Seven months after the "Rendon Group was hired to help Afghan President Hamid Karzai with media relations in early 2004," both Karzai and then-U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad were "ready to get rid of Rendon." They complained that the secretive PR firm was being paid too much - $1.4 million - for "not enough work." Yet Rendon won a second U.S.-funded contract worth $3.9 million, to "create a media team for Afghan anti-drug programs." The goal was "to train five Afghan press officers ... but it trained only three, and one has left her job." U.S. Embassy officials estimated that the work done "could have been performed for about $200,000." That contract expired in October, but Rendon is reportedly under consideration for a new multimillion-dollar, "three-year deal to work on counternarcotics public relations" in Afghanistan. Rendon's supporters say the firm "did an excellent job in a tough circumstance."

"Many of the articles that appear in scientific journals under the byline of prominent academics are actually written by ghostwriters in the pay of drug companies." Used by doctors "to guide their care of patients," these "seemingly objective articles ... are often part of a marketing campaign." The New England Journal of Medicine recently revealed that a 2000 article on Vioxx "omitted information about heart attacks among patients taking the drug. ... The deletions were made by someone working from a Merck computer." A 1999 "publications strategy" prepared for Pfizer by a WPP Group agency listed 81 proposed articles, promoting Zoloft for everything from "panic disorder to pedophilia." One physiologist hired by Elsevier's Excerpta Medica says she was asked to "slant" a 2002 paper in favor of a Johnson & Johnson drug. Many journals ask for disclosure, but say their ability to weed out ghostwriters is limited. "I don't give lie-detector tests," said the Journal of the American Medical Association's chief editor.