The magic number

Today’s must-read: Mark Benjamin at Salon on the “collateral damage estimate” prepared before air strikes, and why the magic number is 30. Rather too far down in this longish article is that they rarely do the assessments they are supposed to do afterwards to see if they actually killed the number of civilians they had decided in advance was acceptable, a fact which tells you everything you need to know about the Pentagon’s commitment to not killing civilians.

Walter Pincus notes in the WaPo that while Congress just voted again against creating permanent military bases in Iraq, the US military is spending billions of dollars in construction each year without specifying where any of it is going. I’m guessing an 18-million-hole golf course.