Evening Wrapup

EVENING WRAPUP….The Washington Monthly site has once again slowed down to such a degree that I can barely add new posts. So instead of writing separate posts, I’m going to write about a bunch of things all at once:

• The Killian memos: The Washington Post reports that a “senior CBS official” named one of their sources as Killian’s immediate superior, retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges. (I was told the same thing by my source.) The memos were read to Hodges over the phone and he confirmed that “these are the things that Killian had expressed to me at the time.” And: “The senior CBS official said the network had talked to four typewriting and handwriting experts ‘who put our concerns to rest’ and confirmed the authenticity of Killian’s signature.”

  However, CBS refused to say who their experts were, and Killian’s widow scoffed at their story:

  “I don’t think there were any documents. He was not a paper person,” she said, adding that she was “livid” at CBS. A CBS reporter contacted her briefly before Wednesday night’s broadcasts, she said, but did not ask her to authenticate the records.

  In other words, things are still up in the air. At this point, there are enough legitimate questions about these memos that I really think CBS is going to have to provide additional information if they want them to be taken seriously.

• Cheney on al-Qaeda: Dick Cheney is still claiming that Saddam Hussein gave safe haven to al-Qaeda. I guess there’s literally nothing that’s going to shut him up on this point.

  He also said ? correctly ? that “the ultimate threat we face today” is the possibility of a nuclear attack on an American city by a terrorist group. However, I’d take this more seriously from Cheney if the Bush administration had actually shown much interest in nuclear nonproliferation over the past four years.

• Ghost detainees: Finally, the Army admitted today that they didn’t hide just a few Iraqi prisoners from the Red Cross, they hid “dozens, to perhaps up to 100.”

  And why did they hide these prisoners? Because the CIA asked them to. And what did the CIA do with them? We don’t know. And were the prisoners ever returned to normal military custody? We don’t know that either. Lovely.

With that, I’m going to call it a night and hope the site is behaving better by tomorrow morning.