What Is Mainstream?

Holly Bailey writes for Newsweek: "The small group of journalists traveling with Cheney were waiting to board the plane en route to Kabul, when sirens suddenly erupted around the Bagram military base. Reporters saw plumes of smoke rise in the distance. A loudspeaker announced that the base was under attack--and Secret Service agents rushed the press to the plane.

"The vice president's office was careful to say that Cheney was never in any danger. . . .

"But tensions at the base were palpable. Cheney was supposed to have had a three-hour visit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai; the visit was cut to just an hour."

Security had been almost unprecedented, even before the attack.

Olivier Knox writes for AFP: "Security fears led US Vice President Dick Cheney to exchange his Air Force Two suite for a high-tech trailer chained to the floor of a cavernous military plane for his visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan. . . .

"Traveling reporters were given strict instructions before Cheney arrived first in Pakistan: No saying he was leaving from Oman, no saying he was flying on a C-17 transport aircraft rather than his usual Boeing, no saying when he arrived, no saying in Islamabad that he would fly on to Bagram, and so on.

"The journalists were only allowed to discuss the trip with their spouse or significant other and one superior at their news organisation, on penalty of seeing the entire media squad dropped from the visit."

Chicago Tribune reporter Mark Silva has been blogging the trip, and has more the military plane Cheney used for the flights into and out of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"This particular C-17, a hulking gray cargo jet out of Charleston, S.C., is dubbed The Spirit of Strom Thurmond, with the name painted decoratively in black above the front passenger door that Cheney boarded," Silva writes.

In another blog post, Silva writes: "The vice president spent an unexpected rainy and chilly night inside a reportedly comfortable special VIP container at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, having been snowed and rained in the night before, causing his planned meeting Monday with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to be delayed."

The pool reporters, meanwhile, had to make do in some fairly inhospitable army barracks.

Pakistan Watch

David E. Sanger writes in the New York Times: "Just hours after Vice President Dick Cheney delivered a stiff private message to President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan, the Pakistani government lashed out Monday with a series of statements insisting that 'Pakistan does not accept dictation from any side or any source.'