Call it a qualified victory.

On July 1, the Pentagon agreed to investigate the showers built by KBR, a private military contractor in Iraq. More than a dozen U.S. soldiers have been fatally electrocuted by faulty wiring in the showers. There has been a lot of blogger commentary and reporting about the electrocution, including several items I wrote for Progressive Future.

And while I think we certainly helped push this issue into the mainstream, I'm pretty sure all the blogger activism in the world would not have made a bit of a difference without the efforts of Cheryl Harris.

I know, you're disappointed to miss out on another thrillingly breathless tome on FISA and how We! All! Must! Do! Something! Now!

While you were reading the last 40 FISA diaries, something else happened which people should note.

On Friday the Defense Department released two reports to Congress about Afghanistan (as required by law). One is the first biennial report on security in the country, the other a plan for sustaining the Afghan National Security Forces (both PDFs). The news is grim. But just as with the Iraq quarterly reports, the DoD tries to put a positive spin on things. This time the best evidence of that is on display in purple font (literally).

The security report indicates that the situation is deteriorating so badly that the Pentagon expects the Taliban to continue to grow in strength (it has "coalesced into a resilient insurgency"); expand its strongholds in the south and east while moving into the north and west; and "maintain or even increase the scope and pace of its terrorist attacks and bombings in 2008" (IED attacks were up 35% in 2007). June has seen 40 coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan, a new high since the invasion. Even though we have only 32,000 troops deployed there, US deaths in Afghanistan in May outnumbered those in Iraq. It's fair to say that things are falling apart.

U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, commander of U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, told reporters this week that violence there had increased 40 percent over the level of last spring.

Schloesser said the attacks by Taliban insurgents are increasingly sophisticated: rather than a simple roadside bomb being detonated by a convoy, his troops are now seeing roadside bomb detonations followed immediately by intense enemy small-arms fire from both sides of the road, and a second roadside bomb being detonated as U.S. reinforcements arrive...

A U.S. Army mental health assessment this spring said that American troops in Afghanistan face a more dangerous and violent environment than in Iraq, and consequently are experiencing higher levels of stress.

One of the main culprits for the deterioration of security is Bush's adventure in Iraq, which beginning in 2002 just a few weeks after the collapse of the Taliban government diverted men and resources from Afghanistan.

The turnaround poses a dilemma for the Bush administration, which had counted Afghanistan as the pinnacle of its success in the war on terror. U.S. commanders say they need more forces, but they can only be provided through withdrawing troops from Iraq. As a result, the administration may have to choose between accepting a smaller U.S. presence in Iraq or facing the prospect of turmoil in Afghanistan.

Senior Pentagon officials and military commanders have ordered a top-to-bottom review of U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. The review was prompted by high-level concern that the U.S. "was losing ground and slipping backwards," said a senior military official familiar with the review.

Friday's security report describes wider problems than just the resurgent Taliban. Afghanistan is close to becoming a failed state again. The Kabul government cannot exert control over much of the country...in the east and south because of the Taliban and the apparent meddling of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency, and everywhere else because of warlords and criminals.

"Up to the first quarter of 2008, the most significant threat to stability in the north and west of the country has come from warlords, criminals and drug traffickers."

That has led to almost unchecked corruption.

"Examples abound of corrupt public officials who are immune from prosecution, judges and prosecutors whose discretion is subject to influence, and police who not only refuse to take action to stem corruption, but also engage in corrupt activities themselves."

David Wood of the Baltimore Sun adds:

The Pentagon report's assessment of corruption echoed remarks this week by Afghanistan's attorney general, who told a gathering in Washington that "we have many people who are above the law [and] we cannot touch them."

Abdul Jabbar Sabit, at a conference sponsored by the U.S. Institute of Peace, said powerful warlords and drug lords, as well as senior government ministers "are too powerful for the police to arrest them."

And the opium trade has reached record levels in 2007 despite aggressive programs to stamp it out. The report concedes that...

"overall counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan have not been successful"

The Afghan media is less and less free.

"Government repression and armed groups prevent the media from operating freely."

Human rights abuses are routine, even among the National Security Forces.

"Afghanistan's human rights record remains poor and serious abuses continue. The [Afghan government] and its partners are fighting an insurgency that respects no boundaries in perpetrating violence upon civilian populations. Afghan National Security Forces and tribal and regional leaders' Human rRights abuses include extrajudicial killings, arbitrary arrest and detention, poor prison conditions, official impunity, prolonged pretrial detention, torture, and abuse of authority. Restrictions on freedoms of movement and association continue as does violence and societal discrimination against women, minorities, and religious converts; trafficking in persons; abuse of worker rights; and child labor."

That passage (on page 40), like several others in the version of the Afghan security report posted at the DoD website on Friday, includes what appear to be several additions and deletions (purple font in the original) waiting to be finalized. Thus the Pentagon seems to have slipped up in not posting the final draft of the report, but instead perhaps the penultimate draft.

If that's the case, we can see several instances where the DoD is trying to craft a less embarrassing report. In the foregoing passage, somebody wanted to delete an explicit reference to the Afghan National Security Forces' involvement in murder, torture, and abuse. That was replaced with a unspecific reference to "human rights" abuses; responsibility was to be assigned to nobody in particular. It seems a likely interpretation that a decision was made at a higher level in the Pentagon that it would not do to embarrass the Afghan military by accusing it explicitly in the US of human rights abuses.

Similarly, on page 72 a sentence is inserted late for the purpose of beefing up the claim, otherwise vague and weak, that Iran has been arming the Taliban. The insertion, a claim that the Taliban "has access to Iranian weaponry" produced as late as 2007, helps to obscure the admission in the previous sentence that "the lethal support that has been provided to the insurgency in Afghanistan has not proven militarily significant".

The other new Pentagon report, on the Afghan National Security Forces (the Army and police), doesn't make pleasant reading either. As of March (when it was completed), only one of the Army's 85 battalions was rated as capable of operating independently in the field (page 16). The Afghan Air Force consists of only 17 helicopters and 7 cargo planes.

That's as good a measure as any how little the Bush administration has achieved in Afghanistan during the last six and a half years. David Wood again:

Since 2001, the United States has spent about $23 billion in Afghanistan, most of it in training and equipping Afghan security forces. Total international assistance has reached $30 billion, but U.S. officials and non-governmental reports have said much of that aid has been wasted and poorly coordinated.

Update [2008-6-30 15:16:51 by smintheus]: Sometime in the afternoon or evening of Saturday, June 28, the DoD website switched the version of the Afghan security report described here (with last minutes edits showing up in purple font) to the version that was supposed to have been released (with those edits fully incorporated in the text). h/t Janus The web address remains unchanged.

The incorporation of those edits went precisely as predicted, e.g. on p. 40 the report's final version eliminated any explicit mention of the Afghan Security Force's involvement in murder, torture, and abuse. I saved a copy of the penultimate draft that was posted by mistake. Hence by comparing that with the final draft it's possible to observe how the Pentagon finishes putting its spin on such a sensitive report as this one.

by Max Keiser

I'm all for Exxon competing in the global market for profits, but I'm against giving them corporate welfare. I'm also against the White House appeasing arsonists when they should be holding them accountable. If Exxon were forced to compete without massive handouts from US tax payers, they would go out of business (or be forced to change their business model). Free-market capitalism would triumph over Wall Street-Washington corporate-communism and its axis of price-fixers, market manipulators, and insider traders.

We would, in a true meritocracy, expect a company like Exxon, and its business model of arson-for-hire to go out of business when cost-efficient, carbon-neutral alternatives for energy exist.

So how do we get the market working again? How do we raise the cost of abusing the system and the environment high enough to curtail Exxon?

This week the Washington Post will be taking a two-part, front page look at the failure of al-Hurra, an Arabic-language propaganda network financed by the U.S. government and created to win those ever-elusive hearts and minds in the Middle East.  But let’s save you some time because the reason for this $350 million dollar failure is pretty much summed up in these three lines:

[A] succession of executives who either had little experience in television or could not speak Arabic.

One news anchor greeted the station's predominantly Muslim audience on Easter by declaring, "Jesus is risen today!"

In 2004, when an Israeli airstrike killed the spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheik Ahmed Yassin, virtually all Arabic news channels interrupted their regular programming. Al-Hurra continued with a cooking show.

And now that the mystery of why al-Hurra only manages to attract 2% of its target audience is solved, perhaps the Washington Post could take some time to investigate the Pentagon sponsored propaganda program that propelled us into a war in Iraq.  The one that has cost more than $500 billion, 4,103 American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives.   Because the Washington Post still hasn’t bothered to report on that story.

by Max Keiser

Probably the worst effect Americans can expect from the U.S. government's approval of the pro-spy laws that give telcos immunity from prosecution for breaking the law is more inflation.

Immunity from prosecution in this case means immunity from competition and this means higher prices. As long as the telco's have been given a government guaranteed free ride to collude, expect prices for telephony, data, and cable to continue to increase exponentially. You won't be any safer, but you'll definitely be poorer.

For five years now, I have been chronicling the disturbing number of "noncombat" deaths in Iraq, often suicides, which usually come to light only due to the diligence of local newspapers.  As part of that effort, last August I briefly described  yet another case, involving a 20-year-old Texas woman named Kamisha Block, who apparently was much loved in her Vidor hometown.  It was said to be death by "friendly fire," which officially is fairly rare in Iraq, so I kept an eye on it for days, in case of an update.

Many more nonhostile deaths arrived, and so I forgot about Kamisha.  Last night, a reader sent me a link to a diary here by "greenies,"  which in turn led me to a news article in yesterday’s Beaumont Enterprise.    I'm updating and expanding that diary now.

Forget friendly fire.  It turns out that Spc. Block was actually murdered, and the killer, another soldier, Staff Sgt. Brandon Norris, then turned the gun on himself.

Many people have raised the specter of nuclear WMDs being sourced from nefarious sources-- from errant former Soviet states, from N. Korea, Iran or Pakistan> It may be that to those fears must be added the threat that American nuclear weapon technology may be circulating in the black market as well.

cross posted from OpEdNews.com

Physicians for Humans Rights just laid the smackdown on a Pentagon spokesman who dissed PHR's new report on medical evidence of U.S. torture and its enduring impact on former detainees, men who were never charged with any crime.

This is juicy. In a moment, the Pentagon talks smack and gets smacked down. First, a bit of background.

Oh this can't be good.  The Financial Times is reporting this morning that the Pentagon is claiming it can't seem to locate "sensitive" parts for building nuclear weapons.

Another day, another middle finger to the American taxpayer and American soldier from the Bush Administration and friends at Kellogg Brown & Root.

The New York Times has an article up detailing how back in the early stages of the Iraq War, the Army's own auditor found lack of support for $ 1 billion in fees and charges sought by KBR for their "services," and that the senior civilian overseeing the KBR contract was "reassigned" for demanding KBR provide information:

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

More below...

I had to diary this just because I think its a great juxtaposition of events. Due to republican chicanery and their strange love/hate for our armed forces, the Pentagon is having to shift budget items around to make sure that the Army can cover payroll.

The White House likes to pretend that it has not created a kafkaesque spiderweb of prisons and military tribunals, despite all the evidence to the contrary: kidnapping, the purchase of prisoners for "bounties", torture and abuse, coerced confessions, locking up known innocents for years at a time, secrecy and lies, destruction of evidence, poor access for lawyers and human rights watchdogs, prolonged imprisonment without trial, a series of kangaroo-court procedures, reprisals against military lawyers who uphold standards of justice, and the flagrant politicization of trials. Well, add another stone to the mountain of evidence against this "administration".

A Gitmo defense lawyer stumbled upon a Pentagon manual that advises interrogators to destroy their hand-written notes in order to thwart any inquiries at trial into wrong-doing by officials.

Interrogators at Guantánamo Bay were told to destroy their notes to stop them potentially being used to highlight the mistreatment of detainees, according to a US military lawyer.

William Kuebler, a lieutenant commander who is defending Omar Khadr, a Canadian national facing trial for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, said the classified instructions were included in an operations manual that prosecutors allowed him to see last week...

He told reporters the instruction was contained in a US military manual of standard operating procedures, or SOPs, for interrogators that was shown to him during a pre-trial review of possible evidence.

The mission has legal and political issues that may lead to interrogators being called to testify ... Keeping the number of documents with interrogation information to a minimum can minimise certain legal issues," the document was cited as saying in an affidavit signed by Kuebler...

Kuebler said the operations manual, from January 2003, was attached to a 2005 report into alleged detainee abuse at Guantánamo, but that the section covering the manual was not made public at the time.

Omar Khadr was 15 years old when the military imprisoned him. His defense alleges that interrogators coerced a false confession from Khadr partly through abuse and threats to rape him:

Mr. Khadr's defence team at Guantanamo Bay had asked the prosecution to provide handwritten notes relating to Mr. Khadr's interrogations in both Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan.

"Counsel for the government claim that, after a diligent search, they have been unable to locate and unable to provide responsive materials," LCdr. Kuebler writes in his affidavit.

It looks like Kuebler is right that the Pentagon insured that interrogators "routinely destroyed evidence" that might have been used to defend the Khadr and other detainees.

For its part, the Pentagon didn't even try to defend the destruction of evidence when the SOP was exposed.

A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said he was reviewing the matter Sunday evening.

Destruction of evidence is in fact routine at Guantanamo. Last December we learned that in 2005 the CIA ordered the destruction of videotapes of interrogations, apparently at the behest of the White House.

If the Guantanamo tribunals really are legitimate courts of law, as the WH insists, then the destruction of videotapes and interrogators' notes ought to count as obstruction of justice. This report from March remains relevant:

“They thought they were saving themselves from legal scrutiny, as well as possible danger from Al Qaeda if the tapes became public,” said Frederick P. Hitz, a former C.I.A. officer and the agency’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, speaking of agency officials who favored eliminating the tapes. “Unknowingly, perhaps, they may have created even more problems for themselves.”

In a suit brought by Hani Abdullah, a Yemeni prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, a federal judge has raised the possibility that, by destroying the tapes, the C.I.A. violated a court order to preserve all evidence relevant to the prisoner. In at least 12 other lawsuits, lawyers for prisoners at Guantánamo and elsewhere have filed legal challenges citing the C.I.A. tapes’ destruction, said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer representing 16 prisoners.

“This is like any other cover-up,” Mr. Remes said. “We’ve only scratched the surface.”

Indeed, as the new revelation about the Pentagon manual demonstrates. Kuebler's find has been reported widely outside the US. Shame that there's only a single, brief report in the American news media.

++++

See also the diary by Christian Dem in NC.

Update [2008-6-9 18:11:51 by smintheus]: See also Lyle Denniston on the ramifications of Kuebler's discovery for the important habeas cases now before SCOTUS, Boumediene v. Bush and Al Odah v. United States.

The L.A. Times is characterizing the replacement of Gen. T. Michael Moseley (who was fired last week as Air Force chief of staff) by Gen. Norton A. Schwartz as a blow to the traditional "fighter" and "bomber" power structures within the service. All previous Air Force chiefs of staff have come from one of those two arms of the service, while Schwartz rose through the ranks of the transport command:

The nomination of Gen. Norton A. Schwartz, who is currently head of the Pentagon's transportation command and rose through the ranks as a pilot of military cargo planes, marks a significant break for the Air Force, which has been led by fighter and bomber pilots almost since its inception after World War II . . .

In bypassing the Air Force's "fighter mafia" in filling the chief of staff's position, [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates appears to be sending a message to the service that it needs to prioritize missions that support the current ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, such as transport flights, in-air refueling and overhead surveillance, according to Pentagon officials.

A closer look at Schwartz, though, might provide a more ominous reason:

Gretchen Peters reports that the Pentagon has awarded an international fugitive, shadowy Saudi financier Gaith Pharaon, an $80 million contract to supply jet fuel in Afghanistan (h/t Ron Beasley). Pharaon is a fugitive from the FBI as well as the subject of investigations by France and Italy.

The contract to supply jet fuel to American bases in Afghanistan was awarded to the Attock Refinery Ltd, a Pakistani-based refinery owned by Gaith Pharaon. Pharaon is wanted in connection with his alleged role at the failed Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and the CenTrust savings and loan scandal, which cost US tax payers $1.7 billion.

The Saudi businessman was also named in a 2002 French parliamentary report as having links to informal money transfer networks called hawala, known to be used by traders and terrorists, including Al Qaeda.

Interestingly, Pharaon was also an investor in President George W. Bush's first business venture, Arbusto Energy.

To call that information "interesting" is to put it rather mildly. Can you imagine the hoo-hah that would erupt in the American trad media if a Democrat such as Barack Obama, say, were connected by even two degrees of separation to an international crook like Pharaon?

And yet Pharaon was a Harvard classmate of Bush's and a key investor in Arbusto/Harken Energy. He has a notoriously unsavory record. During the Carter administration he was involved in the disgrace of Bert Lance, and then a dozen years later in another banking scandal, the collapse of the shady BCCI due to massive fraud that cost the bank's clients billions of dollars. In the US, he was the second largest shareholder in CenTrust when it went belly up. The Federal Reserve then barred Pharaon from doing business in the US, and the FBI indicted him. Pharaon has been a fugitive ever since.

The FBI accuses the Saudi millionaire of fraud "involving millions of dollars" in the case of the Bank of Commerce and Credit International...In 1995 a US judge ordered Pharaon to give up $102m of his assets for his role in the BCCI fraud. He is alleged to have acted as the frontman for BCCI to acquire illegal stakes in American banks.

American pilots in Afghanistan depend for their lives upon the fuel supplied by this crook. Another in a long line of scandalous war-contracts from the Bush "administration".

Update: The ABC reporter is Gretchen Peters, not Brian Ross as originally stated.

Uh-oh:

Report accuses Bush of misrepresenting Iraq intel
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer
58 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - A new Senate report gives a fresh shot of adrenaline to the election-year debate over the Iraq war. President Bush and his top officials deliberately misrepresented secret intelligence to make the case to invade Iraq, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee

.

We all know that Iraq has been the major beneficiary of the Bush Cheney strategic disaster in Iraq.  But the newly released Senate Intelligence committee report suggests something further:

Iran may have been planting information they knew that Cheney and Bush would use to attack Iraq.

McClatchy has the story: Did Iranian agents dupe Pentagon officials?

More after the jump

60 Minutes did a nice propaganda piece for the military industrial complex, specifically the Raytheon corporation. Common Dreams has the video. The program featured a demonstration of the "non-lethal" Active Denial System, essentially a big ray gun that shoots focused microwave beams that heat up "the target." Supposedly, when the target feels the sensation of having their skin cooked, they will quickly move out of the way avoiding serious burns. What happens to immobilized "targets" who are trampled by a panicked crowd is not explained.

Here's the neat part: This thing was developed for the military with taxpayer money, but there is no planned use of this "non-lethal" crowd-control weapon in Iraq, and Raytheon, which developed the system for the Pentagon, is currently selling a more limited-range civilian version of the system, under the name “Silent Guardian,” which it promotes as being suitable for “law enforcement, checkpoint security, facility protection, force protection and peacekeeping missions.”