Ten years ago today, in the Fergana Valley of Uzbekistan, a mass of people gathered to protest arrests and violence by state police. Authorities shot at least 1,000 to death. The figures remain sketchy, in part because U.S. officials—led by Donald Rumsfeld—opposed an investigation of a valued partner in the war on terror.

The logo and the company name change, but business stays the same. The mercenary syndicate formerly known as Blackwater has raked in more than half a billion dollars from U.S. contracts to thoroughly fail at stemming the terrorist-supported trade in Afghan opium, according to a new government report.

The Taliban, bane of America's post-9/11 Afghanistan operations, said Wednesday that they captured Mullah Abdul Rauf Khadim, a renegade insurgent and ex-Guantanamo detainee who was in Afghanistan recruiting for the Islamic State, the latest parry in a messy internecine conflict between violent Islamist regimes.

Bowe Bergdahl, the eccentric Army enlistee and final Afghanistan P.O.W. whose release from Taliban custody left detractors screaming for his corpse, may face desertion charges soon. Or maybe not. No one knows for certain just yet. But either way, these blogospheric anti-Bergdahl snuff-porn fantasies will be heard, dammit.

Investigators this week called the military to task for paying Afghan contractors half a million dollars to construct a training base "made mostly of sand" that melted in the rain four months later, calling the now-demolished project "not only an embarrassment, but, more significantly, a waste of U.S. taxpayers' money."

Glistening war dome Eli Lake, late of Bloomberg Politics, just can't stand that hand-wringing Senate report about torture being bad and ineffective. So he turned it upside down and tried to read it all backwards-like, and it turns out torture is super good at helping Americans, maybe, possibly. That'll be $275,000, please!

In one of its last acts before Republicans take leadership, the Senate intelligence committee today released another report again acknowledging that yes, the United States tortured people in the war on terror—and no, it didn't really help much. Here's what we know today.

It's tempting to believe, isn't it? Our mortal enemies in the Islamic State are so primordial, so primitive, so twisted that they have sex with barnyard animals. As evidenced by this drone video! Except it's bogus. Here's why.

The photo above depicts Malalai Kakar, a pioneering female police officer who aided "victims of domestic violence, rape, and forced marriage" before the Taliban murdered her in 2008. Her photographer was shocked to find conservatives using the image this month in a viral anti-Muslim campaign.

"Goodman, who lives in Winterport, said he joined the Army because he was 'tired of paying my school loans' and because he wanted to serve his country." There's something really endearing about this soccer coach who almost lost his legs after surviving an IED attack in Afghanistan.

Now that America's long war is getting longer, it's worth getting some outside perspective on what that war's all about, with all its twists and pitfalls. In short, it's worth asking George Lucas.