TV News LIES

he Supreme Court on Monday declined to scrutinize how a discredited military lab analyst helped convict men like former Navy hospital corpsman Ivor Luke. The court's decision leaves intact Luke's 1999 court martial conviction, secured with the help of U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory analyst Phillip Mills. Mills' own career subsequently collapsed amid revelations that he had falsified a report.

But because Navy investigators had destroyed the evidence used to convict Luke of indecent assault, Mills' work could not be double-checked. That's left Luke to argue for the past five years, ever since Mills' misconduct was discovered, that a general pattern of questionable work should suffice to cast doubt on a specific conviction.

The military's premier crime lab has botched more of its evidence testing than has been previously known, raising broader questions about the quality of the forensic work relied on to convict soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.

Now, the Supreme Court could weigh in, while two senators want the Pentagon to open a full-blown investigation. If they start looking, Pentagon officials will find that the crime lab's problems extend beyond one discredited analyst.

Gilbert resident JoAnn White says she was wounded while serving with the Air Force during the Vietnam War and has not been able to work since. Her injuries were not inflicted by a foreign enemy. She said she was raped and sexually assaulted during her military career by men who were supposed to be on her side.

White says her pain is as emotional as it was physical, and was exacerbated by a system that shrugged off her reports without investigating them.

U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan are experiencing some of the greatest psychological stress and lowest morale in five years of fighting, reports a military study.

"We're an Army that's in uncharted territory here," says Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Army vice chief of staff, who has focused on combat stress. "We have never fought for this long with an all-volunteer force that's 1% of the population."

For military personnel, having at least one psychiatric disorder before deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan appears to increase the likelihood of developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after deployment, the prospective Millennium Cohort Study showed.

The presence of a psychiatric disorder pre-deployment was associated with a 2.52-fold (95% CI 2.01 to 3.16) greater likelihood of post-deployment PTSD, independent of injury severity and numerous other potential confounders, according to Cynthia LeardMann, MPH, of the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego, and colleagues.

In the military, there are more than 3,000 chaplains who minister to the spiritual and emotional needs of active duty troops, regardless of their faiths. The vast majority are Christians, a few are Jews or Muslims, one is a Buddhist. A Hindu, possibly even a Wiccan may join their ranks soon. But an atheist?

Strange as it sounds, groups representing atheists and secular humanists are pushing for the appointment of one of their own to the chaplaincy, hoping to give voice to what they say is a large -- and largely underground -- population of nonbelievers in the military.