By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

A new report by the Justice Department Inspector General details many of the harsh and intentionally humiliating techniques that the U.S. military used against Mohammed Al-Qahtani, a Saudi detainee at the Guantanamo Bay military prison who many U.S. officials believe was meant to be the 20th hijacker on September 11, 2001.

The 438-page IG report focuses on the FBI's involvement in detainee interrogations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But it also provides a window into the methods used by the Defense Department and the CIA on uncooperative detainees such as Al-Qahtani.

By Pete Williams, NBC News Justice Correspondent

The Justice Department's Inspector General said he can find no evidence that FBI agents participated in the abuse of detainees held outside the U.S. Instead, according to a report out this morning, FBI agents reported to their superiors that they were concerned about harsh interrogation methods used by the Defense Department and CIA.

In response, FBI officials told their agents not to take part in any of those sessions.

By Aram Roston, NBC News Producer

The Pentagon's Iraqi goal posts have apparently moved again. According to a federal report released today, the Pentagon has decided that Iraq needs a security force of up to 646,000 Iraqi troops to successfully battle the insurgency. That seems to be a dramatically larger number than previous estimates. In September 2007, the Pentagon estimated Iraq needed only 390,000 troops. And then as recently as March 2008, the Pentagon said only 580,000 Iraqi troops were needed. (U.S. policy has been to train Iraqi troops to fight the insurgency, so that American forces can ultimately leave.)

By Lisa Myers, Rich Gardella and the NBC News Investigative Unit

The Government Accountability Office issued a report today revealing that undercover government investigators have been able to buy sensitive military goods online, including night-vision goggles, body armor and even plane and helicopter parts.

The report also mentioned another item GAO investigators were able to buy online from sellers on eBay -- infrared tabs worn on combat uniforms by U.S. troops. 

"Enemies," the report states, "could use [infrared] tabs to pose as a friendly fighter during night combat, creating confusion on the battlefield and putting troops at risk."

The GAO's findings match the surprising results of a recent NBC News investigation. NBC News discovered that combat uniforms and special equipment designed to protect U.S. troops in war zones are widely available for sale, potentially endangering U.S. soldiers' lives.

How to tell your own troops apart from the enemy is an age-old combat challenge. 

By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer

Former top aides of Ahmad Chalabi now admit in a new book that they believed that the defectors who Chalabi and his group introduced to Western media and to U.S. intelligence agencies were in some cases providing misleading information about Saddam Hussein and his access to weapons of mass destruction. Chalabi, the charming Iraqi exile who became the darling of American neo-conservatives, helped convince the Bush Administration that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and should invade Iraq.

The new book, “The Man Who Pushed America to War,” was written by NBC News Investigative Producer Aram Roston. Roston chronicles how Chalabi and his group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), provided sketchy defectors to news media organizations and to US intelligence agencies who embellished their accounts of life under Saddam or lied for dramatic effect. "Chalabi's INC, even where it did not directly plant false information about Saddam's links to terrorists and WMDs, believed that, in many cases, it was false," Roston writes.

By Aram Roston, NBC News Producer

A massive fire that destroyed the records of Iraq's Central Bank last week, while causing no fatalities, is being investigated as a possible arson, two American officials familiar with the case tell NBC News.
 
The fire on January 28 was reported to have killed no one, but it consumed large parts of the Central Bank building in Baghdad, and destroyed key records. It reportedly started around 2 am.