PETRAEUS TO REPORT ON SEPTEMBER 11th. Today, listening to the radio, I heard reiterated what the National Review reported yesterday after a media conference call with Republican presidential kinda hopeful Sen. John McCain: that Gen. David Petraeus will testify before the Senate about the contents of his vaunted report (which, according to whom you believe, he may or may not write himself) on September 11. A caller to the Diane Rehm Show today asked Rehm's panel of defense policy experts -- Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, former Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress and Washington Post reporter Jonathan Weisman -- about the unseemliness of the timing, and all concurred that it was simply a matter of complications regarding the congressional schedule. Perhaps so (I'm not yet convinced), but I really think it should be rescheduled to any other day; I don't care if it's a Sunday. The administration has exploited the pain of that memory one too many times. Even if that's not the intention here of some White House political genius, more than half of the population will never be convinced of that. So let us remember a horrible day when we all came together without linking it to the war that is tearing us apart. --Adele M. Stan
