Afghanistan

In an Department of Defense memo sent last week to officials and the news media, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Douglas B. Wilson reaffirmed the Pentagon’s effort to curb the flow of leaked or otherwise unauthorized information to the news media.

The military has reversed recent changes to its policy for embedded reporters that prohibited them from photographing troops who have been killed in action, Congressional Quarterly reported on Tuesday.

Confusion remains after military commanders in eastern Afghanistan issued two recent changes to a policy on whether embedded journalists can photograph mortally wounded soldiers, the Associated Press reported.

A revised policy for reporters embedded with the U.S. military command in eastern Afghanistan released Thursday retreats from a more stringent version imposed last month, the Washington Post reports.

The agreement journalists must sign to become embedded with a military unit in Afghanistan now includes a prohibition against any photographic or video coverage of U.S. troops killed in action, according to a copy of the latest agreement.

The Obama administration announced it will finally release photos of abuse in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Last September, a federal appeals court ruled images of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib must be made available to the public, but the government has since failed to actually release them or other abuse photos.

An Army historian today told a government declassification group that the Army is not enforcing its record-keeping policies and that it is not receiving adequate records from military units in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Records are just not kept," Dr. Richard Davis of the U.S. Army Center of Military History told the Public Interest Declassification Board at its third open meeting of the year. "As of October 2005, not one Army unit returned one record."

An Afghan journalist, Abdul Samad Rohani, employed by the BBC, was found dead on Sunday in Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand. The journalist had been kidnapped the day before.