TV News LIES

The American Civil Liberties Union has said it identified 25 to 30 cases of "unjustified homicide" in US-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. After filing a Freedom of Information request in 2009, the civil rights group last week obtained 2,624 pages of documents from the US military detailing investigations into 190 deaths in custody at prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the detention center in Guantanamo Bay.

The Defense Department says many of those deaths were due to illness, natural causes or inmate-on-inmate violence, but the ACLU alleges it has identified more than two dozen deaths it sees as being unjustified.

A key congressional oversight committee announced today that it was opening an investigation into the basis of a decision by the Pentagon's health plan to deny a type of medical treatment to troops with brain injuries.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., the chairman of the subcommittee on contracting oversight, said she wanted to examine a contract issued by Tricare, an insurance-style program used by soldiers and many veterans, to a private company to study cognitive rehabilitation therapy for traumatic brain injury. Such injuries are considered among the signature wounds of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Suicides among soldiers serving on active duty decreased modestly in 2010 for the first time in years, even as the Army National Guard and Reserve saw a major increase in the number of soldiers taking their own lives.

New figures released Wednesday by the Army show how difficult it has been for officials to drive down the number of suicides in a force that remains under serious strain. Last year, 301 active-duty, reserve and National Guard soldiers committed suicide, compared to 242 in 2009, senior Army officials said.

When military investigators looked into an attack by American helicopters last February that left 23 Afghan civilians dead, they found that the operator of a Predator drone had failed to pass along crucial information about the makeup of a gathering crowd of villagers.

But Air Force and Army officials now say there was also an underlying cause for that mistake: information overload.

A high-level military commission is set to recommend that the Pentagon reverse its long-standing policy that bars women from being in combat. Hundreds of thousands of women are currently serving in the U.S. military, and many of them are in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the Pentagon's policy, women are, and always have been, barred from taking part in any ground combat operations.

But in reality, women are already in the thick of the fight — and an upcoming report will recommend that the Pentagon acknowledge the reality on the ground and allow women to be assigned to combat units.

In ancient times, Gorgon was a mythical Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld them. In modern times, Gorgon may be one of the military's most valuable new tools.  This winter, the Air Force is set to deploy to Afghanistan what it says is a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.

The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a "soda straw" area the size of a building or two.