Pentagon tries to dump the disastrous news
by smintheus
Mon Dec 18, 2006 at 09:33:00 PM PST
The Bush administration, always bursting with embarrassing information, is famously addicted to the document-dump. I discovered long ago that the ritual dumps on Friday evenings had become so widely anticipated that the White House began experimenting with Thursday document-dumps. But any convenient day for burying the bad news will be welcome among this gang.
Given that Robert Gates was sworn in as the new Defense Secretary yesterday, I naturally went looking to see what information the Pentagon would be flushing out the back. The website did not make it particularly easy to discover where the trash was buried. No mention on the “Today in DOD” or the “News releases” pages.
But eventually I smelled it out. I knew there would be something, somewhere. It’s the week before Christmas.
Yesterday, it turns out, the Pentagon released to the public its quarterly report on the situation in Iraq, as mandated by Congress. The study is dated November 30. So its public release had to wait a mere 19 days.
Read the rest here.
