TV News LIES

I have met with dozens of civilians who were injured during drone strikes and other air attacks," al-Muslimi states. "I have met with relatives of people who were killed as well as numerous eyewitnesses. They have told me how these air strikes have changed their lives for the worst."

On one occasion, he met a man who described how "he stood helplessly as his 4-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter died in his arms on the way to the hospital." The man's house was targeted by mistake. He reported on another strike that killed 40 civilians and spoke to a 12-year-old boy who cried while describing being afraid of the drones buzzing overhead every night.

The Obama administration does not intend to send a witness to testify at a Senate hearing next week on the legality of the U.S. targeted killing program, the White House said Wednesday.

The decision illustrates the limits of President Barack Obama’s pledge in his State of the Union speech on Feb. 12 to provide greater transparency into top-secret drone operations that have killed thousands of suspected terrorists in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen.

A Pentagon audit indicates that due to a lack of oversight, some Afghan contracts went to the Taliban. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction compiled the audit report.

The SIGAR audit detailed that the agency found significant weaknesses in the oversight intended to keep the U.S. Department of Defense from giving contracts to Taliban and other terrorists, adding that that the Pentagon is failing to implement fail-safes designed to prevent contracts from being given to terrorists, or following up on them afterwards to apprehend them.

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Even as its civilian leaders publicly decried U.S. drone attacks as breaches of sovereignty and international law, Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency secretly worked for years with the CIA on strikes that killed Pakistani insurgent leaders and scores of suspected lower-level fighters, according to classified U.S. intelligence reports.

Dozens of civilians also reportedly died in the strikes in the semi-autonomous tribal region of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan that is a stronghold of al Qaida, Afghan militants, other foreign jihadists and a tangle of violent Pakistani Islamist groups.

Up to 12 civilians - 10 children and two women - are reported to have been killed in a Nato air strike in eastern Afghanistan. A further six women are believed to have been injured in the incident in Shigal district, Kunar province.

Villagers and officials told the BBC that the casualties were inside their homes when they died. Nato confirmed that "fire support" was used in Shigal after a US civilian adviser died in a militant attack.

America’s post-9/11 conflicts have been wars of corruption, a point surprisingly seldom made in the mainstream media. Keep in mind that George W. Bush’s administration was a monster of privatization. It had its own set of crony corporations, including Halliburton, KBR, Bechtel, and various oil companies, as well as a set of mercenary rent-a

-gun outfits like Blackwater, DynCorp, and Triple Canopy that came into their own in this period.  It took the plunge into Iraq in March 2003, sweeping those corporations and an increasingly privatized military in with it.  In the process, Iraq would become an example not of the free market system, but of a particularly venal form of crony capitalism (or, as Naomi Klein has labeled it, “disaster capitalism”).