micah holmquist's irregular thoughts and links |
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Welcome to the musings and notes of a Cadillac, Michigan based writer named Micah Holmquist, who is bothered by his own sarcasm. Please send him email at micahth@chartermi.net. Holmquist's full archives are listed here.
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Sites Holmquist trys, and often fails, to go no more than a couple of days without visiting (some of which Holmquist regularly swipes links from without attribution) Aljazeera.Net English Blogs that for one reason or another Holmquist would like to read on at least something of a regular basis (always in development) Thivai Abhor |
Thursday, July 24, 2003
War notes "In an exclusive interview with CBS News, three men who claim to have participated in several recent and deadly attacks on U.S. soldiers say they're not doing it for love of Saddam -- but instead for God and their country," CBS News writes in July 21 story. Robert Fisk says the deaths of Uday and Qusay will likely only increase resistance to the U.S. occupation. I find it very interesting that the U.S. military is not generally catching those responsible for these attacks. *** Salam Pax writes about the aftermath of the deaths of the sons. *** "Prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the CIA failed to act on intelligence it had about hijackers, the FBI was unable to track al Qaeda in the United States, and key National Security Agency communications intercepts never were circulated, a congressional investigation has concluded," Curt Anderson of the AP writes today. "But even had these and many other failures not occurred, no evidence surfaced in the probe by the House and Senate intelligence committees to show that the government could have prevented the attacks that killed more than 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania." *** "The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear material in Africa, White House officials said yesterday," Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus write in yesterday's Washington Post. "The officials made the disclosure hours after they were alerted by the CIA to the existence of a memo sent to Bush's deputy national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, on Oct. 6. The White House said Bush's chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, on Friday night discovered another memo from the CIA, dated Oct. 5, also expressing doubts about the Africa claims." This AP story by Tom Raum on the same topic is also worth reading. *** "The deputy secretary of defense said yesterday that some key assumptions underlying the U.S. occupation of Iraq were wrong, tacitly acknowledging the judgment of current and former U.S. officials critical of the occupation planning," Peter Slevin and Dana Priest write in today's Washington Post. "Paul D. Wolfowitz, briefing reporters after a 41/2-day trip to Iraq, said that in postwar planning, defense officials made three assumptions that 'turned out to underestimate the problem,' beginning with the belief that removing Saddam Hussein from power would also remove the threat posed by his Baath Party. In addition, they erred in assuming that significant numbers of Iraqi army units, and large numbers of Iraqi police, would quickly join the U.S. military and its civilian partners in rebuilding Iraq, he said." The transcript of what Wolfowitz said is here. *** Yesterday U.S. General John Keane announced a new troop rotation policy for Iraq: ...before I get to the specifics of the rotation policy itself, I want to let you in on the policy guidelines that are actually driving this policy. And I think it's important to understand them.Essentially it is a first-in-first-out policy. *** |