TV News LIES

Federal investigators have identified several dozen Pentagon officials and contractors with high-level security clearances who allegedly purchased and downloaded child pornography, including an undisclosed number who used their government computers to obtain the illegal material, according to investigative reports.

Senior commanders have reached a turning point. After nine years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, they are beginning to recognize age-old legacies of the battlefield - once known as shellshock or battle fatigue - as combat wounds, not signs of weakness. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Amos's Army counterpart, has been especially outspoken. "PTSD is not a figment of someone's imagination," Chiarelli lectured an auditorium of skeptical sergeants last fall. "It is a cruel physiological thing."

Soldiers killed themselves at the rate of one per day in June, making it the worst month on record for Army suicides, the service said Thursday.

There were 32 confirmed or suspected suicides among soldiers in June, including 21 among active-duty troops and 11 among National Guard or Reserve forces, according to Army statistics.

Serviceman Bradley Manning, 22, faces two charges related to the illegal transfer and transmission of classified information from a US military network. The US said he was suspected of downloading from SIPR Net.

He reportedly then passed on the data, including army videos and diplomatic messages, to the WikiLeaks website. WikiLeaks has repeatedly said it does not have the confidential messages and the site itself is not mentioned in the charges against Private First Class (Pfc) Manning.

President Obama, saying that post-traumatic stress is one of two "signature injuries" of today's wars, announced Saturday that new policies will soon take effect to make it easier for war-zone veterans with the disorder to receive disability benefits.

The president previewed the changes at the Veterans Affairs Department in his Saturday radio address. He said traumatic brain injuries also beset today's veterans and that too few of them "receive the screening and treatment they need" for both conditions.

The follow-up investigation of a botched Special Operations Forces (SOF) raid in Gardez Feb. 12 that killed two government officials and three women, ordered by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal Apr. 5, was ostensibly aimed at reconciling divergent Afghan and U.S. accounts of what happened during and after the raid.

That implied that the U.S. investigators would finally do what they had failed to do in the original investigation - interview the eyewitnesses. But three eyewitnesses who had claimed to see U.S. troops digging bullets of the bodies of three women told IPS they were never contacted by U.S. investigators.