Pentagon watchdog declines to investigate the Ukraine internet slowdown its contractor already admitted ordering, calling it contractual.

…(cont) So, the fourteenth. The Guardian, a Wednesday. Common Dreams has the same day under concerns about the government's reliance on one man. And then there's the clip from Thursday the fifteenth. The headline over it reads "Ukraine Blames Elon Musk for Internet Outage Amid Russian Strike." The address of the page itself says Musk suggests Trump is behind the internet outage in Ukraine. Same clip, two names on it. That's the first shape of the answer: you ask who turned it down and you get pointed at the government.

Thursday is also the letter. Four Republican senators signed on — today's Examiner calls the group bipartisan, so take your pick — expressing "grave concern" over Ukraine's sudden loss of access to intelligence-sharing and high-speed Starlink data, which it needs to intercept Russian drones. Here's the part I kept going back over in the shop lot. They asked the inspector general to investigate whether senior Defense officials played a role. Officials. Their word. Not mine, I wouldn't know one from the other.

Ten days on, Saturday the twenty-fourth, Ukraine's military says the connection is stable again. Guardian carries it. And then hours after that announcement — hours — the man who owns the company accuses the Ukrainian military of violating the company's terms. And that same Saturday he says he gave the order. Morning Star has it in Sunday's paper, and I'm reading off the page here: he "admitted on Saturday that he gave the order for his company SpaceX to restrict the speed" on the service in Ukraine. President Zelensky had already said the Starlink and Starshield links were back to the speeds they ran before restrictions that disrupted front-line operations for more than a week. So there's the second shape: the owner says he did it.

Now today. Thursday the twenty-ninth. Five days after that. The inspector general writes back to the lawmakers and declines to open the investigation, and the phrase ABC reports is that it was a contractual matter.

And here's where I'm slow, so bear with me. Last winter the car wouldn't turn over in the cold, so I brought it in. Kid takes it around back, I sit in the lot with the dog and a coffee, and the next morning the thing won't go over twenty-five. First day I call: nobody touched it. Second day: probably your gas. Third day the kid tells me he set it down himself, because I'd been running it wrong, which is in the ticket I signed, apparently. So I ask for the service manager, because what I want is a name — which one of them turned my car down, and whether anybody in that building told him to. And the manager hears me out, very patient, nice man, and tells me it's a contractual matter between me and the shop. He works for the shop.

So I'd like to ask it the third time and then I'll go. The letter asked which Defense officials played a role. Does the sentence that came back name an official? And if the restriction was a contract question, who are the two parties to it — the page says the company owns the service, so who is the other one?

Hold the elevator a second, would you. One thing. The senators asked which officials. The owner says he gave the order himself. Both of those are on paper, in front of me, right here. Which of them is the contractual matter?