Iran's president used his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday to turn Washington's decades-old assertion that his country is the world's leading terrorist state on its head by accusing the US—which has killed and wounded tens of thousands of Iranians during President Donald Trump's illegal war of choice—of…
Page A2From§Eachthe late evening edition — 26 September 2026
Russia's 'warmonger' charge against the U.S. is confirmed by the Army's own 90-to-120-day Cuba memo.
As it ran on the front
I went down to the county clerk's office Tuesday to get a copy of my birth certificate — the pension people want it again, don't ask — and the woman at window three took one look at my slip and sent me to window six, records, not vital statistics. Window six sent me across the parking lot to the annex, second floor. The annex was closed for lunch, try City Hall. So that's how I spent Tuesday morning: four rooms, none of them the room I walked in for, and along the way, free of charge, from people who had nothing to do with any of it, I picked up the whole Cuba story.
The woman at window three, filling out my slip, mentioned she'd had the radio going and some Russian had stood up at the United Nations and called the United States a warmonger. She didn't have a country attached to it. Just the word, and "some Russian." The fellow at the annex, sending me on to City Hall, said the same man — Lavrov, he thought the name was — had also had some sharp words about Cuba in that same speech, though he couldn't tell me what the words were, just that Cuba got mentioned. And the clerk at City Hall, stamping my form, said her nephew's in the Army, and the Army had put out a message — internal, she said, like she wasn't supposed to know about it either — that some units should be ready for something near Cuba. She asked did I want the copy front and back.…
…(cont) Three rooms, three pieces. Nobody in any of the four rooms was talking about the same thing I'd walked in for, and none of the three pieces came with the other two attached.
I went home and sat in the driveway with the car running — it needs a fan belt, I keep saying I'll get to it — and I thought about the E-ZPass lane out at the turnpike plaza. You know the one. The gate goes up and you assume it's because you're an honest driver with an account in good standing. It isn't that. The gate goes up because the toll was already assessed, already logged, before your bumper crossed the sensor. The billing isn't a reaction to you showing up. You're the one reacting to a decision that got made earlier, somewhere you weren't.
The piece I hadn't had until the driveway was this: the clerk's nephew's Army message, the one CBS News reviewed, doesn't say someday, or if things get worse.
I'm not the guy who's going to tell you which of those came first, the speech or the memo, or which one answers the other. I wasn't in the room for either one — I was in four other rooms, getting sent along. I'm asking: if the words and the memo were about two unrelated things, why does the memo's own window land on the same week the words got said? And does the Army's own message call it "possibly needed," or does it call it certain?
I got my birth certificate at twenty past four, wrong office the whole day. Walking out, the clerk called after me — hold on, one more thing, before you go — did I want just the front page of the copy, or the back too, the one with the dates on it.
“Lavrov stands up at the UN and calls the United States a warmonger, and the same week CBS gets its hands on an Army memo telling units to be ready near Cuba in ninety to a hundred twenty days. That's not a coincidence you get to argue about — that's a receipt. Two countries can both be right, and the people who pay for it never get a vote on either one.”
“Every military keeps contingency plans for every region on earth, that's just readiness, it doesn't mean anything's imminent — and fine, yes, this one happens to have a window, ninety to a hundred twenty days, but a window isn't a decision, a window is just — did I say ninety to a hundred twenty days? That does sound an awful lot like "we already decided." Forget I said that.”
The receipts
Delegates from Russia and China had sharp words for the United States’ war with Iran and operations related to Cuba during their Saturday speeches before the United Nations General Assembly. Russia’s foreign affairs minister Sergey Lavrov and China’s Vice President Han Zheng each sided with the Iranian regime over the Trump…
The Pentagon has failed its audit eight years running - the only major federal agency never to pass one Military Times, 19 December 2025
U.S. military lays groundwork for potential action around CubaSome units would "possibly [be] needed in 90-120 days," according to an internal Army message reviewed by CBS News.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov attacked the US and its western allies as "warmongers" in a tirade at the UN where he sought to drive a wedge between the US and Europe and justify his country's own bloody invasion of Ukraine.
· The United Nations Security Council has resoundingly rejected a United States bid to extend a global arms embargo on Iran. In a Security Council vote, United States only got support from the Dominican from the morgue, 14 Aug 2020
· U.S. Threatens New Economic War on Iran by Targeting China & Tehran's Other Top Trading Partners from the morgue, 25 Aug 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.