It seemed fishy at the time -- confusion about why exactly Dick Cheney's plane was stopping in Singapore; the Aussies thought it was an unscheduled stop but the spin from Cheney's office was that it was scheduled. Then the weird spin about a suddenly not very important bag that someone had left on the ground near the plane. But the media still decide to move along to another story. And now Cheney pops up on a SURPRISE! visit to Pakistan. Why do the hacks believe a word that Cheney's office says?
Irish protestors should note that the odds are now much higher that Cheney's plane will stop in Shannon, as the Atlantic route is now the more likely one home.
UPDATE 27 February: The Cheney curse continues. His security team apparently considering Pakistan so dangerous that his visit couldn't be announced in advance, he then flys to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, presumably because Kabul is considered too dangerous and then gets stuck there because of a snowstorm, in time to hear a Taliban suicide attack this morning. The incoherence of the war on terror -- tied down in Iraq while the Pakistan-Afghanistan situation spirals out of control -- crystallised.
Note also that news accounts on Monday had mentioned Cheney's presence in Bagram, so there was not necessarily a leak from inside the Pakistani or Afghan governments directly to the Taliban. Anyway, Cheney's last reported location was Muscat so the Shannon stopover is still a possibility.
[Dan Froomkin has a nice roundup of the late stages of Cheney's trip, including the news that he flew from Singapore to Muscat on his usual jet but then used a military plane ("The Spirit of Strom Thurmond") with a mobile home inside for the travels from there on].
FINAL UPDATE: Cheney's refuelling stop was in Britain.
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