TV News LIES

In what passes for a mausoleum here, the body of Saddam Hussein lies in the middle of a marble octagon, under a giant twinkling chandelier and purple, orange and blue blinking lights. His grave is covered with Iraqi flags, candies thrown from children and bundles of plastic flowers.

It has been four years since the former Iraqi leader was executed, and over that period it has been rare to see any more than a trickle of Iraqis show up to pay tribute in his home town, just outside Tikrit  But over the past few months, the crowds have begun to grow.

A U.S. Army helicopter brigade is set to pull out of Baghdad in December, as part of an agreement with the Iraqi government to remove U.S. forces. So the armed helicopters flying over the Iraqi capital next year will have pilots and machine gunners from DynCorp International, a company based in Virginia.

On the ground, it's the same story. American soldiers and Marines will leave. Those replacing them, right down to carrying assault weapons, will come from places with names like Aegis Defence Services and Global Strategies Group — eight companies in all.

MI6 plotted the toppling of Saddam Hussein nearly 18 months before the invasion of Iraq in 2003, secret papers revealed.

Spy chiefs discussed with Downing Street a plan that was layered ‘like an onion’, with ministers openly supporting ‘regime change’ while behind the scenes working closely with those carrying out a coup.

The intelligence service also made clear in newly declassified papers that the ‘prize’ for removing the Iraqi dictator was ‘new security to oil supplies’.

A top military intelligence official has said the discredited dossier on Iraq's weapons programme was drawn up "to make the case for war", flatly contradicting persistent claims to the contrary by the Blair government, and in particular by Alastair Campbell, the former prime minister's chief spin doctor.

In hitherto secret evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Major General Michael Laurie said: "We knew at the time that the purpose of the dossier was precisely to make a case for war, rather than setting out the available intelligence, and that to make the best out of sparse and inconclusive intelligence the wording was developed with care."

Osama bin Laden's possible al-Qaida successor, Anwar al-Awlaki, was targeted but missed by a U.S. drone attack in Yemen, military officials said.
Pentagon officials said an unmanned aircraft bombed a remote compound Thursday, targeting the U.S.-born al-Awlaki, The New York Times reported Saturday.

There were casualties, but al-Awlaki was not among them, unidentified military officials told the Times. Since locating and killing bin Laden in Pakistan Sunday, the U.S. intelligence community's concern has been to identify the apparent heir to the leadership of the Muslim terrorist group.

Start­ing in late 2005, U.S. and NATO for­ces in Afghanis­tan began turn­ing de­tainees over to the Afghan Nation­al Di­rec­torate of Secur­ity (NDS), de­spite its well-known re­puta­tion for tor­ture.

In­ter­views with form­er U.S. and NATO di­plomats and other evi­d­ence now avail­able show that Uni­ted States and other NATO govern­ments be­come com­plicit in NDS tor­ture of de­tainees for two dis­tinct­ly dif­ferent rea­sons.