Wonder what it's like to guard State Department facilities in Kabul? In photos first published by Gawker, security contractors get their kicks peeing on one another, simulating anal sex, doing "butt shots," and "eating potato chips out of ass cracks."

These photos were provided to us by the Project on Government Oversight, which has just written a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton detailing its investigation into the "Lord of the Flies environment" that has overtaken the private contractors who guard State Department employees in Kabul, Afghanistan. According to POGO, employees of ArmorGroup North America—a unit of contracting giant Wackenhut—get their jollies off by "deviant hazing [that] has created a climate of fear and coercion, with those who declined to participate often ridiculed, humiliated, demoted, or even fired."

What sort of hazing? The traditional desperately homoerotic frat boy kind, mostly involving eating and drinking things off of other men's butts. Also some nipple-biting, as you can see below. One POGO whistle blower described it thusly [PDF link]: "They have a group of sexual predators, deviants running rampant over there. No, they are not jamming guys in the ass per say [sic], but they are showing poor judgenment [sic]." Most of it appears to have been voluntary, but those who didn't really want to drink vodka shots out of the clenched butt-cheeks of their male co-workers were penalized and reported barricading themselves in their rooms. And sometimes the behavior extended to the locals:

An Afghan national employed as a food service worker at the guard corps' base at Camp Sullivan submitted a signed statement dated August 16, 2009, attesting that a guard force supervisor and four others entered a dining facility on August 1, 2009, wearing only short underwear and brandishing bottles of alcohol. Upon leaving the facility, the guard force supervisor allegedly grabbed the Afghan national by the face and began abusing him with foul language, saying, "You are very good for fXXXing." The Afghan national reported that he "was too afraid of them I could not tell them any thing."

So anyway, these are the people who are guarding our national security in Afghanistan, being paid vast multiples of what soldiers, sailors, and marines get with your tax dollars. Are these guys asking, or telling?

[Via Mother Jones.]