I’m not a successful mystery writer like RLS, (too many “Roger”s around here and you Brits just stop tittering) but I’m a pretty successful mystery reader, and I follow “true crime” stuff to some extent. As a result, I’m very suspicious of a “grand conspiracy”: you can’t keep conspiracies quiet for long, and the best conspiracy theories almost always depend on complicated schemes and amazingly obscure and improbable inferences.

Real crimes, on the other hand, almost always come from greed or a moment of emotional stupidity. There’s one playing out in Utah right now, where there’s a missing woman, and we’ve just found out that her husband hadn’t been admitted to medical school, or even graduated from college. My prediction is that we’ll find out one of two things: either the husband killed the wife because he couldn’t bear to let her know he’d been lying to her, or the wife ran because she couldn’t bear to face her family with the false med-school story around.

Sandy Berger looked, on TV, like someone who knows he’s really really fucked up bad. His voice was trembling, his face looked ashen.

So here’s another prediction: we’ll eventually find out that those copies of that after-action report had some kind of handwritten notation that was personally damning to Berger or more generally damning to the Clinton administration. Something like “but what about bin Laden’s plot to hit the World Trade Center again” — it’s got to be big enough that it would be terrifying.

Having seen it, Berger was so frightened of the implications of it getting to the 9/11 Commission that he acted irrationally, thinking he could cover it up and no one would notice, or that he was a big enough dog that he was immune from consequences. Maybe he rationalized it by figuring if it did get out, it wouldn’t be until after Kerry was elected, and Kerry would protect him.

It’s too dumb and clumsy to be a conspiracy, and the rest of this is futile coverup, like an accident-prone cat on a linoleum floor.