TV News LIES

Today is the ninth anniversary of the devastating saturation bombing, by the US, of Baghdad, a city that was home to nearly 6 million Iraqis . This strategy, labeled SHOCK and AWE, was designed to rapidly overwhelm the Iraqis so that they could not possibly mount a defense against the terrifying might of the US military.

What followed was the illegal, immoral, and horrific invasion of Iraq, a nation that never at any time had posed a threat to the United States. The next eight years of senseless war were based on a series of lies created and repeated by the Bush/Cheney regime and its PNAC members. These lies were designed to convince the American people that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to their lives.

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan are the highest they've been since the invasion, according to the latest statistics from the United Nations creating the highest total since 2006 for civilian deaths - the continued annual rises has seen over 12,793 killed in the past six years.

In the light of the horrific attacks on a village by an American soldier over the weekend, the data brings fresh focus on the Nato operation there.

In order to be able to claim "no more troops on the ground" in Afghanistan by 2014, the Pentagon envisaging transferring its special operations forces to the CIA, thus "making them spies" and "reducing the number of troops". This was reported in an AP article quoting two unnamed Pentagon officials.

The troops, such as the SEALs and other units, would only change titles since they “still would target militants on joint raids with Afghans and keep training Afghan forces to do the job on their own”, according to AP. (Kimberly Dozier, Pentagon may put special ops in Afghanistan under CIA control to meet 2014 pullout deadline, March 3, 2012)

U.S. drone attacks killed at least 25 al Qaeda-linked fighters including one of their leaders while a Yemeni air force raid killed 20 more in the south, sources said on Saturday, in the biggest airstrikes since Yemen's new president took office.

Militants have expanded their operations in southern Yemen during months of turmoil which paralyzed the country and eventually unseated former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was replaced in a February vote by Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.

Women are subordinate to men, should not mix in work or education and must always have a male guardian when they travel, according to new guidelines from Afghanistan's top clerics which critics say are dangerously reminiscent of the Taliban era.

The edicts appeared in a statement that also encouraged insurgents to join peace talks, fuelling fears that efforts to negotiate an end to a decade of war, now gathering pace after years of false starts and dead ends, will come at a high cost to women.

The mega-leaks website, WikiLeaks, has partnered with the hackers cooperative Anonymous, to publish internal emails of the American strategic intelligence company Stratfor. In one of the hacked emails, Stratfor officials discuss information obtained from one of their sources who reports that Israeli commandos, in cooperation with Kurdish fighters, have destroyed Iranian nuclear installations.