Fred Kaplan read a Defense Times article in which military brass openly talk about bribing Iraqi commanders before we invaded Iraq. Al Jazeera was running stories about this right after the fall of Baghdad, and it wasn’t picked up at all in the US media. (Perhaps they didn’t think that Americans would be interested in the fact that we blitzed through Iraq in record time because Iraqi soldiers were paid not to show up for work.) He also picks up the thread of recordings of the Iraqi officers talking about banned weapons that Colin Powell played during his February 5 UN speech, wondering about the same things that I did back on May 7.