It occurs to me that we cannot even really have a Pentagon Papers event in this country anymore. Sure, Wikileaks releases gained a decent amount of attention, but the real evidence for this comes in the past week. Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis wrote an 84-page report detailing his experiences in Afghanistan, which are at odds with the official narrative. Much like the Pentagon Papers on Vietnam, Davis’ report claims that the top military brass has been lying to the public about the state of the war.

The unclassified version of a report on the war in Afghanistan was finally published for public viewing last Friday. The report is by Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a seventeen-year Army veteran who just returned from his second tour of duty in Afghanistan. It asserts military leaders in Afghanistan have lost much of their integrity and have routinely distorted the truth of the war.

So far, no condemnation or concern about international law has been heard from the White House.

General Stanley McChrystal told journalist Michael Hastings that he wanted to be on the cover of Rolling Stone and so he was. The resulting story—describing an alcohol fueled dinner in Paris and the General’s staff mocking the Obama Administration—ended McChrystal’s tour as the commander of US forces in Afghanistan and his military career.

At least so far, the attempts from inside the military to warn against an early withdrawal in Afghanistan are not working. In fact, the US appeared to move in the other direction today, aligning themselves more with France than with the military moles.

Charlie Savage has a great piece on the mess that is the DOD’s investigation and trial of those charged with the 2005 massacre of Iraqi civilians in Haditha. Sadly, as Savage points out, the lack of justice in this case is part of a disturbing pattern in the military, where all too often, PR trumps justice.

It’s not new. The Pat Tillman case was the same way, as PR concerns shoved the truth aside. Another example of the ongoing “PR trumps justice” movement in the military is on view at the Sundance film festival with “The Invisible War,” a film that describes itself as “a groundbreaking investigative documentary about one of our country’s most shameful and best kept secrets: the epidemic of rape within our US military.”

Within the military, it seems PR trumps justice, all too often. Our military, and our nation, deserve better.

The focus on Guantanamo over the past couple years has hidden the fact that the number of detainees there has been dissipating somewhat. The number of detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan has exploded, with detainees captured throughout the world moved over to Bagram and shielded from any habeas proceedings. Bagram has become the black hole. So it’s good news, on its face, that the Administration wants to repatriate non-Afghan detainees out of Bagram.

The Taliban has agreed to open an office in Qatar, seen as a precursor to peace talks in Afghanistan. The Taliban want release of their prisoners from Guantanamo as part of a goodwill gesture preparatory to peace talks. Congress is going ballistic, and because of the NDAA and other bills, the process for getting clearance to release Guantanamo detainees is almost impossibly complex.

The release of Fazl and other Taliban may just be a Hail Mary pass, however. Talks have been suspended at the request of Hamid Karzai, the Afghan President. Though asking for a prisoner release previously , Karzai doesn’t favor it now. We may get the establishment of a Taliban office in a neutral third country, with talks continuing there on a reconciliation. But Karzai stopped the talks when he found out that the US was negotiating directly with Taliban officers to use Qatar as the third country, recalling the Afghan ambassador there.

As we wind down the overt military phase of the Iraq war, I think this article carries some important knowledge. In Iraq as well as Afghanistan, the way out of the country has been to train native security forces to take over. We trained hundreds of thousands of security personnel in Iraq, and just as many in Afghanistan. And now, we’re learning that those security forces are actually abusing their own citizens.