From Talking Points Memo:
There is chatter in Pakistani intelligence circles that the US has let the Pakistanis know that the optimal time for bagging 'high value' al Qaida suspects in the untamed Afghan-Pakistani border lands is the last ten days of July, 2004.
But of course.
Memo to self: soon as you get done worrying about oil prices, start worrying about food prices. Memo to John Kerry: it's all the fault of the Chinese. Memo to Brad: yes, yes, that's a joke, really, I know trade is good for everyone in the long run (which I believe to be some time after November). No manholes in Coral Gables, so I don't have to worry about falling down one.
Karl Auerbach of the CaveBear Blog has been thinking about Google's GMail service and has figured out a way to turn the tables on it, Manipulating Google's Gmail for fun and profit.
I'm not sure how practical this is, but I like the spirit of it.
According to Milblogger Citizen Smash, one of the stories I linked to below is false: there is no general order preventing soldiers in Iraq from using e-mail, but rather a localized rule to stop GI's helping themselves to private bandwidth. According to Smash it's an example of how rumors get started:
It would appear that KBR contractors at Ginmar’s camp had set up their own wireless Internet system, and some industrious GIs have since set up their own unofficial Internet café, piggy-backing off the KBR system. But now the KBR folks are upset that the soldiers are slowing down their access (poor babies), so they’ve decided to end the “free ride.”
Not, he says, a general rule blocking access. Rather, the general rule was and remains that e-mail access is spotty, and mostly a matter of private enterprise.
Thank you to all the people who have been reading, and linking to, Discourse.net.
Below I have a discussion of traffic trends, comments and comment deletions, and other bloggy stuff. If you're reading this directly, I've hidden it behind the “There's More” link so as not to bother people who have better things to do. If you are taking the feed, my apologies.
Even the UK's Telegraph is running away from this one.
Rumsfeld is running this operation like a pizza parlour: Mr Rumsfeld has expressed his profound regret, although it is not entirely clear whether that is chiefly for the treatment of the Iraqis or the political damage that the scandal has caused the US government. He has, however, refused to resign, and – according to the recent polls – 70 per cent of the American public agrees with his decision.
I found it rather confusing, however, when Mr Rumsfeld also indicated that he would “resign in a minute” if he felt he could not be an effective leader. On that basis, he should be gone already: he has already proved an ineffective leader, and will be much less effective in the wake of this miserable scandal. For what has leaked out of Abu Ghraib, along with the stomach-churning whiff of chaos and sadism, is the fundamental incompetence in the running of the US military from the top down.
As for George W. Bush, the Telegraph produces the best narrative of events from a bureaucratic perspective I've seen yet. Read this article and ask yourself how it could be that no one told the President?
At some stages the answer plausibly is, 'Because no one showed the pictures to Rumsfeld' (perhaps on the theory that if you keep the pictures locked in a safe in Iraq, they're less likely to leak?) and thus he had no chance to see just how bad it was.
But the plausibility of that answer vanishes once the Pentagon learned that 60 Minutes had the pictures. And still no one told Bush. Rumsfeld et al are trying to say it was just a mistake. No way. Too many people made that mistake. No, it's either a massive CYA attempt gone wrong (and you'd think they'd been around too long the think the press would sit on this story for long? or are they that used to a tame press?) or, most likely, no one thought to tell GWB because, well, why would you?
(I'd sure like to know when they told Cheney — why hasn't anyone asked that question?)
Jotwell Blenderlaw