment and training for its smaller partner nations in the Afghanistan war, a new effort that could encourage some countries not to abandon the increasingly unpopular conflict.
The money comes from a $350 million Pentagon program designed to improve the counterterrorism operations of U.S. allies.

While the funding cannot be openly used as an enticement for NATO nations to either send troops to Afghanistan or keep them in the country, the budding initiative sends the message that those who commit to the counterinsurgency fight could be rewarded.

The U.S. is committing more troops to Afghanistan to beat back a stubborn Taliban-led insurgency — and watching in dismay as allies, including Canada and the Netherlands, look to pull troops out of the 8-year-old war or remove them from combat duties. Roughly 87,000 U.S. troops are in Afghanistan now, and about 100,000 are expected to be in place by late summer.

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A federal judge is forcing the Department of Homeland Security to process the permanent-residency request of an Iraqi artist despite the U.S. government's claims that he could be considered a terrorist under post-Sept. 11 laws. The ruling in favor of Sami Alkarim, a refugee whom McClatchy profiled earlier, is expected to prompt others to file similar suits.

About 7,000 refugees are trapped in legal limbo because immigration authorities have branded them terrorists even though many of them opposed dictators, helped the U.S. government in countries such as Afghanistan or, in Alkarim's case, were tortured in one of Saddam Hussein's most notorious prisons.

That's because the Obama administration has interpreted the Patriot Act and other laws to mean that refugees and asylum seekers are barred from living and working in the U.S. if they supported or were members of armed groups in their homelands.

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Ahmed Wali Karzai, the most powerful man in southern Afghanistan, may maintain links with drug dealers and insurgents, as some American officials and Afghans believe. And he might have played a central role in last summer’s fraudulent presidential election, as Western diplomats charged.

But Mr. Karzai is also the brother of the Afghan president, Hamid. And after debating Ahmed Wali’s future for months — and with a huge military operation in the area looming — Afghan and American officials have decided that the president’s brother will be allowed to stay in place.

Senior American officials spent months weighing the allegations against Ahmed Wali Karzai: that he pays off Taliban insurgents, that he launders money, that he seizes land, that he reaps enormous profits by facilitating the shipment of opium through the area.

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U.S. President Barack Obama is in Afghanistan on an unannounced visit that is expected to last several hours. Mr. Obama landed at the Bagram military base north of Kabul Sunday and was flown by helicopter to the presidential palace for meetings with Afghan Preisent Hamid Karzai and other top officials.

He also planned to meet U.S. military officers and troops for a briefing on the offensive against Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan.

U.S. National Security Advisor James Jones told reporters that Mr. Obama is meeting with President Karzai to impress on him the need to "battle the things that have not been paid attention to almost since day one." General Jones did not elaborate, but U.S. officials have pushed for stronger Afghan government efforts against corruption and drugs, and to build credible government services.

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It was just a single contract for a single job on a single base in Iraq. The Department of Defense agreed to pay the megacontractor KBR $5 million a year to repair tactical vehicles, from Humvees to big rigs, at Joint Base Balad, a large airfield and supply center north of Baghdad.

Yet according to a new Pentagon report [PDF], what the military got was as many as 144 civilian mechanics, each doing as little as 43 minutes of work a month, with virtually no oversight. The report, issued March 3 by the DOD's inspector general, found that between late 2008 and mid-2009, KBR performed less than 7 percent of the work it was expected to do, but still got paid in full.

The $4.6 million blown on this particular contract is a relatively small loss considering that in 2009 alone, the government had a blanket deal worth $5 billion with KBR (formerly known as the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root). Just days before the Pentagon released the Balad report, KBR announced it had won a new $2.3 billion-plus, five-year Iraq contract. But the inspector general's modest investigation offers new insight into just how little KBR delivers and how toothless the Pentagon is to prevent contractor waste.

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"Tied up, gagged and killed" was how NATO described the “gruesome discovery” of three women’s bodies during a night raid in eastern Afghanistan in which several alleged militants were shot dead on Feb. 12.
Hours later they revised the number of women “bound and gagged” to two and announced an enquiry. For more than a month they said nothing more on the matter.

The implication was clear: The dead militants were probably also guilty of the cold-blooded slaughter of helpless women prisoners. NATO said their intelligence had “confirmed militant activity”. As if to reinforce the point, coalition spokesman Brigadier General Eric Tremblay, a Canadian, talked in that second press release of “criminals and terrorists who do not care about the life of civilians”. Only that’s not what happened, at all.

The militants weren’t militants, they were loyal government officials.  The women, according to dozens of interviews with witnesses at the scene, were killed by the raiders. Two of them were pregnant, one was engaged to be married.

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