Read This, Make the Pentagon Unhappy

This is an 84-page report on the war effort in Afghanistan, prepared by Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, a 17-year Army veteran who recently returned from his second tour there. It begins:

Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable. This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan. It has likely cost American taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars Congress might not otherwise have appropriated had it known the truth, and our senior leaders’ behavior has almost certainly extended the duration of this war. The single greatest penalty our Nation has suffered, however, has been that we have lost the blood, limbs and lives of tens of thousands of American Service Members with little to no gain to our country as a consequence of this deception.

[....]

These are surely serious charges and anyone who would make such claims had better have considerable and substantive evidence to back it up. Regrettably, far too much evidence does exist and I will here provide key elements of it. As I will explain in the following pages I have personally observed or physically participated in programs for at least the last 15 years in which the Army’s senior leaders have either “stretched the truth” or knowingly deceived the US Congress and American public. What I witnessed in my most recently concluded 12 month deployment to Afghanistan has seen that deception reach an intolerable low. I will provide a very brief summary of the open source information that would allow any American citizen to verify these claims. But if the public had access to [...] classified reports they would see the dramatic gulf between what is often said in public by our senior leaders and what is actually true behind the scenes.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/02/11/world/asia/atwar-dereliction-documents.html
http://www1.rollingstone.com/extras/RS_REPORT.pdf
http://www.fileserve.com/file/MptcgwM/Dereliction_of_Duty.pdf

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