TV News LIES

A U.S. Army soldier accused of exhorting his bored underlings to slaughter three civilians for sport was convicted of murder, conspiracy and other charges Thursday in one of the most gruesome war crimes cases to emerge from the Afghan war.

Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, of Billings, Mont., was the highest ranking of five soldiers charged in the deaths of the unarmed men during patrols in Kandahar province early last year. At his seven-day court martial at Joint Base Lewis-McChord south of Seattle, the 26-year-old acknowledged cutting fingers off corpses and yanking out a victim's tooth to keep as war trophies, "like keeping the antlers off a deer you'd shoot."

Nearly 90,000 soldiers are either unfit for combat with health restrictions or are otherwise unavailable for combat, according to data released to USA TODAY.

While the Army says it can fill combat brigades heading to Afghanistan with healthy soldiers — some rushed in at the last minute as units head overseas — the growing list of ill, injured or wounded is making the job tougher, say military officials.

The last of the chemical weapons stockpile at the U.S. Army's Umatilla Chemical Depot has been successfully incinerated.

For nearly 50 years, it was the deathtrap next door: 3.7 tons of nerve gas and blister agent, a big part of America's chemical weapons arsenal, stored at a depot near the little town of Hermiston, Ore.

The Army's crime lab, already beleaguered by multiple internal investigations, has something new to explain: missing evidence.

Examiners misplaced evidence in a possible suicide investigation and an assault case. One of the analysts didn't notify his superiors for months that a handwriting sample he was supposed to examine had been missing, a miscue that delayed an investigation into the matter until recently.

The Pentagon has paid $1.1 trillion to hundreds of defense contractors and their parent companies that have defrauded the government over the past ten years, according to a Department of Defense report released Thursday.

More than 300 contractors involved in civil and criminal fraud cases that resulted in judgments of $1 million or more during the last decade were paid a total of $573.7 billion by the US military, including $398 billion that was paid to contractors after judgments for fraud. When awards to parent companies are included, the Pentagon awarded $1.1 trillion to the top 37 companies that defrauded the US military since 2000.

Several decades ago, during the darkest days of the Cold War, with the threat of nuclear annihilation, the U.S. military tested more than 1,000 nuclear weapons in the deserts of Nevada and the waters of the Pacific. Many of the thermonuclear detonations involved the presence of large numbers of soldiers, sailors and Marines, who began to think of themselves as "guinea pig ground grunts."

It's a largely forgotten part of American history, mostly because the government didn't want it known. In today's world, it can be difficult to fathom using regular troops, given essentially no protection, as test subjects in an experiment in how to take advantage of the post-nuclear bomb drop.