TV News LIES

The military ignored steps before the invasion of Iraq that could have prevented the staggering number of casualties from roadside bombs, the Pentagon's acting inspector general charged Tuesday.

The IG's report says that the military knew years before the war that mines and homemade bombs, which the military calls "improvised explosive devices," would be a "threat . . . in low-intensity conflicts" and that "mine-resistant vehicles" were available.

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ragments of bricks, engraved with cuneiform characters thousands of years old, lie mixed with the rubble and sandbags left by the US military on the ancient site of Babylon in Iraq.

In this place, one of the cradles of civilisation, US troops in 2003-2004 built embankments, dug ditches and spread gravel to hold the fuel reservoirs needed to supply the heliport of Camp Alpha.

Today, archaeologists say a year of terracing work and 18 months of military presence, with tanks and helicopters, have caused irreparable damage.

TVNL Comment: What we have done in Iraq is unforgivable.

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An L-3 Communications Holdings Inc. (LLL) unit agreed to pay $4 million to the U.S. government in a settlement over overbilling claims by the U.S. Army for hours worked to support military operations in Iraq.

The settlement with company subsidiary L-3 Vertex Aerospace involved allegations that L-3 submitted false time records and inflated claims of hours worked by the company's employees at Camp Taji in Iraq from March 2004 through August 2005, according the Justice Department.

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TVNL Comment:  What a joke... it's not "overbilling"  - it's grand larceny. 

U.S military contractor KBR, a former subisidary of Halliburton, is facing a number of lawsuits over its activities in Iraq, and elsewhere.  KBR is the largest contractor for the United States Army and a top-ten contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense.

In one class-action suit Joshua Eller, a civilian who worked for the U.S. Air Force in 2006 at the Balad air force base northeast of Baghdad, alleges KBR 'knowingly and intentionally supplied to U.S. forces and other individuals food that was expired, spoiled, rotten, or that may have been contaminated with shrapnel, or other materials'.

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Employees of U.S. security firm Blackwater who shot and killed Iraqi civilians should face the death sentence, relatives of some victims said on Sunday.

U.S. law enforcement sources said on Friday that U.S. officials expected to announce charges soon against the security guards over the shooting that killed 17 civilians in 2007 and strained U.S.-Iraqi ties.

"A death sentence is the least thing ... In addition the director of Blackwater should be taken to trial. He gave them the weapons, this authority to block roads and kill civilians," said Mohammed al-Kinani, whose son was killed that day.

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I saw a lot of people cry while I was in Iraq, but I think of the hugging soldiers and the rocking civilian most often. Maybe it was the strangeness of seeing uniformed soldiers in tears. Maybe it's because they're the last sad scene I saw before I flew away. Or maybe it's the way they made me feel: guilty, because I got to leave.

Whatever the reasons, I'm glad that I think about them, glad that their grief is my last remembrance of Iraq. Because for all the stories of reduced violence and political and social successes there, Iraq remains, for the most part, a devastated country.

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