From the blogopause

Now that I'm a big evil postdoc, serving at the pleasure of the Military-Industrial Complex, I've begun taking Aviation Week and Space Technology (thoroughly buried behind a firewall, eerily unavailable at newsstands).

So I was reading this article (I read it for the articles) in the Jan. 22 issue called "A Need to Succeed: Time runs short for the White House to influence military events in Iraq," when this sentence kinda poked me in the ribs. The authors are talking about the latest, intelligence-based plans to "target the insurgents and their supporters":

It is part of the White House plan to go after targets and people that were previously exempt from attack for political reasons.

Shudder, shudder, and shudder.

Shudder #1: "the White House plan" ("too big a fool"). Shudder #2: "previously exempt" ("exercise restraint"). Shudder #3: "political" ("and I mean everything").

Also, for what it's worth, I'm inclined to grant Aviation Week the benefit of the doubt about this sort of stuff. If you're going to "build the death planes," you need reliable information. Other parts of the article above are cited to anonymous intelligence and Pentagon "officials" (not senior). And, anecdotally, a friend of mine who used to run a gigantic Pentagon research lab tells me he and his research-lab cronies called the magazine "Leak Week" because of all the stuff, "we shouldn't have been reading" that they found in its pages.