Posted on 07/23/2004 9:37:06 PM PDT by conservative in nyc
ASHINGTON, July 23 - Officials at the National Archives were so concerned about Samuel R. Berger's removal of classified documents last year that they imposed new security measures governing the review of sensitive material, including the installation of full-time surveillance cameras, government officials said Friday.
The new policy, issued March 31 to security officers at the archives, lays out toughened steps for safeguarding research rooms used by nongovernmental employees who are given special access to classified material. And it demands "continuous monitoring" of anyone reviewing such material.
The restrictions were put in place as a direct result of the Berger episode, said a government official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity surrounding the continuing investigation.
Mr. Berger, the national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, has acknowledged that he took several copies of classified documents from a secure reading room last year when preparing for testimony before the Sept. 11 commission. He said the removal was a careless mistake, but leading Republicans have accused him of stashing documents in his clothing intentionally, perhaps as a way of hiding information that could be considered damaging to the Clinton administration.
The Justice Department is conducting a criminal investigation to determine whether federal laws on the handling of classified material may have been broken, and the disclosure of the investigation this week forced Mr. Berger to step down as a senior foreign policy adviser to Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign. Democrats have accused the Bush administration of leaking word of the investigation and exaggerating its importance to distract attention from this week's final report of the Sept. 11 commission.
After the issue first flared on Tuesday, Mr. Berger told reporters outside his Washington office that he had made "an honest mistake" and that he deeply regretted it.
He has maintained a low profile since then, even as the political furor over the case has grown. An associate of Mr. Berger said Friday that "this is a situation that any human being would find difficult.''
"He's tired," the associate said, "and he's reading through lots of e-mails from friends and doing work and just trying to deal with all this."
National Archives officials have reached no judgments on Mr. Berger's motives in removing the documents, and one law enforcement official said, "We don't know what he was thinking when he did it."
Nonetheless, officials at the National Archives viewed the episode as troubling enough that they reviewed their security procedures and issued new guidelines for dealing with nongovernmental researchers like Mr. Berger.
The guidelines do not refer specifically to Mr. Berger or his case, but they emphasize careful monitoring of researchers, prohibit cellphones, hand-held computers and other electronic devices in classified research rooms, and limit the volume and type of material that researchers may review.
Archive security officials use surveillance cameras at many of their public research sites. But the archives did not have cameras at the classified site in Washington that Mr. Berger used, and no video was taken of his research, officials said.
Concern over his case led the archives to install a surveillance system in the Washington research room and any areas used for classified research, said a second government official who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
Susan Cooper, spokeswoman for the National Archives and Records Administration, said the agency routinely reviewed security procedures. But Ms. Cooper added that after the Berger episode, "it's fair to say that in light of the incident we took a look at what our procedures were and redid the guidelines and regulations to strengthen them."
The National Archives maintains about 25 public research sites around the country that allow researchers to sift through billions of pages of documents, the vast majority of them unclassified. For a small number of former senior government officials like Mr. Berger who retain security clearances, the agency also has separate classified research areas in Washington; College Park, Md.; and at some presidential libraries.
Mr. Berger, designated the Clinton administration's point man in reviewing documents for the Sept. 11 commission, visited the Washington research room three times in the summer and fall of 2003, spending a total of about 30 hours reviewing thousands of pages of classified documents, officials said.
After his second visit last September, security officials became suspicious because some copies of documents he reviewed appeared to be missing. Mr. Berger's lawyer, Lanny Breuer, said Mr. Berger later realized he had mixed in with his leather portfolio three or four versions of a lengthy classified report on terrorism. The report centered on millennium bombing plots in December 1999, and it concluded that counterterrorism efforts had not made a significant dent in Al Qaeda operations and that "sleeper cells" may have taken root in the United States, officials said.
Mr. Berger also acknowledged that he improperly put in his pockets some notes he wrote in reviewing the documents.
We all know they'll try, but Berger as admitted it.
If these documents were really Code Word classified, then you'll have to get everyone investigating the case cleared to see documents of that level, presumably even all the members of the Grand Jury. Conducting an investigation involving classified information is a very touchy and difficult task.
A Clintonista? Never.
You get me?
No, they do not. You're simply wrong.
One administration can transfer its records to a succeeding administration, but the succeeding administration cannot (and never has in American history) simply siezed the records of its predecessor.
Bill Clinton has statutory authority over his administration's classified records. Period. That's the law.
The reason Bergler removed the draft copies is that in requesting those Millenium After Action records (which request would have been granted), the Archives would provide the "stack" (the whole file), just as they did with Berger himself.
Bergler wanted to make sure the Commission got the sanitized "stack", without the draft copies.
I can't find the mention of that, but I recall seeing it, too.
So you have this new Archive staff, so it seems, who have no surveillance, guards that just . . walk away, and clerks who see people stealing TOP SECRET documents and probably hold the door for 'em on the way out.
But, it's not funny. No. It's not hilarious.
Others had suggested that at one time staff required such TOP SECRET documents had to be signed out, one after another, and that they were kept in a safe - like nuclear codes, or something (which apparently don't even carry as high a security classification as what Sammy B stuffed in his shorts (I still can't believe that)).
If I may be allowed to clarify this. So then why can't . . . he send some agent in there, a Sammy B for example, to simply burn the documents? Sammy could have said to the guards, I'm going to go to the john, soon, and I need some help tearing up these documents. Then he goes and flushes the pieces. And no harm, and nothing wrong. If you say "control", then why can't he order them all shredded, on the taxpayer's dime?
Or are there actual security concerns, beyond his own whims? It doesn't make sense, in other words. These aren't HIS documents. They are property of the nation, and are to be protected from theft, destruction, whatever by personnel who are supposed to safeguard these documents.
If these are all unclassified, and just 'scraps' that he could take in boxes with him when he left, with no national security content or threat of exposure by that, then they should just purge the catalogues, lump everything into loosely packed boxes, and just charge him for the FedEx. On the other hand, these documents were classified TOP SECRET, with CODE WORD access. He may have access to the files. But that doesn't mean his representative can just do what he likes with the documents. In fact, he should have been watched every minute he was there, and challenged, even arrested, when he was observed literally stealing documents.
I did find a comment I made on the Condi Rice LIVE THREAD testimony before the commission where I related what I'd heard on tv:
posted April 8, 2004
No. These documents were under the protection of the National Archives. Clinton, or a representative, may have had access. But his representative should certainly have been cleared for access to those documents, rather that just send in any lawyer off the street, which is basically all Berger was at that point. He shouldn't have been allowed without proper clearance, for one. And Sammy B still had to treat those documents as TOP SECRET, with code word access, and all that implied. He didn't. He should have been arrested on the spot.
Bergler wanted to make sure the Commission got the sanitized "stack", without the draft copies.
The commission wouldn't have wanted that. In fact, I think they make reference to document notes in certain passages. It wasn't Sammy's business to steal documents from the National Archives.
I just disagree with your suggestion that these were just personal papers, that Clinton could have burned, shredded, mangled, spilt coffee on, whatever tickled him. It's not the case, and Berger needs to go to jail. And if Clinton ordered him to pinch documents, to commit a heist, then he needs to go to jail, as well.
I'm wrong? I didn't assert anything. I said what Lindsey claimed. Did you read the article I posted where he said it was the Bush administration withholding Clinton era documents?
I'm laying out what happened--and believe me, the media was in quite a tizzy at Bush hiding Clinton's brilliance in dealing with the threat of terrorism, as the spin went.
As to the rest of your point---please, I know why Berger was there and what he obviously did. We are in agreement. Where did I say otherwise? My goodness, I've said what you have said.
Nobody really knows what he stole. They know what he returned. But they haven't said specifically what is still missing, or what they might have not catalogued. The whole thing raises so many questions about personnel and procedures at the NA. The speculation has to do with a drafts supposedly written by Richard Clarke, markedup by various, and on the subject of the Millenium Plot and certain measures the country might take in its wake. But no one has even yet definitively said that was that. This will all come out.
Indeed. Note I didn't claim what, how could I?
I said we all know *why* he did what he took the papers, and that was cleaning up the files at the behest of Clinton under the guise of reviewing documents that should be given to the 9/11 commission.
I hope you change your mind, PD.
The fargin icehole bastages you hear from are just throwing useless garbage at you. If they know better, why don't they prove it? ===> they can't.
When it all comes out, you're vindicated.
Just look at how they took Bruce Lindsey's talking points straight from their steno pad to print:
The Mystery Deepens (Another NY Slimes Editorial Hit Piece)
The Bush administration's handling of the bipartisan commission investigating the 9/11 tragedy grows worse — and more oddly self-destructive — with each passing day. Following its earlier attempts to withhold documents from the panel and then to deny its members vital testimony, we now learn that President Bush's staff has been withholding thousands of pages of Clinton administration papers as well.
Bill Clinton authorized the release of nearly 11,000 pages of files on his administration's antiterrorism efforts for use by the commission. But aides to Mr. Clinton said the White House, which now has control of the papers, vetoed the transfer of over three-quarters of them. The White House held the documents for more than six weeks, apparently without notifying the commission, and might have kept them indefinitely if Bruce Lindsey, the general counsel of Mr. Clinton's presidential foundation, had not publicly complained this week. Yesterday the commission said the White House had agreed to allow its lawyers to review the withheld documents, but without guaranteeing any would be released.
This latest distressing episode followed the White House's pattern of resisting the commission in private and then, once the dispute becomes public, reluctantly giving up the minimum amount of ground. Earlier in the week, Mr. Bush finally agreed to allow Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to testify under oath — but only after extracting a commitment that the commission would not seek any further public testimony from any White House official. After months of foot-dragging, Mr. Bush also grudgingly agreed to let the panel question him and Vice President Dick Cheney privately. Last year the Pentagon, the Justice Department and other agencies stonewalled the commission's requests for documents until its chairman, Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, complained publicly.
Explaining the latest act of obstruction, Scott McClellan, the president's spokesman, said on Thursday that some documents were duplicative, unrelated or "highly sensitive." The White House, he said, had given the commission "all the information they need." Mr. Bush's staff should not be making that judgment. The commission's 10 members can be trusted with sensitive material.
Moreover, given the repeated criticism of this administration's obsessive secrecy on other issues, it is astonishing that it would still withhold anything that did not pose an immediate and dire threat to national security. The American people would like to know that they have a government that freely gives information to legitimate investigations on matters of grave national interest, not one that fights each reasonable request until it is exposed and forced to submit. The White House is serving no public purpose by acting less interested than the rest of us in having this commission do its vital work. Its ham-handed behavior is also gravely damaging the entire concept of executive privilege
Yes, I agree. One does feel the need for a shower after reading much of anything from the NY Times, these days (or even early APR).
Thank you VRWC_minion, for that thorough and thoroughly informative reply. I get so few of those. Feels like I just had a free backrub :)
National Security Reviews or National Security Directives.
The docs have all the pertinent stamps and markings, and you'll note that they're mostly SECRET, not TOP SECRET.
Regarding the Archives, certainly all classified materials are stored in secured area. The "research room" used by Berger would also conform to security guidelines.
Archives would deliver to Berger a "stack" (or file) within his requested range of materials, and he'd have a go at them.
It looks like what happened is that they suspected he took a few docs, but (I'm guessing) were so shocked that they didn't act immediately. Here you have Sandy Berger, former NSA, putting classified docs into his briefcase, and he has a clearance waiver approved by Bruce Lindsey and Bill Clinton. I would speculate this was totally and completely unprecedented in their experience.
SO they call Lindsey (who's their interface to Bill Clinton who has authority over these docs), and Lindsey says "Call Sandy on the phone and ask for them to be returned."
They get the docs back, so on his next visit the Archives staff codes the docs, and he does it again, bold as can be. Now they call in the FBI.
This issue about the "nuclear codes" and "safes" and etc is true in (classified materials must be under the control of cleared people or approved physical systems at all times), but indeed we DO have those conditions here with secured National Archives facility and the former NSA with a presidential clearance waiver. All is seemingly in place. Then the guy starts filching docs.
Personally I believe the Archives staff was shocked by the filching, slightly intimidated by who had done it, and inexperienced with how to proceed. It had probably never happened before. So perhaps they acted a little bit more slowly than is desirable, but I can certainly understand why.
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