The report says the U.S. hired a number of public relations companies to put a positive face on the reconstruction effort. One of them is the Washington-based Rendon Group, which the report says has "close ties to the Bush administration". The Pentagon has awarded Rendon more than 56 million dollars in contracts since Sep. 11, 2001, "as part of a coordinated effort to disseminate positive press about America and its military in the developing world".

The contracts call for "tracking foreign reporters" and "pushing (and sometimes paying) news outlets worldwide to run articles and segments favourable to United States interests."

The report says Rendon was also granted a contract in 2004 to train staff at President Hamid Karzai's office in the art of public relations, and "later received another hefty grant of 3.9 million dollars from the Pentagon to develop a counter-narcotics campaign with the Afghan interior ministry -- despite objections from Karzai and the State Department."

The report charges that the contracting system used by international donors is broken. It says, "USAID gives contracts to American companies (and the World Bank and IMF give contracts to companies from their donor countries) who take huge chunks off the top and hire layers and layers of subcontractors who take their cuts, leaving only enough for sub-par construction."