Over the weekend

* Patrick Cockburn and Tom Engelhardt have exceedingly grim reviews of what's happened over the past week in the Iraq.

* Dexter Filkins of the NY Times reports that the US military is considering a "year end drive" to retake areas of Iraq that have fallen outside of its control.

* So it's final. No WMD in Iraq. Ho hum.

* In related essays, Mark Danner looks at the hidden story of Abu Ghraib and Marjorie Cohn explores the Bush administration's war crimes, along with their cover-up.

* Salon's Eric Boehlert offers a useful primer on questions about Bush's Guard Duty, particularly in the wake of the flap over the discredited CBS memos.

* Remember when Presidential campaigns used to be about the issues? asks Jason Leopold.

* "It's ironic that John Kerry's character is under assault for the most courageous political act of his life -- his opposition to the Vietnam War," observes Robert Jensen. But rather than embracing that part of his personal history, Kerry is running from it. As a result, Jensen laments, "a campaign controversy that could help the United States come to terms with bigger truths about its brutal history of empire building is being used by both parties in ways that obscure the truth."

* Here's a revised version of the afterword to Noam Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival. It's worth a read.