TV News LIES

At least four of the 28 minesweepers who were abducted four days ago by unknown gunmen in western Afghanistan have been found, dead local officials said Sunday, as a wave of attacks across the country killed three NATO soldiers.

The workers belonged to the United Nations-supported Demining Agency for Afghanistan, a local non-governmental organization based in Kabul and which operates all over the country.

A few days after Barack Obama's December 2009 announcement of 33,000 more troops being sent to Afghanistan, in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary Robert Gates advanced the official justification for escalation: the Afghan Taliban would not abandon its ties with al-Qaeda unless forced to do so by US military force and the realization that "they're likely to lose."

Gates claimed to see an "unholy alliance" of the Afghan Taliban, al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban emerging during 2009. Unless the United States succeeded in weakening the Taliban in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda would have safe haven in Afghanistan, just as they had before the 9/11 attacks, according to Gates.

The CIA is reported to have used unmanned drones to target leaders of al-Q'aida's affiliate in Somalia for the first time, attacks coinciding with the unveiling of a new US counterterrorism strategy shifting the war on terror away from costly battlefields and toward expanded covert operations.

The strikes in Somalia, which last week apparently wounded two leaders of the al-Shabab militant group, bring to six the number of countries where the missile-armed drones have been deployed: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Iraq, and now the lawless country in East Africa which officials here increasingly identify as a major terrorist base after the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

A new report issued by Brown University says the cost of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and operations in Pakistan - will cost the country nearly $4 trillion. The report's total is more than three times higher than U.S. President Barack Obama’s estimate in a recent speech.

When Obama recently announced a drawdown of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, he said America's wars have cost the country $1 trillion dollars. But a report by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies estimates the total cost at $3.7 trillion.

The United States spends $20.2 billion annually on air conditioning for troops stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan — more than NASA's entire budget, NPR reported.

In fact, the same amount of money that keeps soldiers cool is the amount the G-8 has committed to helping the fledgling democracies in Tunisia and Egypt.

The then Prime Minister Tony Blair had assigned Sir John Scarlett to write the notorious dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) on September 2002.

But, Scarlett, who was head of the Joint Intelligence Committee, sent a memo to Blair's foreign affairs adviser referring to "the benefit of obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional".

Joint Intelligence Committee was duty-bound to give impartial intelligence-based advice to ministers, but in this case, intelligence has been misrepresented to make the case for war.