Department Of Defense U S

Can the coins jingling in your pocket trace your movements? The Defense Department is warning its American contractor employees about a new espionage threat seemingly straight from Hollywood: It discovered Canadian coins with tiny radio-frequency transmitters inside. In a U.S. government report, it said the coins were found planted on U.S.

The Pentagon has disavowed a senior official's remarks suggesting companies boycott law firms that represent detainees at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Charles "Cully" Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said in a radio interview last week that companies might want to consider taking their business to other firms that do not represent suspected terrorists.

The Pentagon has been requesting information from financial institutions and telecommunications companies to investigate people within the United States suspected of spying or terrorism, the Defense Department said Saturday. The little-known practice could raise questions on Capitol Hill about the military conducting domestic investigations, which are traditionally reserved for the FBI. The American Civil Liberties Union said Saturday that the Pentagon activity raised concerns.

The Pentagon is not violating privacy rights by requesting information from financial institutions, telephone companies or credit bureaus in suspected espionage and terrorism cases, Vice President Dick Cheney said Sunday. He defended the requests as a "perfectly legitimate activity" that serves in part to protect personnel on hundreds of military bases within the United States -- "potential terrorist targets," in Cheney's words.

The steadily rising cost of the Iraq war will reach about $8.4 billion a month this year, Pentagon spokesmen said Thursday, as the price of replacing lost, destroyed and aging equipment mounts. The Pentagon has been estimating last year's costs for the increasingly unpopular war at about $8 billion a month. It rose from a monthly "burn rate" of about $4.4 billion during the first year of fighting in fiscal 2003.

Reversing itself, the Defense Department says its espionage report that warned about Canadian coins with tiny radio frequency transmitters was not true. The Defense Security Service said it never could substantiate its own published claims about the mysterious coins. It has begun an internal review to determine how the false information was included in a 29-page report about espionage concerns. The service had contended since late June that such coins were found planted on U.S.

The Department of Defense on Tuesday exempted the Navy's sub-hunting sonar from a federal law that protects marine mammals, saying it needs more time to work out safeguards for whales that can be injured by powerful sonic blasts. The two-year exemption to the Marine Mammal Protection Act also renders moot one key portion of a federal lawsuit filed by environmentalists in 2005 in Los Angeles.

The Pentagon official who criticized law firms for defending detainees held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has resigned, a Defense Department spokesman said. Charles Stimson, deputy assistant secretary for detainee affairs, last month called it "shocking" that major U.S. law firms represented Guantanamo detainees for free and said they would probably suffer financially after their corporate clients learned of the work.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates acknowledged Tuesday that Pentagon planners were considering alternative war plans in case the current buildup of forces in Iraq failed to quell ongoing violence in Baghdad, saying the administration strategy "is not the last chance" to salvage the war-torn country.

A Pentagon official who was a prime architect of Bush administration policies that led to the Iraq war presented policymakers with allegations of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda that did not accurately reflect the views of U.S. intelligence agencies, according to a Defense Department investigation disclosed Thursday by a senior Senate Democrat. The report concluded that the official's actions were inappropriate, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said.