HERE’S THE LINK to the 9/11 Commission report. I can’t get it to open at the moment, because of high traffic I suppose. I’ll try later. In the meantime, the folks at The Corner are posting tidbits.

SUCCESSFUL ANTITERRORISM: Giving credit where it’s due. But have you ever heard of Diana Dean? And why not?

JAMES LILEKS’ SYNDICATED COLUMN is on the Sandy Berger affair:

Hey, it’s happened to us all. You have an orange for lunch, your hands get sticky. Things happen, and besides, none of the memos could possibly have cast the Clinton team in a bad light, of course.

But let’s play everyone’s favorite game, “What If He Was a Republican?” Imagine Dick Cheney caught filling his socks with documents on pre-Sept. 11 security procedures. Imagine a hidden camera snapping shots of Condi Rice slipping secret memos into her foundation garments. We wouldn’t be hearing about impeachment, we’d be debating the probity of rolling a guillotine toward the White House, and whether the heads should be arranged alphabetically on the fence spikes, or by seniority.

So what do we do with a guy who not only treats his trousers as a diplomatic pouch but was national security adviser during the years when al-Qaida feasted on American laziness?

Blame Bush, if you listen to David Sanger and Eric Lichtblau.

ANDREW SULLIVAN: “C’mon, Keller. You can do better.”

WAS KERRY THE ONLY ONE WHO DIDN’T KNOW? I found this quote from the otherwise-unimpressive New York Times story interesting, and it gets more interesting as I think about it:

On Wednesday evening, Mr. Berger’s spokesman, Joe Lockhart, said: “Mr. Berger never passed any classified information to the Kerry campaign. Any suggestion to the contrary cannot be supported by any facts.”

At the Kerry campaign, officials say they were taken by surprise by the accusation. It appears that Mr. Berger did not disclose the investigation to Mr. Kerry’s aides. Mr. Lockhart said that was because “we were dealing in good faith with the Department of Justice on this matter for many months, and part of our agreement was that this was not to be discussed beyond Sandy’s legal team.”

So Berger knew he was under investigation. As we’ve seen earlier, Bill Clinton says that he knew months ahead. And, I guess, so did Joe Lockhart, serving as Berger’s “spokesman.” (Hence the “we” and “our” — and who else might be included in those terms? And why does a retired government official have a spokesman, anyway? Beats me.) Yet John Kerry says that he “didn’t have a clue.”

If I were Kerry, I’d worry about what else my staff wasn’t telling me.

UPDATE: Reader Jim Geraghty emails:

There’s one element strangely missing from this story. Kerry has said he didn’t know, and high-level Kerry advisors with good records of veracity have said the campaign didn’t know until the story broke.

So where’s the anger?

I’m not expecting Kerry himself to snarl, “No, that [BAD WORD]ing two-faced son of a [ANOTHER BAD WORD] didn’t tell me about a FBI investigation, even though he found the time to tell Bill [REALLY BAD WORD]ing Clinton!” But where are the anonymous quotes from Kerry’s supporters trashing Berger? Where are the “how could Berger do this to our guy” comments?

According to Kerry’s version of events, Berger just stabbed his party’s man in the back by not telling him about the FBI investigation. Doesn’t anybody in the Democratic party want to call Berger a jerk?

This is a dog that has been very, very quiet lately.

Good point. They let him go swiftly, but didn’t act all that upset for what by any measure is a major blow to their campaign. That would tend to support Kevin Drum’s Democratic leaker theory.

MORE: “Bill Clinton may be laughing, but I’ll bet John Kerry isn’t.” I’m not sure.

SOME THOUGHTS on what weblogs add to news.

IRAQ, IRAN, SAUDI ARABIA, AND MORE: Check out Dan Darling’s war news roundup.

Because there’s more to the news than ketchup, or Sandy Berger’s socks.

And speaking of ketchup-blogging, Sean Hackbarth is at it again, with this proviso: “Cheap gimmick not endorsed by Glenn Reynolds.”

Because there has to be one cheap gimmick that I don’t endorse. . . .

DARFUR UPDATE: The Washington Post editorializes:

It is as though, in the wake of the West’s failure to prevent Rwanda’s genocide, the gods of history are asking, okay, if we give you a second chance and months of warning, will you do better? So far the prospect that 300,000 to 1 million people may perish — an estimate offered more than a month ago by Andrew S. Natsios, the head of the U.S. Agency for International Development — is failing to galvanize serious action.

Genocide works, because, fundamentally, the world doesn’t care. And the genocidaires can always find ready allies.

MAUREEN DOWD’S BACK, and Stephen Green is paying attention. Well, somebody has to.

GREG DJEREJIAN says that The New York Times has no shame in its treatment of the Berger story:

Rarely have I seen a major newspaper play a story in such brazenly partisan fashion.

It truly beggars belief.

Check out today’s lead NYT story on the unfolding Sandy Berger scandal by Eric Lichtblau and Dave Sanger.

Boy, is it a whopper. . . . Your baffled NYT readers might be excused, at this juncture, from thinking George Bush himself was stuffing docs down his socks and trousers.

Read his dissection. I think this tells us that they’re really scared that this story has real substance, and legs. As with Pravda, you have to read between the lines. And this Washington Post story may explain why they’re scared:

Last Oct. 2, former Clinton national security adviser Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger stayed huddled over papers at the National Archives until 8 p.m.

What he did not know as he labored through that long Thursday was that the same Archives employees who were solicitously retrieving documents for him were also watching their important visitor with a suspicious eye.

After Berger’s previous visit, in September, Archives officials believed documents were missing. This time, they specially coded the papers to more easily tell whether some disappeared, said government officials and legal sources familiar with the case. . . .

The government source said the Archives employees were deferential toward Berger, given his prominence, but were worried when he returned to view more documents on Oct. 2. They devised a coding system and marked the documents they knew Berger was interested in canvassing, and watched him carefully. They knew he was interested in all the versions of the millennium review, some of which bore handwritten notes from Clinton-era officials who had reviewed them. At one point an Archives employee even handed Berger a coded draft and asked whether he was sure he had seen it.

At the end of the day, Archives employees determined that that draft and all four or five other versions of the millennium memo had disappeared from the files, this source said.

This makes the “inadvertence” defense look less plausible, and the uniqueness of each draft — with different people’s handwritten notes — explains why he might have taken them all.

No wonder the Times people are frantically spinning. Ed Morrissey has more thoughts, and also links this story on more suspicious-sounding behavior:

WASHINGTON – Former national security adviser Sandy Berger repeatedly persuaded monitors assigned to watch him review top secret documents to break the rules and leave him alone, sources said yesterday.

Berger, accused of smuggling some of the secret files out of the National Archives, got the monitors out of the high-security room by telling them he had to make sensitive phone calls.

Berger also took “lots of bathroom breaks” that apparently aroused some suspicion, the source added.

It is standard security procedure to constantly monitor anyone with a security clearance who examines the type of code-word classified files stored in the underground archives vault in the building where tourists view the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Asked if guards left Berger alone in the classified reading room while he made calls, archives spokeswoman Susan Cooper replied, “I’m not going to say I haven’t heard that.”

Curiouser and curiouser. I suppose that it’s possible that this could all be innocent — but it sure doesn’t sound that way, does it?

UPDATE: Martin Peretz writes in The New Republic:

I do not like Sandy Berger; and I have not liked him since the first time we met, long ago during the McGovern campaign, not because of his politics since I more or less shared them then, but for his hauteur. . . . Still, here’s his story about the filched classified materials dealing with the foiled Al Qaeda millennium terrorist bombing plot from the National Archives: He inadvertently took home documents and notes about documents that he was not permitted to take from the archives; secondly, he inadvertently didn’t notice the papers in his possession when he got home and actually looked at them; and, thirdly, he inadvertently discarded some of these same files so that they are now missing.

Gone, in fact. One of his lawyers attributes this behavior to “sloppiness,” which may better explain his career as Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser and certainly describes his presentation of self in everyday life. But it is not an explanation of his conduct in the archives or, for that matter, at home. . . .

So my question is: Did Berger, who knew that he was under scrutiny since last fall, alert Kerry to the combustible fact that he was the subject of a criminal probe by the Justice Department and the FBI? My guess is not. Kerry is far too smart, too responsible to have kept him around had he known. But if Kerry didn’t know, it tells you a lot about Berger, too much, really.

(Emphasis added in all cases.) Yes. And, I should note, the New York Times’ frantic spinning of such a major story tells us a lot about the Times. Too much, really.

ANOTHER UPDATE: More disappearing documents here. Interesting.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Dave Johnson finds the phone-call bit intriguing: “Who was he calling and what where they talking about? The Feds should subpoena his Cell phone records. Then they need to see who that person called. This story has legs.” Perhaps they’ve already done that.

WHILE I BLOG ABOUT SOCKS, AND KETCHUP, Daniel Drezner and Henry Farrell have authored a scholarly paper on blogs.

WHAT ABOUT THE SOCKS? My emailers, left and right, seem to care a lot. I don’t. Fawn Hall’s underwear, I care about. Well, at least abstractly, in a 1987 sort of way. Sandy Berger’s socks — no. (I envision the old-fashioned kind, with garters, though they’re probably more like these high-fashion items). Close enough.

Anyway, The Daily Howler is raining scorn on the socks story, though he doesn’t engage this report. My position: Who cares? What I’d like to know is, in general, what was taken and why.

[Sock-blogging and Ketchup-blogging in one night? You need a vacation — Ed. I’m not sock-blogging — I’m blogging about not sock-blogging! . . .Riiigghht. –Ed. No, really. Now this is sock-blogging. A shameful thing. But sexy camisoles are another matter entirely. . . . I’m heading back to Kaus’s. It’s getting too exciting over here. –Ed. Good luck. He’s got socks, too!]

OUCH, AGAIN:

It’s deja vu all over again – it was only two years ago that Sandy Berger was promoting to TIME magazine a bold Clinton response to Al Qaeda that had been shelved by the incoming Administration.

However, a visit to a Congressional committee jogged his memory (scroll to “A Story Sullivan Likes”), and the Man with a Plan became the Man with a Nice Powerpoint Presentation – Sandy Berger admitted that the TIME story was, well, a story.

Again, ouch.

OUCH:

John Kerry to Tom Brokaw tonight:

Brokaw: “Did you know that [Berger] was under investigation?”

Kerry: “I didn’t have a clue, not a clue.”

Brokaw: “He didn’t share that with you?

Kerry: “I didn’t have a clue.”

Ouch.

HOW DID BERGER GET STUFF OUT OF THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES? Apparently, the rules are different for the big shots:

WASHINGTON — Pens are forbidden, pencils provided. Each scribbled piece of paper is checked, then stamped. Cell phones and jackets go into lockers. Prying eyes make sure nothing precious walks off.

Researchers digging into the nation’s history at the National Archives are watched every step of the way.

Despite precautions like those, former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger somehow came away with material he wasn’t supposed to have. . . .

The process is somewhat different for those who have security clearance or otherwise are allowed access to classified information, as Berger was.

“He was a special case,” Kornbluh said. “He was a former government official who was there to look at still-classified material.”

Some users are more equal than others. I hope that this new policy will be applied evenhandedly, though. Or maybe I should say “evenfootedly.”

DONALD SENSING looks at developments with China and Taiwan.

HMM. I’M GUESSING THAT THERE’S A CONNECTION between these two headlines:

Presbyterians divest themselves from Israel

Protestants May Lose Majority In U.S. Population

I’m a Presbyterian, though somewhat nominally. And one reason it’s nominal is the lack of moral seriousness in the church, as in many denominations. They have nothing — at least nothing worth listening to — to say that I can’t hear on NPR. Like the Anglicans in Britain, they worship political correctness (the URL for the Presbyterian Church is, appropriately enough, pcusa.org), and it has feet of clay. Er, or something clay-like.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I’m an elder in a PCUSA church and I am firmly convinced that the thing holds together–so far–solely becauses the pewdwellers have no clue what HQ is doing. HQ is in Louisville, but I’ve been dealing with that bunch of SDS retreads since they were on Riverside Drive in New York. They have been on the wrong side of just about everything that’s been important in the last thirty years. In the days of the Cold War, I used to inquire if there were as many as one issue of US military or foreign policy in which the PCUSA disagreed with the USSR. Of course, in many cases one side or the other (presuming they were different sides) had a position and the other didn’t. But nobody at HQ ever could tell me one where the two sides disagreed. They got mad when I asked. Once my term is over–end of the year–I am likely to leave. It’s getting tougher to look my Jewish friends in the eye.

The spread of antisemitism to the left is shocking. The spread of antisemitism to the Christian left is more shocking. But maybe that’s my naivete showing.

HEY, THAT’S MY CATCHPHRASE: But it’s a good one.

ENOUGH ON THE SCANDALS OF THE WEEK: Now I want to address the most unimportant political question of the day, while also undermining claims from Old-Media Pooh-Bahs that bloggers never do original reporting. Stinging from such accusations, I decided to do a side-by-side taste test of Heinz Ketchup and the new upstart, W Ketchup — thus answering a question that, to the best of my knowledge, Old Media outlets have shamefully ignored. Is it because they’re afraid of the truth? Let’s go to the test results.

Regular InstaPundit readers will know that I am a committed Heinz Ketchup partisan, and should keep that in mind in reading these results. (We bloggers wear our biases on our sleeves — take that, Poynter people!) Nonetheless, I wanted to give this new guy a chance to win me over. To ensure fairness, I ordered the W Ketchup off their internet site — no free-sample corruption here, despite my fond hopes therefor. It’s easy to be incorruptible when nobody’s offering to buy you anyway. . . .

The test apparatus is pictured at right — a plate, the two contenders, and a standardized product, McDonald’s French Fries, which should make this experiment fully replicatable by interested readers. The Heinz bottle is bigger than W — but so is John Kerry, so that seemed fair. And the French Fries are a traditional all-American product, like George Bush — but they’re French in origin, like John Kerry. That’s as fair and balanced as I can make things.

The expert taste panel, consisting of me and the Insta-Daughter, alternated between fries dipped in Heinz Ketchup, and fries dipped in W Ketchup, until we felt comfortable arriving at an opinion.

The unanimous victor — no hanging chads here — was Heinz. The W Ketchup wasn’t bad — somewhat sweeter than Heinz, which is no surprise given that its ingredient label lists “high fructose corn syrup” ahead of vinegar, while the Heinz label reverses the order. (The W Ketchup also has 5 more calories per serving). This too seems to reflect the candidates’ personality, with Kerry coming across as the more astringent. (Some people, however, are concerned about this: “A bigger worry for Democrats is that enough voters might decide that Kerry offers too much vinegar and not enough sugar.” But in ketchup, at least, a higher vinegar-to-sugar ratio turns out to be good thing.)

But the result is a bit of a role reversal: While W Ketchup is a perfectly respectable contender, it’s not enough to knock the reigning incumbent off his throne.

Of course, spoiling the already silly, but widely invoked, use of a ketchup contest as a proxy for the political contest is the proudly non-partisan status of the H.J. Heinz Company, and the lack of any connection, as far as I can tell, between the W Ketchup folks and President Bush. (And Teresa Heinz’s connection to the Heinz company itself is, despite the claims of the W Ketchup folks — “Choose Heinz and you’re supporting Teresa Heinz and her liberal causes, such as Kerry for President” — rather limited — though I’d like to own a similarly “limited” 4% of Heinz stock myself. . . .) And I suppose it was never much of a contest, as even potent anti-Kerry partisans freely admit the long-standing superiority of Heinz ketchup. Bush supporters can thus spin this as a triumph for traditional values.

Nonetheless, for those wondering whether W Ketchup can stand up to Heinz, the answer is that as a candidate it can cut the mustard, but its appeal isn’t strong enough to cut into the base.

STEPHEN GREEN: “Terry McAuliffe wants all the records of the Sandy Berger investigation released . . . Fine by me — if we also get to see what documents Berger pants-pilfered out of the National Archives.”

UPDATE: Related thoughts here:

We’ll grant that visions of a former National Security Adviser stuffing classified documents down his trousers or socks makes for good copy. But count us more interested in learning what’s in the documents themselves than in where on his person Sandy Berger may have put them when he was sneaking them out of the National Archives.

For the evidence suggests that the missing material cuts to the heart of the choice offered in this election: Whether America treats terrorism as a problem of law enforcement or an act of war. . . .

If it’s all as innocent as Mr. Berger’s friends are saying, there’s no reason not to make them public. But there are good reasons for questioning Mr. Berger’s dog-ate-my-homework explanation. To begin with, he was not simply preparing for his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. He was the point man for the Clinton Administration, reviewing and selecting the documents to be turned over to the Commission.

Yes.

THE TIMING OF THE LEAKS: Reader John Lucas has an observation:

Berger could have released it himself last year, but chose not to do so, even though he proclaims his innocence. He can’t now be heard to complain about the timing, since that was always in his control.

Good point.

UPDATE: Here’s a chronology of timing questions. Boy, there’s been a lot of that.

FIGHT MEDIA CONCENTRATION IN THE BLOGOSPHERE! Read the Carnival of the Vanities.

THE JOE WILSON IMPLOSION: The Washington Post editorializes:

Mr. Wilson chose to emphasize the latter point, that no deal was likely — but that does not negate the one Mr. Bush made in his speech, which was that Iraq was looking for bomb material. This suggests another caution: Some of those who now fairly condemn the administration’s “slam-dunk” approach to judging the intelligence about Iraq risk making the same error themselves. The failure to find significant stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons or an active nuclear program in Iraq has caused some war opponents to claim that Iraq was never much to worry about. The Niger story indicates otherwise. Like the reporting of postwar weapons investigator David Kay, it suggests that Saddam Hussein never gave up his intention to develop weapons of mass destruction and continued clandestine programs he would have accelerated when U.N. sanctions were lifted. No, the evidence is not conclusive. But neither did President Bush invent it.

Then there’s this story, with further problems for the “Bush Lied” claim:

An upcoming report will contain “a good deal of new information” backing up the Bush administration’s contention that Saddam Hussein pursued weapons of mass destruction, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., said Tuesday.

The report will be out in September. Some people will question its timing.

And speaking of timing, this chronological post on Joe Wilson from David Adesnik is worth reading.

And, finally, Tom Maguire responds to Joe Wilson’s latest attempt at rebutting his critics, which Maguire finds unpersuasive:

My goodness, he is awfully coy about his anonymous leaks to the media before he went public. Those leaks drove the public debate, and do not seem to have stood up to careful examination. Perhaps his memory betrayed him – he ought to re-read his own book, pages 330-332. Or re-read his chat with Vanity Fair. One wonders whether this is when Mr. Wilson acquired his familiarity with smear campaigns. Was he also orchestrated, or simply a one-man band?

Read the whole thing. And I love this observation from one of Tom’s commenters:

This was an IQ test for the elite media (and others) — and the scores have indicated that Johnny has “special needs” and can no longer be schooled with the rest of the kids. A little understanding of the world and 15 minutes with Google and a broadband connection, salted with at least some understanding of intel, sufficed to conclude that Wilson had little of interest to add (as the CIA apparently instantly concluded). That was BEFORE the Brits confirmed their confidence in the assessment and explained no forged documents were available to them in making it, and BEFORE various parliamentary groups took a look and pronounced the assessment reasonable.

As I’ve said before, the story never made sense even on its own terms.

HEH: “Berger Returns U.S. Constitution to Archives.”

HAMMER AND CRESCENT: More on the Euro-left’s alliance with radical Islam. “A potential electoral force is emerging from the anti–war movement. But why is a supposedly ‘progressive’ grouping making room for religious conservatives?”