TV News LIES

Dozens of confidential and secret cables sent in recent years by the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli to the State Department describe a softer and gentler Libya that Americans following the bloody crisis there now would have a hard time recognizing.

Moammar Gadhafi's son Saif al Islam, who's become the most vehement defender of his father's vicious onslaughts against protesters that triggered the civil war, is portrayed as a human rights advocate and reformer on the losing end of a battle with his harder line brother, Muatassim, Moammar Gadhafi's national security adviser.

Grim combat statistics that one military doctor called "unbelievable" show U.S. troops in Afghanistan suffered an unprecedented number of catastrophic injuries last year, including a tripling of amputations of more than one limb.

A study by doctors at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where most wounded troops are sent before returning to the U.S., confirmed their fears: The battlefield has become increasingly brutal. In 2009, 75 service members brought to Landstuhl had limbs amputated. Of those, 21 had lost more than one limb.

A former Afghan lawmaker told an audience of Tacoma, Washington, peace activists Tuesday that photos of Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldiers grinning over the corpse of a boy they allegedly murdered revealed a disregard for civilian lives among U.S. forces fighting in her country.

"They are making fun with the dead bodies of my people," said Malalai Joya, 32, a human rights activist who visited the University of Washington Tacoma on her U.S. speaking tour. About 80 people attended her talk, which was hosted by the group Peace Action of Washington and was her seventh in the Puget Sound area this week.

At least eight foreign UN workers and four others have been killed in an attack on a UN compound in the Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif, officials say. The violence happened during a protest over the burning of the Koran in a US church last month.

Witnesses said hundreds of people were protesting peacefully in the city when the scene suddenly turned violent. A local police spokesman told the BBC the city was now under control and a number of people had been arrested.

As if U.S. troops serving in Iraq didn’t face enough risk to life and limb already, these servicemen and women are putting their long-term health at risk because the air in Iraq is so polluted.

A study begun in 2008 is finding that much of the air pollution in Iraq is of the most insidious sort – the very small dust particles that can make their way deep into the lungs and stay there. The study’s preliminary findings were presented late Wednesday at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Anaheim.

Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.

Among the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging "savages" and debated the probability of getting caught.