The war industry stood back with glee when it released a shoddy study that produced the sought-after deceptive headlines about defense spending, the magic sauce of job creation. There was no balance to these reports, and the War Industry should know, because they funded it!

A federal court has rejected former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s attempt to have a lawsuit dismissed that alleges he is responsible for authorizing the torture of two military contractors. The case, Donald Vance and Nathan Ertel v. Donald Rumsfeld, et al is one of two cases out of more than a dozen that allege Rumsfeld allowed torture to take place against US citizens in Iraq.

The dismissal means Rumsfeld has now lost two appeals against torture suits filed against him. Last week, a federal court in Washington, DC, released an opinion that upheld the other lawsuit moving forward against Rumsfeld, John Doe v. Donald Rumsfeld, et al, a case that alleges the former defense secretary had a role in the torture and illegal detention of a US citizen that was working in Iraq as a translator.

You know how I have argued that our country does have an industrial plan, one that is commonly called the Military-Industrial Complex? The government dumps seemingly unlimited amount of money into selected projects. Defense companies make sure to spread the jobs created by defense contracts around, so members of Congress support those contracts in bipartisan fashion. And then we export things like jets–one of the few things we export anymore.

Only, if we allow defense contractors to use prison labor, then the whole scheme sort of breaks down.

On April 11, 2010, private US military contractor DynCorp threw a party at its US-taxpayer funded Kunduz Regional Training Center where its employees train Afghan police. DynCorp’s employees allegedly took drugs and paid young “dancing boys” to entertain them.

Really good New York Times piece on WikiLeaked accounts of private security contractors. And while it’s not the main thrust of the piece, the following section shows how the murky legal rules and chain-of-command situation in Iraq worked to the contractors’ detriment as well as their benefit: The threats were not limited to insurgents, the [...]

The State Department’s $10 billion, five-year contract with private security firms is finally out. Guess who’s still a part of it?

Rep. Towns, are we really supposed to believe that with the change of a single leadership role in Afghanistan, that these enormous problems with accountability and transparency in DOD contracting and the mission in Afghanistan have changed virtually overnight, that a culture in which lawlessness and corruption has been ingrained for decades has suddenly turned itself around?

On Monday it’s expected that the Washington Post will debut a series by Dana Priest on military contractors, with an emphasis on intelligence contracting. We’ve known for some time there are far more contractors than troops, that we don’t know the exact number — which makes for a lot of interesting questions.

I’m amused by the panic revealed in a memo the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a few weeks ago preparing all members of the intelligence community for an upcoming Dana Priest series covering the same terrain.

In an article providing many new details about complaints from CIA about the DOD contractor, NYT’s Mark Mazzetti comes pretty close to admitting that this turf war focuses at least partly on whose contractors — rather than whose officers — are conducting the spying in Pakistan.