An official government website offered the world a virtual manual for nuclear bomb making, reports the New York Times.  Over the objections of John Negroponte, the website, "Operation Iraqi Freedom Document Portal," posted thousands of documents seized in the Iraq war.  Yesterday, following objections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the website was taken down.  According to the Times, the website was expected to advance the Bush administration's claims that Saddam Hussein was building weapons of mass destruction.

The campaign for the online archive was mounted by conservative publications and politicians, who said that the nation's spy agencies had failed adequately to analyze the 48,000 boxes of documents seized since the March 2003 invasion. With the public increasingly skeptical about the rationale and conduct of the war, the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees argued that wide analysis and translation of the documents -- most of them in Arabic -- would reinvigorate the search for clues that Mr. Hussein had resumed his unconventional arms programs in the years before the invasion. American search teams never found such evidence. (NYT, 11/3)

Today, I heard author and blogger Andrew Bard Schmookler speak about the problems in our society. The reason he says that liberalism frequently doesn't have spine is because it has difficulty recognizing the concept of good and evil. I think that this concept can very easily be applied to our Democratic leaders frequently. Although they have done better this time around, especially in their questioning of Chertoff, they still have a long ways to go before developing the kind of spine that we would like to see here in this community.

Schmookler discusses spirituality in applying his concepts. He says that spiritual well-being and goodness involves wholeness, while evil involves brokenness. Before the 1960's, there were very clear institutions that defined right and wrong. They were the school, parents, churches, and society. All our movies had black and white endings in which the good guys had a clear point of reference to look forward to.

So, someone let it slip that the intelligence budget is about $44 billion. Now, that seems a bit low, considering that the Department of Defense Budget (which I believe is separate) is some $400 billion. Now, let's look to how that budget is used.

Not much has been made in the blogosphere about the fact John Negroponte, intelligence czar, is called to testify in Congress this week about why he performs so pathetically at his job. Well, those are my words. The real reason is "to answer concerns about whether his new office is meeting the goals Congress envisioned in a 2004 intelligence overhaul".

Short answer to that inquiry: hell no.

Tomorrow's closed door meeting can be expected to be a contentious one, with staffers on both side of the aisle alluding to great frustration with Negroponte: