Posted on 07/21/2004 7:20:16 PM PDT by snopercod
Politics: In poll after poll, Americans show a profound distrust of Democrats on national security. To understand why, look at the Sandy Berger affair.
Berger, you'll recall, formerly served as President Clinton's national security adviser and as John Kerry's chief adviser on security issues.
One would think the theft of classified documents from the National Archives last October would have elicited shock, dismay, concern, even anger from the former president.
But Clinton, told of the theft, had a different response. "We were all laughing about it," Clinton told the Denver Post.
He called Berger's actions a "nonstory" in case the mainstream media didn't know what their marching orders were. The Kerry camp had a telling response: It blamed the Bush White House.
For his part, Berger termed the security lapse an "honest mistake."
Mistake, yes. Honest? We're not so sure. The idea Berger was somehow a klutzy innocent, as Clinton and Democratic National Committee spinmeisters say, doesn't wash.
It's not as if the thefts were a one-time thing; Berger made several trips to the National Archives as he prepared to testify before the 9-11 committee.
It's against the law to take secret documents from the archives. Someone as astute as Berger a lawyer who stood atop the U.S. national security apparatus for four years would know this.
Surely Berger remembered that his colleague, former CIA chief John Deutch, got into trouble for taking classified documents home on his personal computer. (He was later pardoned by Clinton.)
So what exactly did Berger take? Drafts of a March 2000 "after-action report," written by then-antiterrorism czar Richard Clarke, on the nation's response to terrorism threats before and during the millennium celebrations.
The final report harshly criticized the Clinton administration's anti-terror efforts and its failure to do more about al-Qaida.
That's bad enough. But because Berger threw out some of the drafts of that memo, we may never know just how bad.
Did the missing drafts show the Clinton administration knew even more about the terrorist threat than has been revealed? Did the Clinton team ignore al-Qaida's growing presence in the U.S.?
We do know this: Attorney General John Ashcroft revealed some of the memo's findings when he appeared before the 9-11 commission last April. It was pretty damning stuff.
Clarke's report, Ashcroft said, showed how vulnerable U.S. defenses were to terrorism. And it warned "of a substantial al-Qaida network and affiliated foreign terrorist presence in the U.S."
The memo also made some sound suggestions for improving our anti-terror efforts. Unfortunately, Clinton ignored them. He didn't even put them in his five-year national security plan.
The Berger affair says much about the Clinton White House's sloppiness and lack of concern for national security.
It may also help explain why Americans show so little faith in one major political party when it comes to protecting them from foreign threats.
WASHINGTON (Reuter) - President Clinton's wife, Hillary, and
daughter, Chelsea, flew on the same plane last week that crashed
in Croatia with Commerce Secretary Ron Brown aboard, U.S. Air
Force sources said Wednesday.
A military version of the widely used Boeing 737 passenger
jet flew Mrs Clinton and her 16-year-old daughter from the
Turkish capital of Ankara to the ancient biblical city of
Ephesus and on to Istanbul last Wednesday.
The T43A plane, with a tail number of 1149, was based at the
U.S. air base at Ramstein, Germany, the sources said. Mrs
Clinton used it rather than the Boeing 707 assigned to her for a
week-long goodwill tour of southern Europe because of the short
runway at Ephesus.
The same plane was used to ferry Defense Secretary William
Perry in and out of Bosnia last week. Mrs Clinton also visited
the Yugoslav region during her trip but used a giant C-17
military cargo jet for that leg of her journey.
I'm suprised O'Donnell did not follow the toe the corporate line, he must know something. There is gonna be a mity big 'there' there.
Leave it to IBD to speak frankly. It always has good editorials.
The whole 'After-Action Report' is a smoke-screen.
check out these links
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1175272/posts
http://www.jaynadavis.com/
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1175778/posts
Go through these links, they are quite illuminating.
peace...D
Absolutely! Let Congress determine why, I want to see the DOJ try this self-admitted thief for the felony he comitted. Don't public officials have to swear an oath to uphold the laws of this country? Folks, he committed a FELONY! Put him on trail, determine the facts, and let a jury decide his fate. Let Congress determine why he did it, the fact that he did it is sufficient.
I hope Sandy blows the whistle on them all. What has he got to lose .. he's already destroyed his career.
I was thinking more along the lines of Fredo Corleone.
Wow!
It seems likely. I hope more comes out on this, more actual details. That's what's missing now. And the American people should know. What was stolen? What was returned? Was a copy made prior to this to serve as standard? Is the information just irretrievably lost? How was 'Fingers' not challenged when he left? How was it that he was not under constant observation handling what some have characterized as 'code word' access documents? And so on.
Things seem to have gotten a lot more lax than when I had a TS clearance. Back then, documents were kept in a combination safe inside a secured area. If you wanted a document, you got the custodian to open the safe, and you signed out the document in the presence of the custodian. You had to prove to the custodian that you had both the proper clearance and the "need to know".
All classified documents have "cover sheets" on the front and back stamped with the classification level and a warning of the penalties for unauthorized viewing and disclosure. You were not supposed to look under the cover unless you had proper clearance and need to know.
In general, you could not leave the secured area with the document (unless you were transporting it to another secured area in a locked briefcase). You could take notes while you were in there, but the notes had to be tossed in the classified trash before leaving.
When you were done, you signed the documents back in with the custodian.
It would certainly be possible to stuff a few pages in your pants and sign in what was left. Nobody would notice until the next person came to check out that same document and found pages missing.
Then the custodian would look at the log and see who had checked it out last time.
Also, back then, they did annual audits of the entire contents of the classified safe(s).
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