Some musings on media happenings over the weekend:

• The White House may be shunning Fox News, but its surrogates are still pushing the administration's line. Rhode Island's senior senator, Jack Reed, was on Fox News Sunday this weekend doing battle with Rudy Giuliani over Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try some of the alleged 9/11 terrorists in civilian court.

Months after President Obama pledged to appoint a cybersecurity czar, the White House has failed to act. With health care and Iraq at the top of the agenda, this is not the stuff of headlines. But holes in the nation's cyber defenses are a serious, if little-noticed, liability.

Congressman James Langevin and Congressman Michael McCaul co-chaired the Center for Strategic and International Studies Commission on Cybersecurity for the 44th Presidency, which outlined the risk to the nation.

To many observers in the US, 9/11 marked the end of civil action and what might be considered other half-actions in the fight against Islamic terrorists. Yet a Providence lawyer with McIntyre, Tate & Lynch has played a lead role in pursuing a different course, and he's talking about it on Monday. Bill Rodriguez reports:

Strange times:

List of some of the songs played to detainees by US military interrogators in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, according to Reprieve:

Enter Sandman - Metallica Bodies - Drowning Pool.

Shoot to Thrill - AC/DC.

Hell's Bells - AC/DC.

I Love You - from the "Barney and Friends" children's TV show.

A local appearance tomorrow by former Army interrogator Mike Ritz is especially timely given fresh revelations about the Bush administration's support of waterboarding:

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaida suspects - documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

Roger Williams University is scheduled to receive a visit at 7 tonight by Tom Trento. Here's how the College Republican Federation of Rhode Island, which is sponsoring his appearance, describes it:

This Thursday Tom Trento will be heading to Roger Williams University to give a proactive presentation on Radical Islam, the angry left, and gutless citizens! Tom will be showing "Wild & Crazy" pictures and videos from the Democratic and Republican Convention!! ( You do not want to miss the "anarchists".

The dangerous state of affairs in Afghanistan, which became an afterthought following the invasion of Iraq, is apparently off the radar of mass consciousness.

From Rasmussen Reports:

Nearly half of Americans (48%) now believe the United States and its allies are winning the War on Terror, as opposed to 20% who give the nod to the terrorists, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national survey.

A prominent Rhode Island Democrat with whom I spoke yesterday expects Barack Obama to win the November election in a blowout.

Dan Kennedy, however, writing in the Guardian, is not so sure.

Be afraid. It's not just a warning - it's a campaign slogan. For Republicans, fear is a cudgel with which they've bludgeoned their way to victory since the Reagan era, and it's acquired an extra emotional wallop since 9/11.

Got $162 billion more for war? No problem.

But what about that Osama guy?

From today's New York Times:

Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden’s terrorism network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.

Yes, kids, it's time for another installment of are we the butt of technology's cruel joke?

What's worse: that there's a chain e-mail making the rounds, falsely claiming that Al Gore gave Oliver North a hard time when he tried to warn the world about (wrong again) Osama bin Laden?

'Threatened? By whom?' the senator questioned.

We remember how Keven McKenna unsuccessfully challenged the role of Frank J. Williams, chief justice of the RI Supreme Court, in serving on a federal appeals panel concerning US terror detainees. Now, as Eric Tucker of the Providence AP recently reported, Williams is still waiting for his first case in that arena:

Maureen Dowd went to yesterday's US Senate hearing:

It’s hard to follow the narrative of our misadventure in Iraq. We went in to help the Shiites that we betrayed in the first Gulf War shake off their Sunni tormentors. But then, predictably for everyone except the chuckleheaded W. and Cheney, the Shiites began tormenting the Sunnis.

A lot of Americans forget that most of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. So the appearance this afternoon by media bigfoot Karen Elliott House, at Brown's Watson Institute, promises to be interesting:

Monday, April 7, 2008 at 4:00 PM

Directors Lectures Series on Contemporary International Affairs

Early on during the war in Iraq, there was talk of how Americans officers were checking out The Battle of Algiers, a movie about the Algerian insurgency against the French in the 1950s, for clues about the politics of insurgency and counter-insurgency. Not that it seems to have helped much. Anyway, the Watson Institute at Brown is screening the movie tomorrow.

As has been reported, Colin Powell took aside President Bush before the US invaded Iraq and told him about the Pottery Barn Rule. In other words, you break it, you own it.

We recently looked at some of the impacts of the war:

[There's] a tab in the trillions, tens of thousands dead, US troops being sent into battle without proper equipment, veterans getting shabby treatment, America's global standing seriously diminished, terrorists strengthened, and no end in sight .