Sorta - I visited the International Spy Museum today. It was interesting, but not all that interesting to a 2 year old, and plus it was getting close to nap time.

Housed in a building that at one time was the headquarters for the American Communist Party, it has displays on spy technology and celebrity spies and a whole floor on the Cold War. I am sure a lot of people will be surprised to see that it is unequivocal in pointing out that Alger Hiss and the Rosenbergs were spies, and the proof of it in the Venona files (warning, the NSA has created the ugliest website ever for these documents). It does make one egregious error in stating that the House Unamerican Activities Committee was best known for Senator Joseph McCarthy, which is, unfortunately, a common misconception - I mean, how hard is it to figure out that a Senator does not sit on a House Committee? Despite that, they make it clear that there were a lot of spies in the US - Communist and otherwise.

Unlike most of the museums in DC, though, as a private museum, it has an entry fee, a pretty steep one - $13 per adult. If you are a real fan of spy stuff, you probably won't learn anything you didn't already know. If you are a spy geek, I guess you would instead go the National Cryptologic Museum at the NSA.

The NYT has an article headlined C.I.A. "Chief Is Caught in Middle by Leak Inquiry" Several paragraphs down is this tidbit:

Even before this latest blowup, Mr. Tenet told friends that he was worn out from the relentlessness of his job since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that he felt he had served long enough. (Only Allen W. Dulles and Richard Helms held the job longer.) Mr. Tenet, who has directed an extensive overhaul and expansion of the C.I.A. since the attacks, had talked about stepping down by late summer or early fall, people close to him said.

Of course, a couple of paragraphs down, it also says this:

Friends of Mr. Tenet's said that the leak investigation might now keep him in place longer than he wanted, if only to prove that he was not a casualty of the latest furor — or of the political fallout from the failure so far to find chemical or biological weapons in Iraq.

He should leave, or be fired. And Rudy Giuliani should take his place.

Another suicide bomber in Israel. This is the key:

After the Sept. 9 bombings, Israel threatened to "remove" Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, either through expulsion or assassination, but did not say when it would take action. It is widely believed that a major attack with many casualties could trigger Israeli measures against Arafat.

Just do it. Don't buy that Powell stuff that it might make the Arabs angry. What are they going to do? Strap on some explosives and walk into a restaurant?

Glenn Reynolds posted recently:

What worries me more, in a way, are the friendly emails from people saying that they get all their news from InstaPundit.

Don't do that! It's "InstaPundit," not "InstaNews Service." And this is, as Eugene properly notes, an amateur activity. I don't even get to blog all the stuff that interests me -- I've really fallen behind on space, guns, and even nanotechnology lately-- much less stuff that's important, but that doesn't interest me.

What you get here -- as with any blog -- is my idiosyncratic selection of things that interest me, as I have time to note them, with my own idiosyncratic comments. What's more, to the (large) extent that it's shaped by my effort to play up stories that Big Media are ignoring, it's even more idiosyncratic.

But that is precisely why you should be using Instapundit or your favorite blogger as a news service. Because the stories that the Big Media are ignoring are important ones. The blogworld is fact checking the entirety of the media's asses, and while everybody has their own spin, the facts, when they exist, will out.

Instapundit is one of the first places I check (he's faster than Drudge anymore), and while I would have eventually gotten to Andrew Sullivan anyway, without either of them, I would not have gotten this view (and just keep reading) of the Kay report at all. (I've already received a couple of emails about it, sourced from Andrew Sullivan's posts.)

In short, the Kaye report says a whole lot more than "we didn't find any WMD." It says that essentially everything we suspected of Hussein was true. And we have evidence of it. He was still pursuing WMD, and he was hiding it from the UN. Don't believe me or Andrew Sullivan? RTWT.

I would not expect the press to report that the adminstration's justifications for war were correct. I would, though, expect the press to report at least the whole story.

But one reason why they aren't is that the administration isn't talking about the whole story. Why is Senator Pat Roberts' "I'm not happy" getting airtime, and nothing else? Because noone is saying anything else. The administration made the justifications - they need to be saying that those justifications were, if not vindicated, but at least, well, justified. And they are not. The President needs to be saying it, the Secretary of State needs to be saying it, the Director of Central Intelligence needs to be saying it, the director of the NSC needs to be saying it, and the Secretary of Defense needs to be saying it.

And yet, there is silence. This story will not tell itself. The mainstream press will not tell it. And Andrew Sullivan, even with his readership, can't be the one to tell it.

Get on the ball, guys. You've been hiding from the storm. Do what Jonah says and put on the flight suit and play a Robert Duvall basketball game. Have a press conference. You know Karen Hughes wouldn't let you just lie there. Get up. Do something. Not just for yourselves, but for all of us, because if you get rolled on Iraq, you won't have the credibility on Iran and Syria and Saudi Arabia. And if that's the case, I'd have to be with Lileks (can't find the link) - elect Dean if it means that he'll have the okay to put those guys out of business.

Seriously.

UPDATE: This is a start:

President Bush said today that an interim report to Congress by the administration's chief weapons investigator provided proof "Saddam Hussein was a danger to the world" because of the ousted government's efforts to conceal alleged weapons programs before the U.S.-led invasion.

Pentagon: Terrorists May Be Infiltrating Military

Ya think?

Plame, not lame.

I haven't posted on it before not because I am ignoring it - how could anyone who follows the news? - but because I don't know what to make of it. (Okay, I mentioned it in the last post.) Is it simply a partisan blowup, something orchestrated to make W, or more directly, Karl Rove look bad? Or is it a true breach of security?

I don't know the answer, and the facts are mighty thin behind all the heavy breathing. But even if it is true that Karl Rove was speed dialing his friends in the press (picture Rove with friends in the press - hah!) to expose a CIA operative so she would get whacked to get back at Joe Wilson for writing an op-ed in the NYT, the real scandal is something else.

James Robbins has a piece on NRO about it, and I saw a piece on Fox News last night, and this post at Winds of Change touches on it even though it isn't about Plame at all. Here is the problem in a nutshell: given a very serious charge, that Saddam Hussein had purchased (that is what the false documents alleged) uranium, the CIA, to follow up, sends not a CIA operative, but the husband of one, a former ambassador, to make, in Wilson's words, a "discreet but not secret" inquiry into it.

Perhaps the number one security issue of the day, and that is the CIA response. Let's send a guy to spend "eight days drinking sweet mint tea and meeting with dozens of people." That's it. As Joe Katzman writes: "Feeling safe yet? Sleep well."

If that's how we are checking out the existence of WMD out there, then no wonder we don't have boatloads of evidence from Iraq. No wonder we didn't know about North Korea breaking the Agreed Framework for half a dozen years or more. No wonder we still don't know about the anthrax.

If Bush is the evil mastermind that the Left has turned him into (a step up from stupid fratboy, if you ask me!), then he needs to do this - pin the Plame leak on the CIA and fire Tenet. Because he really should have fired him after 9/11.

No wonder I was up so late last night, and up so early this morning. Sleep well, indeed.

Back when that whole Michael Savage thing was going on, he said on his show that the conservatives who were criticizing him were going to be targeted by the Left, too.

So, today we have the Plame thing which appears to be well orchestrated, on Drudge we see an orchestrated attack on Rush Limbaugh, and another on Arnold Schwarzenegger, a late hit piece from the LA Times.

Now obviously in each case there was an initiating instance. But the response in each case is coordinated. This is a real issue.

It is getting ugly out there. I think it is going to get uglier. W needs to get a war room up and while he shouldn't run a permanent campaign, he needs to run a campaign now because there has been a campaign running against him for a while. I'll say it again - get Karen Hughes on the phone.

Frank - he's not just about ridding the world of those damn dirty apes anyore. A collaborative effort from the blogosphere - Front Line Voices.

Just saw this on Drudge:

Kuwait foils smuggling of chemicals, bio warheads from Iraq

Kuwaiti security authorities have foiled an attempt to smuggle $60 million worth of chemical weapons and biological warheads from Iraq to an unnamed European country, a Kuwaiti newspaper said on Wednesday.

The pro-Government Al-Siyassah, quoting an unnamed security source, said the suspects had been watched by security since they arrived in Kuwait and were arrested "in due time." It did not say when or how the smugglers entered Kuwait or when they were arrested.

24 hour rule starts now. How did they place the value at $60M, unless that was how much money was changing hands.

This is what I look like in French. I'm guessing I have a new fan.

Winds of Change decided to let a run-on troll (Tony Foresta of Daily Pundit comment fame) do a guest blog. It has spawned quite the comments itself, and the comments are long. I wanted to respond to that post, here, too, because I think my point will get lost in the mass there.

Foresta's point, besides that he hates George Bush, is that the administration went after Iraq but ignored Saudi Arabia, which is who we should really be after. This is one of those things that I point out often - there is no argument that the Left won't pursue if they perceive that it can be a negative on Bush. The "going after Saudi Arabia" argument used to be a negative on Bush itself. SA would be yet another notch in the neocon cowboy belt. Here is the knock on the Bush administration from Slate:

Diplomatic china rattled in Washington and cracked in Riyadh yesterday when the Washington Post published a story about a briefing given to a Pentagon advisory group last month. The briefing declared Saudi Arabia an enemy of the United States and advocated that the United States invade the country, seize its oil fields, and confiscate its financial assets unless the Saudis stop supporting the anti-Western terror network.

The article continues with a "guilt by association" argument with Lyndon LaRouche.

At any rate, the Bush administration putting Saudi Arabia in its sights in August 2002 was negative for Bush. That Saudi Arabia wasn't in our sights instead of Iraq, is negative for Bush today.

Changed in the blogroll - if you want to find it, it's http://www.thedonovan.com/index.html.

I usually try to stay away from grand conspiracy theories, but all of the strangeness surrounding the Bush administration and Iraq and WMD and all of that is kind of puzzling. They still maintain high confidence in their prewar WMD statements (as does Tony Blair), even in the face of what should be bad news - first, that none have yet been produced, and it doesn't look like the upcoming Kay report is going to change the narrative on that.

Some people are saying now that this means that Iraq never had WMD (which is just silly), to the Time magazine report that they didn't have WMD, but Saddam thought they did. Which would explain some things, but not others, since we weren't getting our intel on WMD from Saddam. At any rate, that theory isn't any stranger than the one I am about to suggest.

First of all, in Woodward's Bush at War, the President, early after 9/11, becomes concerned about the possibility of bioterrorism. I was surprised to read that, because the Washington Post, early on, had reported that one of the big concerns that drove terror alerts was the possibility of a dirty bomb. I don't recall that issue being raised in the book (though it could just be an oversight on my part.) Not too long after that, the first anthrax case shows up and is briefed to the President - another indication that the bioterror concern is one that has a high priority.

We have all but forgotten the anthrax attacks, despite their huge impact. While only 8 people lost their lives, it shut down the US government at a critical time and caused well over $100 million in economic damage. The import of this is something that I don't think we, as a country, have really digested, especially after putting it out of our minds - the United States has already suffered a bioterror attack.

The hard part is, we still don't know, at least not publicly, who made that attack. There was a public display of investigating Steven Hatfill, but that has not panned out. And that is probably because he isn't the most likely suspect. The circumstances add up to the 9/11 terrorists, or their associates, being behind it. First of all, there is the text of the letters that went with the anthrax:

Of course, there are those who say that this text is designed to throw suspicion on the terrorists. Second of all, the first anthrax victim was not a politician or big media person - a photo editor from the Sun tabloid. And the wife of the editor of the Sun was the real estate agent who found a room for two of the hijackers. And a pharmacist in Del Ray, Florida reported that Atta and another hijacker came in to his store for some skin treatment and antibiotics. And one of the hijackers was reportedly treated in Florida for cutaneous anthrax. Any one of these items could be considered a coincidence. The whole string of them makes that extremely unlikely. But the FBI chalked it all up to coincidence very early.

However,as soon as the larger number of anthrax letters was known, according to Woodward, President Bush thought that Iraq was behind the attack. Again, I don't think this is something he came up with on his own. He had been briefed on the possibility of bioterror before anyone else in his War Cabinet. He had more preparation, and more information. And his first inclination was Iraq.

So why not say that then, or even later, during the runup to the war in Iraq? There are some of the usual intel concerns - revealing sources, etc. And then there is the possibility that it was sketchy information. We've seen the flareup of the not absolute proof on African uranium - accusation of being behind a WMD bioterror attack would be labelled hysteria without iron clad proof that could be revealed. And then there is the question of what our response would be if this is the case. Suppose that we had that proof that the terrorists sent the anthrax, sourced from Iraq. We have relied on nuclear capability as a deterrent against WMD. Use WMD on us, and we'll nuke you.

The problem with that formulation is that we don't have the will to do it. I don't think that the United States really wants to nuke anyone, which is actually a good thing. The world would also look pretty poorly on a US nuclear strike in response to something that killed 8 people. And a response less than a nuclear strike would have truly taken away from our mission in Afghanistan - that had yet to begin when we were hit by the anthrax. Also, while many people credit the threat of nuking Iraq for deterring the use of chemical weapons during Desert Storm, that may not necessarily be the case. Many Gulf War veterans claim that Gulf War syndrome is the result of chemical exposure in the Gulf. I personally know someone who logged a chemical attack during the Gulf War, and was told later from higher headquarters to change the logs to reflect detector malfunction. (His story sounds remarkably like this.)

If both of these are true, then the US has been attacked twice with WMD, and made no response to it. Which means that the United States has no WMD deterrent. And Saddam Hussein knew it. Since both attacks had minimal effect, and their source not publicly known, it would be easier to cover it up, not because we didn't want to pay benefits to Gulf War veterans, but because we did not want to reveal our vulnerability. And that is why we had to put Saddam out of power. Because he had WMD. And because he wasn't afraid to use them. Because he had no reason to be afraid.