General Update...
by Riverbend

The cousin, his wife S. and their two daughters have been houseguests these last three days. They drove up to the house a couple of days ago with several bags of laundry. “There hasn’t been water in our area for three days…” The cousins wife huffed as she dragged along a black plastic bag of dirty clothes. “The water came late last night and disappeared three hours later… what about you?” Our water had not been cut off completely, but it came and went during the day.

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Tomgram: Mark Danner on Smoking Signposts to Nowhere

Imagine that the Pentagon Papers or the Watergate scandal had broken out all over the press -- no, not in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but in newspapers in Australia or Canada. And that, facing their own terrible record of reportage, of years of being cowed by the Nixon administration, major American papers had decided that this was not a story worthy of being covered. Imagine that, initially, they dismissed the revelatory documents and information that came out of the heart of administration policy-making; then almost willfully misread them, insisting that evidence of Pentagon planning for escalation in Vietnam or of Nixon administration planning to destroy its opponents was at best ambiguous or even nonexistent; finally, when they found that the documents wouldn't go away, they acknowledged them more formally with a tired ho-hum, a knowing nod on editorial pages or in news stories. Actually, they claimed, these documents didn't add up to much because they had run stories just like this back then themselves. Yawn. This is, of course, something like the crude pattern that coverage in the American press has followed on the Downing Street memo, then memos.

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July, 2002

This isn't going away. It may be a slow build, but the danger to the Bush administration is that there really is a break in the dam, at this point -- on a wide variety of fronts, previous snippets and stories are being merged together to finally reveal the larger storyline. Bolton, the DSM, ElBaradei, the movement of funds and troops away from the active search for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in preparation for the Iraq action, the heightened bombings being carried out against Iraq in the period before the involvement of the U.N. -- rather than a collection of discrete stories, the overall plot is coming together. And it is damning.

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Army Group Steiner

In Hitler's bunker, he repeatedly said that Army Group Steiner would rescue Berlin. The fact that Army Group Steiner was a ramshackle group of units and unable to save itself was of no concern to Hitler. In his mind, Army Group Steiner was the solution to the desperate straits of the German Army. Just as the cowards at Powerline and in the Congress embrace torture, Duncan Hunter's shameful performance last week is among the lowlights in American political history, Theresienstadt-like political theater. When you have old line spooks like Larry Johnson decry torture, they are scared for the US, and people like him, Pat Lang, Tony Cordesman and Ray McGovern are no liberal academics. When Bill Lind rants weekly about the destruction of the US Army, he's no member of Greenpeace. These are all mainstream cconservatives who are deeply afraid of what Bush is doing in Iraq.

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Republican senators challenge Bush's Iraq optimism

President Bush needs to tell Americans the nation faces "a long, hard slog" in Iraq, a key Republican senator said on Sunday, and another said the White House was "disconnected from reality" in its optimism over the war.

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  thanks to Antiwar.com

Turning Point

Iraq is not Vietnam, all right, because there is no way the US can pull out now without severe consequences, namely the loss of our access to all the oil in the Middle East -- where two-thirds of the world's remaining oil is.

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