pentagon

House and Senate members today approved language for a homeland security appropriations bill that would give the Pentagon the right to continue withholding photos of the abuse of detainees in its custody, the ACLU reported on Wednesday.
The ACLU has been trying to get its hands on those photos, as well as other records, since 2003 [...]

Ben Smith finds some news in Sarah Palin’s all-over-the-place Hong Kong speech.
Despite the need to move men and material by air into theaters like Afghanistan, the Obama Administration sought to end production of our C-17s, the work horse of our ability to project long range power. Despite the Air Force saying it would increase future [...]

The sun rose today and its gravitational force kept the planet twisting around it through the void, so naturally Fred and Kim Kagan, the neoconservative wing of counterinsurgency, have put out a call for between 40,000 and 45,000 additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan in the next year. Both Kagans advised the McChrystal strategy [...]

After former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s speech to the Values Voter Summit, he held a short press conference where I asked him to expand on something from his speech: His argument that President Obama had left America weaker by scrapping the Euro missile shield.
I heard Ambassador John Bolton, I heard many other people who are [...]

Ahead of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s resource request for the Afghanistan war, which should be finalized today-ish, Defense Secretary Gates is already settling on areas of agreement, such as adding “enabler” assets to the  increases in troop levels that President Obama ordered in the spring:
The 2,500 to 3,000 troops include explosive ordnance disposal teams, route clearance [...]

According to a Pentagon fact sheet on the now-scrapped plans for a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic, Defense Secretary Bob Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff “unanimously” agreed to get rid of the shield in favor of “technology that is proven, cost-effective, and adaptable to an evolving security environment.”
Among their baseline [...]

Afghanistan reporting appears to have ended in 2006 and in Iraq reports stopped in 2008.

A military judge’s ruling that U.S. officers used “cruel and inhuman” treatment and possibly “torture” on an Afghan teenager imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay provides strong support for the argument that the government should embark on a broader investigation of the treatment of “war on terror” detainees during the Bush administration.

Although there is already criticism of Attorney General Erc Holder’s planned investigation of CIA interrogators, it’s worth noting that former senior FBI and Defense Department interrogators support the criminal probe — and also want a more thorough investigation.
As I noted earlier, the Center for Constitutional Rights and others has criticized the probe for its narrow [...]

Late last week, in a decision that got some attention over the weekend, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled that a Pakistani man who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison since 2004 has the right to submit written questions to self-described 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. After all, the government’s case rests [...]