Posted on 07/22/2004 9:59:01 PM PDT by Pikamax
The Berger Affair
Friday, July 23, 2004; Page A28
IT'S STILL NOT clear why former national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger improperly removed secret documents from the National Archives last year. Mr. Berger, who was reviewing Clinton administration papers in connection with their release to the Sept. 11 commission, says he carried off several drafts of a January 2000 White House counterterrorism memo by mistake. But archives employees told The Post he took documents on more than one occasion, prompting them to code material they gave him during an October 2003 visit. When called about the disappearance of some of those papers, Mr. Berger acknowledged that he also slipped out with some 50 pages of notes he had failed to clear with archives personnel, as required by law.
Because the classified memos he took apparently covered weaknesses in the Clinton administration's defense against domestic terrorist attacks, some have speculated that the former NSC chief, until this week a principal foreign policy adviser to presumptive Democratic nominee John F. Kerry, may have been trying to save himself or the previous Democratic administration from embarrassment -- although the Sept. 11 commission did review the memo. Maybe he was simply contemptuous of the idea that he should have access to a report he commissioned only in an archives reading room and under the scrutiny of its personnel. Whether it was a mistake or not, Mr. Berger's conduct, the subject of a criminal investigation by the FBI, was reprehensible, and he was right to resign as a Kerry adviser.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Of course taking a briefcase and cell phone (with camera capability...?) into the "secure" document viewing room doesn't rate a mention here.
Well, we have two explanations:
A. He is corrupt and a traitor.
B. He is so inept he should get round-the-clock supervision for his own safety.
This guy was Clinton's National Security advisor. I'll leave the choice to them.
As the rat media spins...
He'll walk.
What an utter spin job.
As we know - there is only a justified outcry when the dems are executing one of their trash Bush ploys. We never see these articles then.
So, apparently, the liberal media would have us ignore any indiscretions by the dems so that they are free to corrupt, steal, manipulate, and cover their tracks over their misspent years in public office.
How dumb do they think we are. In fact, why do we even care how they spin this stuff. We should just keep on telling the truth, calling the corruption when we see it, calling the spin when we see it too.
Get this one!
As happened so often during the Clinton administration, they are treating a real but apparently limited case of misconduct as an opportunity to misuse congressional oversight powers to wage partisan warfare.
Time to e-mail and call the WaPo and call them out for the slimy butt kissers that they are. Who on God's earth could still buy this paper? Boycott France AND the WaPo.
Who has that e-mail and contact list of the major department stores and car dealerships, etc., that provide so many advertising dollars to these idiots?
Or maybe the voices made him do it. Could have been aliens. Maybe the room was haunted ... one of those "built it over the old graveyard" deals. Maybe fancy new remote controlled documents that someone directed into his pants. Could have been. Maybe ...
You right wing Republican haters are just blind. You have a Vice President who was CEO of a major American corporation -- one that sold goods and services to energy companies -- and you obsess on a few papers inadvertently removed by someone who had the highest security clearance possible.
As for the Washington Post, they are just wh*ring out for the Democrats. And that is not a crime, just a violation of journalistic ethics. (Rumor has it there are such things as journalistic ethics. They are nearly as extinct as legal ethics.)
Congressman Billybob
Latest column, "The Wussification of America: Fallout from Arnold, John and Sandy"
If you haven't already joined the anti-CFR effort, please click here.
Are business men not "allowed" to become Vice President? I suppose you only want career politicians in that slot?
Really disappointing editorial. Even the New York Times is harder on Berger and less gullible of the White House-leak claim than the Post.
How do you "inadvertantly" put classified documents in your pockets, socks and pants? You have never dealt with classified documents, have you?
Sandy Berger was inadvertantly CAUGHT stealing top secret information. That is a crime.
In the interest of cleansing the reader's palate:
Finding meaning in Sandy's pants
By Wesley Pruden
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published July 23, 2004
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20040722-115449-7724r
The Democratic apologists for Sandy Berger rushed, as expected, into the familiar War Room mode, accusing George W. Bush and his men (and women) of concocting a security scandal to divert attention from the litany of Bush failures they confidently expected to see in the final report of the 9/11 Commission.
As it turns out, there is no litany of Bush failures in the 9/11 report. Failures and shortcomings abound, with blame enough for everyone to share. But there is a connection between Sandy Berger's pants and the terrorist threat that hangs over us all. It's not the connection John Kerry and his accomplices counted on.
The dreadful reality is that nobody yet takes the threat against the Judeo-Christian civilization of the West as seriously as we must if we expect to survive. Airline security, which allowed the Saudi hijackers of September 11 to waltz past the screeners at Dulles International Airport and onto American Airlines Flight 77 with barely any inconvenience at all, is still a grimly bitter joke. Swarthy, dark-hued Arabs (the physical description is crucial and straight to the point) still get aboard the planes and "case the joint" with no one to disturb them, as The Washington Times reported yesterday. The bureaucrats of George W.'s administration still worry more about whether they will be accused of racial profiling than about whether another 9/11 attempt to kill Americans of all hues is imminent, and Bill Clinton thinks a grave security breach by his former national-security chief is something of a joke, too ("we were all laughing about it on the way over here").
No one, to be sure, looks at Sandy Berger and thinks "wow, hot pants," and his cavalier treatment of secret government documents and the rules that apply to the rest of us is squarely in the tradition of how the Clintonistas, including the ex-president himself, have always treated documents, files, computers and other government property entrusted to them. Craig Livingstone, a Clinton security officer, got away with 900 FBI dossiers on Republican officeholders in the Reagan and first Bush administrations. Several scandal files "inadvertently" landed in Hillary's closet at the White House. John Deutch, one of Mr. Clinton's directors of the CIA, "inadvertently" took a CIA computer, loaded with top-secret stuff, home with him. So far as we know, he didn't stuff it into his pants (which would have given new meaning to "laptop"). Mr. Deutch might have gone to the pokey to reflect on his "inadvertence" if Sandy Berger had not persuaded the president to pardon him. Mr. Clinton's State Department once lost a sensitive computer, too, and Hazel O'Leary, the secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration, abolished security badges at top-secret government nuclear laboratories because she didn't want to hurt the feelings of foreign visitors who might feel "discriminated against." The only people you can safely discriminate against are Americans who don't want to die at the hands of terrorists.
The 9/11 commissioners think it may be time to change that. The report is full of plans and schemes to reorganize the bureaucracy, and such is necessary, but first we have to persuade everyone that getting serious is necessary. If that means paying special attention to the men most likely to kill us, we have to do that, political correctness be damned. If blue-eyed Southern Baptists and blue-haired Lutheran grannies from Minnesota crash airliners into office buildings, we must profile blue-eyed Southern Baptists and blue-haired Lutherans and be wary of them aboard airliners.
The first reaction to the report was encouraging. The president, Monsieur Kerry, his running mate John Edwards, Nancy Pelosi, Dennis Hastert, Joe Lieberman, and numerous Democratic and Republican congressmen all said the right things, putting partisan politics aside if only for the day. (The exception, to nobody's surprise, was Teddy Kennedy, who said the 9/11 report only "makes clear" that September 11 was all George W.'s fault.)
The most eloquent passage in the executive summary was the commissioners' conclusion: "We call on the American people to remember how we all felt on 9/11, to remember not only the unspeakable horror but how we came together as a nation -- one nation. Unity of purpose and utility of effort are the way we will defeat this enemy and make America safe for our children and grandchildren."
If we don't, the commissioners left unsaid, there may not be an America for our children and grandchildren to inherit, nor children and grandchildren left to inherit anything.
I don't agree.
Thanks for posting that.
you obsess on a few papers inadvertently illegally removed by someone who had the highest security clearance possible.
Have you ever inadvertently put something in your sock? Could you please describe how one does that?
And, because of that person's previous position, he should have known better than anyone just what procedures were involved in dealing with top secret documents.
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