On Wednesday afternoon, in a letter to Congress, Attorney General Eric Holder for the first time formally acknowledged that U.S. drones had killed four U.S. citizens -- including Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. Bearing out long-held concerns in the human rights community over the description of these strikes as "targeted" killings, only one of these U.S. citizens (al-Awlaki senior) was on the government's kill list.

The New York Times' typically administration-friendly report suggests that Obama's speech will hail the dawn of a new age of high precision, unproblematic drone strikes. The language used in Holder's letter, however, alongside recent disturbing comments from top Pentagon officials, give us reason to doubt that the boundless, limitless War on Terror is coming to any sort of clean end.

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From the Wall Street Journal:

The U.S. has been in talks with the Afghan government about transferring Afghan detainees from Guantanamo. Human-rights advocates believe these detainees could be among the first transferred.

A U.S. official said the transfers to Yemen would begin slowly, starting with two or three detainees, to ensure Yemen can keep track of the detainees and prevent them from joining militant groups. The official said that transfers to Yemen could still be months away.

As the Washington Post reports, though, the Pentagon is still asking Congress for over $450 million to maintain and upgrade the facilities at Guantanamo Bay, a move that's at odds with the President's announcement:

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Former Navy Secretary Richard J. Danzig reportedly stressed the imminent threat of an Anthrax attack "while serving as a director of a biotech startup that won $334 million in federal contracts to supply" a drug to defend against it. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

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Sheehan's remarks served as a defense of the military's current drone strike policy. While the majority of U.S. drone strikes are carried out by the CIA and authorized by the president directly, the Pentagon oversees strikes in Pakistan and will take increasing control of U.S. drone programs. Sheehan also defended the current structure of the Authorization for the Use of Military Force Act (AUMF), passed after 9/11, which, in its present iteration, grants the president wide-ranging powers to wage drone wars. “At this point we’re comfortable with the AUMF as it is currently structured,” said Sheehan. He admitted that there was no expiration date or geographic boundary to the War on Terror.

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With so much money pouring into the Pentagon’s base world, the question is: Who’s benefiting?

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These kind of stories will continue for one big, if unstated, reason: robotic warfare seems to hold the promise of making many things easier, cheaper and less risky, at least for the countries that operate the drones. But the operative word is "seems," for drones involve a problematic illusion that distorts our perception of the risks we face.

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The report comes only days after Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski, chief of the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response branch at the Pentagon, was arrested and charged with sexual battery in Virginia, an incident that has, once again, brought a military culture plagued by rampant sexual violence and failures of accountability from military leadership into stark relief.

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It’s an open secret in Hollywood that before the MPAA reviews many movies, the Pentagon does. David Robb documents the practice in his book Operation Hollywood. Whenever movie producers want to use Pentagon equipment: helicopters, bases, submarines, etc. they send a request to the Pentagon, along with five copies of the script. The Pentagon replies with proposed changes to the script, which the producer must either accept, or forgo the equipment (which disinclines studios to finance the film, since it entails extra costs). Then, while the movie is shot, a “minder” hangs along, to ensure the director sticks to the script. Final approval comes from Pentagon brass who pre-screen and censor the film.

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In a report to Congress released Thursday, the US Defense Department said that North Korea's recent advances in missile technology, as showcased at the height of its standoff with South Korea, were "in line with North Korea's stated objective of being able to strike the US homeland."

"North Korea will move closer to this goal, as well as increase the threat it poses to US forces and allies in the region, if it continues testing and devoting scarce regime resources to these programs," the report said.

The Pentagon has no reason to expect that North Korea will halt its costly and controversial nuclear tests or rocket launches, the report said, since Kim Jong Un's regime appears to believe that building up a nuclear arsenal will protect it from outside attack and help undermine South Korea's alliance with the US.

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But how does the threat of military action play for foreign investors in South Korea?

Today, President Park Geun-hye met with foreign investors from Google, Citibank and Siemens — to name a few corporations — in her administration's Blue House, reported the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper. She tried to assure them that her administration would create a stable investment environment despite North Korea's bluster.

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Another, perhaps less frequently asked question: What happens when innocent civilians are killed in drone strikes?

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Corruption in Afghanistan today is acute and permeates all sectors of society. In recent years, anecdotal evidence on the subject has been superseded by the studies of researchers, surveys by NGOs, and periodic reports by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). There is also the Corruption Perceptions Index of the Berlin-based Transparency International (TI). Last year, it bracketed Afghanistan with two other countries as the most corrupt on Earth.

None of these documents, however, refers to the single most important fact when it comes to corruption: that it’s Washington-based.  It is, in fact, rooted in the massive build-up of U.S. forces there from 2005 onward, the accompanying expansion of American forward operating bases, camps, and combat outposts from 29 in 2005 to nearly 400 five years later, and above all, the tsunami of cash that went with all of this.

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As part of a pattern traced for some months (particularly by the Washington Post's Greg Miller), in shifting the drone program from the CIA to the Pentagon, the Obama administration would codify shadow wars as fully integrated into modern U.S. warfare -- the stuff of Defense Department oversight. Klaidman reported:

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It's a “doomsday mechanism,” former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta declared. The Aerospace Industries Association (AIA) – the leading advocacy group for Pentagon contractors – has also warned of the allegedly dire consequences of sequestration for their industry (which receives nearly $1 billion a day from the Pentagon), expressing “extreme disappointment that sequestration was not averted.”

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DEFENSE

One of the Navy's premier warships, the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, sits pier-side in Norfolk, Va., its deployment to the Persian Gulf delayed. The carrier and its 5,000-person crew were to leave Feb. 8, along with the guided-missile cruiser USS Gettysburg. The Navy also began plans to gradually shut down four of its air wings - which include 50 to 60 aircraft each and are assigned to the carriers - and delay and cancel the deployments of several other ships.

Furlough notices will begin going out later this month to about 800,000 defense department civilians, who will lose a day's pay each week for more than five months. The Army will let go more than 3,000 temporary and contract employees and beginning in April, it will cancel maintenance at depots which will force 5,000 more layoffs. The Air Force Thunderbirds and the Navy's Blue Angels will cancel air show appearances.

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Up until now the only access to these documents has come second-hand. As the Guardian's Ed Pilkington described it, the refusal to publish the documents, "has led to an Alice in Wonderland world where  [presiding military judge Denise] Lind has read out documents in court, which are then reported in the media."

Via Pilkington:

The 84 documents released by the army include court rulings on defence and government motions, and orders that set the scheduling of the trial that is currently earmarked to begin on 3 June. But the batch constitutes only a tiny portion of the huge mountain of paperwork that has already been generated in the proceedings, including some 500 documents stretching to 30,000 pages.

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They would lose one day of work per week, or 20 percent of their pay, for up to 22 weeks, probably starting in late April.

To dispel the notion that this is mainly a problem for the nation's capital, the Pentagon's budget chief, Robert Hale, told reporters that the economic impact would be felt nationwide. The biggest potential losses, in term of total civilian payroll dollars, would be in Virginia, California, Maryland, Texas and Georgia, according to figures provided by the Pentagon.

Hale said the unpaid leaves for civilian workers would begin in late April and would save $4 billion to $5 billion if extended through the end of the budget year, Sept. 30. That is only a fraction of the $46 billion the Pentagon would have to cut this budget year unless a deficit-reduction deal is reached.

Panetta also said the across-the-board spending reductions would "put us on a path toward a hollow force," meaning a military incapable of fulfilling all of its missions.

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The Duffell Blog is a fake military news site, with headlines like "Army Spends $100M On Piece of Equipment That Doesn’t Do Anything," "DoD Announces Casualty In War on Christmas" and "Syria to Host Iraq War Reenactors."

But, as Spencer Ackerman at Wired's Danger Room reports:

On November 14, 2012, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wrote to Elizabeth King, the Pentagon’s congressional liaison, with a an unusually credulous query. “I am writing on behalf of a constituent who has contacted me regarding Guantanamo Bay prisoners receiving Post 9/11 GI Bill benefits,” McConnell wrote in a letter acquired by Danger Room. “I would appreciate your review and response to my constituent’s concerns.”

Um, Guantanamo detainees getting GI Bill benefits? Yes, that’s from the Duffel Blog, as McConnell’s constituent clearly states, complete with the reference URL. Said constituent even notes that he or she can’t find any information about the alleged government payouts to suspected insurgents and terrorists.

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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this afternoon filed a cloture motion to break the Republican filibuster and end debate on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to head the Department of Defense.

“This is the first time in the history of our country that a presidential nominee for secretary of defense has been filibustered. What a shame. But that's the way it is,” Reid said on the Senate floor.

The move, while unprecedented, was not unexpected. It means that Democrats now need 60 votes to get Hagel confirmed, which could be a tall order, as only two Republicans have said they’ll vote for their former Senate colleague. But as Steve Kornacki pointed out, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain may vote on cloture to help Dems get to 60, even though he will probably vote “no” on the final confirmation vote. Others senators concerned about the dangerous precedent set by the Hagel filibuster may join him.

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