Earlier today I was wondering why the Taguba report on the torture of Iraqi prisoners surfaced now. Why -- and how -- did the New Yorker "obtain" the report? It made me suspicious, given the Bush administration's pattern of operation in the past, that somebody might have something to hide. You know, to cover up a major scandal, release the dirt on a relatively minor one, wait a few media cycles, then announce the major one -- hoping the media frenzy on the first will drown out the second.
Well, today I got my answer: the Pentagon now says it's going to keep the current level of soldiers (about 135,000) in Iraq until the end of 2005. In a not unrelated story, the Toronto Star is reporting on Pentagon plans to reinstate the draft, bump the age limit up to 34, and include women in the draft.
The Abu Ghraib situation, while horrible, is just the kind of scandal that's a perfect distraction from this sort of thing: everyone agrees it's terrible, and all their rhetorical heat gets used up decrying it. Meanwhile, politically untouchable stories get to fly in under the radar, hidden in plain sight.