I'm confused by the whole Sandy Berger affair. It just seems rather strange. Firstly, who would be stupid enough to do what he did? Surely a former National Security Advisor should know better than that. The reports themselves tend to contradict; some say that Berger removed files from the Archive, and Republicans have been spinning this to say that he was covering up for the Clinton Administration (admittedly, this is Rick Santorum, so the credibility is not high), whereas the Commission itself says that Berger only removed copies and did not affect their investigation (I can't find a link for this, but I read it last night, I promise). Then there's the odd, unsubstantiated, reports of him stuffing papers into his socks, which his lawyer vigourously denies. Plus, why did the staff of the National Archive set up a sting operation? Surely it would have been better to stop him each time they suspected that he was removing documents? That way, nothing that wasn't supposed to would have left the Archive.

Why is Bush saying that this is a serious matter, when the FBI privately says that it's really not that important? Why has this been leaked now, instead of months ago? Is the Justice Department getting ready to press charges? No, they say that the investigation is still ongoing, but they have no plans to do anything to Berger at the moment. So there's no reason for it to have leaked, apart from, say, the 9/11 report, or the Democrat Convention next week.

(There's an alternate theory going around that says that the Democrats engineered this leak, to prevent it from hanging over them as a potential election spoiler.)

I'm just confused.

(I'm on page 351 of the 9/11 report at the moment (not feeling well enough to do much else today), and there's nothing really damning, although Bush keeps on mentioning that he used to be a pilot, which I find amusing for some reason. And this:

Clarke has written that on the evening of September 12,President Bush told him and some of his staff to explore possible Iraqi links to 9/11.“See if Saddam did this,”Clarke recalls the President telling them.“See if he’s linked in any way.” While he believed the details of Clarke’s account to be incorrect,President Bush acknowledged that he might well have spoken to Clarke at some point,asking him about Iraq.

)