TV News LIES

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.

The Department of Veterans Affairs is warning hundreds of veterans that they may have been exposed to viruses from dental work performed at the St. Louis VA Medical Center.

The federal agency said it was mailing letters to 1,812 veterans treated during a 13-month period ending in March at the clinic at its John Cochran hospital. The letters say the risk of infection is low but offer free blood testing to screen for the hepatitis B virus, the hepatitis C virus and for HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infection.

A retired U.S. Air Force colonel charged in the 1980s in an Iran-contra related weapons smuggling case has been indicted in a U.S. federal court in Miami with conspiring with an Israeli aeronautics engineer to illegally export 2,000 AK-47s to Somalia.

Federal scientists studying the history of water contamination at Camp Lejeune, N.C., have learned of another source of leaking fuel — this one less than a football field away from a drinking well that once served thousands of Marines and their families. The well was closed in December 1984 after benzene was found in the water.

'How'd I get screwed into going to this dinner?" demands Gen. Stanley McChrystal. It's a Thursday night in mid-April, and the commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is sitting in a four-star suite at the Hôtel Westminster in Paris.

He's in France to sell his new war strategy to our NATO allies – to keep up the fiction, in essence, that we actually have allies. Since McChrystal took over a year ago, the Afghan war has become the exclusive property of the United States.