TV News LIES

"I wish it was like it was before, when I could go out with my friends and feel safe." "Before" was the 1990s — the era of Saddam Hussein, a time that many remember as almost idyllic in its safety. Unless their own families were victims of Saddam's terror, the years between 1991 and 2003 held almost no threats. Young women could go out to visit their friends in the evening, families dined at outdoor restaurants until after midnight, parks were full, and life seemed less precarious

Now young Iraqis want from their leaders what any Iraqi adult wants — electricity, water, security, and jobs. Those were the expectations after the fall of Saddam and, seven years later, they remain largely unfulfilled. For most, democracy runs far behind.

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Six years after the intense fighting began in the Iraqi town of Fallujah between US forces and Sunni insurgents, there is a disturbingly large number of cases of birth defects in the town. Fallujah is less than 40 miles (65km) from Baghdad, but it can still be dangerous to get to.

As a result, there has been no authoritative medical investigation, certainly by any Western team, into the allegations that the weapons used by the Americans are still causing serious problems. The Iraqi government line is that there are only one or two extra cases of birth defects per year in Fallujah, compared with the national average.

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The Pentagon confirmed late Tuesday that it is investigating the death of a 24-year-old Indiana Marine after he was shot to death in Afghanistan, allegedly by several US-paid private security contractors.

The contractors, according to a fellow Marine in Afghanistan who communicated with an investigative reporter in Chicago, were Afghanis who were found with "copious amounts of opium" and had been paid by the United States as guards.

"He was killed by American Hired Local National Contractors that were high on opium the morning of the 19th," the ABC reporter quotes a friend and fellow colleague of Lance Corporal Joshua Birchfield as saying in an email message.

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Even as U.S. forces take steps to reduce the number of Afghan civilians killed by aerial attacks, other civilian casualties remain stubbornly high — deaths in so-called escalation of force incidents in which edgy American troops fire on civilians who've come too close to their convoys or roadblocks.

The number of Afghans killed in such incidents rose 43 percent in 2009 to 113, from 79 in 2008, while the total number of NATO coalition-caused civilian deaths and injuries declined 15.5 percent, to 535 from 633.

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An official at the United States Embassy in Iraq has told federal prosecutors that he believes that State Department officials sought to block any serious investigation of the 2007 shooting episode in which Blackwater Worldwide security guards were accused of murdering 17 Iraqi civilians, according to court testimony made public on Tuesday.

David Farrington, a State Department security agent in the American Embassy at the time of the shooting in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, told prosecutors that some of his colleagues were handling evidence in a way they hoped would help the Blackwater guards avoid punishment for a crime that drew headlines and raised tensions between American and Iraqi officials.

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Ahmed Chalabi, the onetime U.S. ally, is in the limelight again, and his actions are proving no less controversial than they did years ago.

On the eve of Iraq's parliamentary elections, Chalabi is driving an effort aimed at weeding out candidates tied to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Chalabi is reprising a role he played after the U.S.-led invasion -- which many critics believe he helped facilitate with faulty intelligence -- and, in the process, is infuriating American officials and some Iraqis, who suspect his motive is to bolster his own political bloc.

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