Posted on 01/11/2005 11:41:41 PM PST by kattracks
Former Clinton White House Mr. Fix-It Bruce Lindsey emerged tight-lipped yesterday after testifying before a federal grand jury probing whether top-secret documents were illegally removed from the National Archives.The grand jury probe, reported exclusively in The Post Tuesday, is digging into why another former Bill Clinton aide, Sandy Berger, sneaked the national security documents out of the Archives — possibly in his socks.
Lindsey denied any inside knowledge about Berger's sticky fingers.
"All I know is what he [Berger] said. He made a public statement," said Lindsey, Clinton's deputy White House counsel, after testifying under oath yesterday.
Berger admits walking off with 40 to 50 top-secret documents from the archives, but claims it was an "honest mistake" while vetting documents for the 9/11 commission.
Berger has admitted destroying some documents — he says by mistake.
Lindsey declined comment on what he told the grand jury, but denied reports that he met with Berger in New York for crisis control as the scandal erupted last summer.
[snip]
Among the documents Berger lifted were multiple drafts of a report assessing the 2000 millennium threat that is said to conclude that only luck prevented a terrorist attack then.
That conflicts with Berger's sworn testimony to the commission — he claimed "we thwarted" millennium attacks by being vigilant, not lucky.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
That last list provides an interesting list of possibilities for collusion, doesn't it?
Wake up! It's almost 5 AM and things are popping! Read this thread as soon as you can!
I've always been skeptical that 911 was planned so thoroughly for so long and that no one claims to have known about it. When Berger was asked about it by a Congressional committee shortly after, he said it probably took "three months" to plan (right after Bush took office)...............which is ridiculous in the extreme. Berger was CYA'ing himself and Clinton b/c they know 911 was planned under their watch. And now they're trying to cover it up by stealing documents that prove it.
Why did the Archives call Lindsey? Apparently, the Archives wants us it think was b/c they had previous contact with Lindsey, but that does not preclude your theory that there was collusion, and the call may even be evidence of it.
Good point. Let's remember Clinton showing up in New York and walking the streets right after it happened, handing out hugs and tears. Given your statement, it creeps me out.
Bears repeating.
Berger ping
(bump)
I had to go put the dishes in the dishwasher and start my laundry. LOL! I'm baaaccck.
Oh, good! I will have to leave to make breakfast, but I am definitely going to pay attention to this thread today.
Before we can understand why Mr. Berger took such an extreme risk, we need a little bureaucratic insight. Initial drafts of reports are always written by career bureaucrats. By and large, these people confine themselves to the known facts and draw quite limited conclusions.
Following this initial draft, the report works its way up the bureaucratic food chain. During this journey facts are refined and conclusions honed to eliminate certain ambiguities and introduce others. Oddly enough, this process always makes the affected department look better than the original report.
When the bureaucratic department heads are finished with the report, their "draft" is given to a low-level political master – in this case, Richard Clarke. Here, the political revisions begin in earnest. Certain facts which aren't "relevent" are discarded, downplayed, or footnoted. Other facts which the original authors deemed of only peripheral importance are highlighted. This process requires that the report's conclusions be "refined" to take into account this "new information."
When Mr. Clarke was satisfied with the report, he would have passed it on to his boss – in this case, Sandy Berger. If Mr. Berger was satisfied with the report, he would pass it on to his boss – President Bill Clinton. After the president had a chance to read it, he would discuss it with Mr. Berger. They would come to a "meeting of the minds" and the report would get it's final revision. By this point, there is an excellent chance that the report's own mother (original author) would no longer recognize it.
Now back to poor Sandy Berger. He spent three days sifting through classified material at the National Archives deciding what documents to give the 9-11 Commission. But he left not with a list of documents the commission needed to see, but with his clothing and socks stuffed with handwritten notes and his briefcase filled with classified documents the 9-11 Commission didn't need to see! And among these documents were the early drafts of President Clinton's performance on terrorism.
Mr. Berger pointed out that the commission received every document it requested. I'm sure that's true: It's difficult to request documents you don't know exist. It's even more difficult to request documents that once existed but suddenly "disappear" – like the ones that traveled to Mr. Berger's office, never to be seen again.
When Archives employees saw that Mr. Berger appeared twice as heavy when he left the Archives as when he had arrived, they checked their documents. They discovered that earlier drafts of the Clinton terrorism legacy report were missing. Then they told their superiors, who called (please select one):
a) The Park Police
b) The FBI
c) The Justice Department
d) Bruce Lindsey
If you answered Bruce Lindsey, the Clinton family lawyer, you are correct. A phone call from the Archives to Mr. Clinton to inform him that the one of the Plumbers had been caught red-handed stealing classified documents would be open to public scrutiny. If the information was relayed via Mr. Clinton's attorney, however, the phone call would be protected by attorney-client privilege. (We'll see what Attorney General John Ashcroft thinks about that soon.)
As I write this column on Tuesday, speculation is rampant about what was in the stolen reports. The simple fact is, we don't know. But we do know this. Sandy Berger stole classified material in an effort to prevent its disclosure to the 9-11 Commission. He may have done it at the direction of his former boss.
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:ITrd71xg0YcJ:www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp%3FARTICLE_ID%3D39584+When+Berger,+BRUCE+LINDSEY&hl=en
Clinton Signed Off on Berger bin Laden Blunders
Documents uncovered by the 9/11 Commission suggest that disgraced former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger vetoed several attacks planned in 1999 and 2000 on Osama bin Laden's Afghanistan hideouts.
But while Berger may have advised against attacking bin Laden, remarks by President Clinton two years ago indicate that he personally quashed the plans.
Story Continues Below
As first detailed by the New York Sun on Friday, the 9/11 Commission report cites a document detailing a June 1999 plan to launch cruise missiles into a bin Laden encampment known as Tarnak Farms.
In notes handwritten in the margin, Berger cited "the presence of 7 to 11 families in the Tarnak Farms facility, which could mean 60-65 casualties," then warned, "if he responds, we’re blamed."
In February 2002 President Clinton discussed what sounded like the same plan to target Tarnak Farms, which is located near Khandahar. [In his version, Clinton inflated the potential casualties from 65 to 200.]
"The real issue is should we have attacked the al-Qaida network in 1999 or in 2000 in Afghanistan," he told a Long Island business group two years ago.
"The only place bin Laden ever went that we knew was occasionally he went to Khandahar, where he always spent the night in a compound that had 200 women and children. So I could have, on any given night, ordered an attack that I knew would kill 200 women and children that had less than a 50 percent chance of getting him."
Clinton continued:
"Now, after he murdered 3,100 of our people and others who came to our country seeking their livelihood you may say, 'Well, Mr. President, you should have killed those 200 women and children.' But at the time we didn't think he had the capacity to do that. And no one thought that I should do that. Although I take full responsibility for it."
According to the Commission, Berger advised against at least three other plans to capture or kill bin Laden during the same 1999-2000 time frame.
But in his 2002 speech, Clinton explained that he made the final call on at least one of those plans to snare the al-Qaida leader.
"We actually trained to do this. I actually trained people to do this. We trained people," the ex-president recalled.
"But in order to do it, we would have had to take them in on attack helicopters 900 miles from the nearest boat - maybe illegally violating the airspace of people if they wouldn't give us approval. And we would have had to do a refueling stop."
Without mentioning Berger, Clinton said that "the military recommended against it [because] there was a high probability that it wouldn't succeed."
In his April 8, 2004, testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Clinton took two aides with him: longtime damage controller Bruce Lindsey - and Sandy Berger.
And by the way....God Bless Deborah Orin.
Former CIA Director John Deutch was pardoned by Clinton just hours before Clinton left office in 2001 for taking home classified information and keeping it on unsecured computers at his home during his time at the CIA and Pentagon. Deutch was about to enter into a plea agreement for a misdemeanor charge of mishandling government secrets when the pardon was granted.
The 9/11 Commission completed its report under conditions that dictated that members couldn't question Berger about the theft of classified records they had requested of the Archives, without reopening the hearing. This, after it relied on his testimony. (This fact would have certainly affected his credibility.)
It was leaked after Clinton testified in Berger’s and in yet another Clinton spin doctor’s presence, Bruce Lindsey's. Those were the only two men we are certain knew of the investigation at that time.
******
Bruce R. Lindsey, who serves as former president Bill Clinton's liaison to the Archives, said he was not alerted to concerns about missing documents until two days after Berger's Oct. 2 visit. Berger was notified that day, and he searched his office for the missing papers. A government source claiming knowledge of the investigation said Archives officials alerted Lindsey to concerns after a visit by Berger in September.
******
Sandy Berger has been the subject of a criminal probe since October. Former federal prosecutor Joe DiGenova notes that the length of this probe against the understanding that Berger has not yet been interviewed by the FBI indicates a potentially serious charge.
******
Byron York reports that Berger took multiple copies of 15-to-30-page reports on two occasions. Pants and socks.
John Kerry (search) appeared to score points in Thursday’s debate by mentioning the thousands of hours of recordings of Arabic terror suspects that sit useless on FBI (search) shelves because we have so few Arabic translators.
What Sen. Kerry did not mention is that the FBI warned of this in the Clinton administration, which did nothing to alleviate the shortage.
Former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke passed the warnings about translators to Clinton officials after the nation narrowly escaped a major terror attack in 2000. The Clinton official in charge of processing these warnings was National Security Adviser Sandy Berger (search). The warnings were among the documents that Mr. Berger removed from the National Archives earlier this year.
As the New York Post reported in July: "Urgent complaints that the FBI could not decipher bugged conversations between members of a Brooklyn mosque and Afghan terrorists because it lacked translators were included in the documents former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger removed from the National Archives."
For the record, Mr. Berger left the Kerry campaign in July after saying that his removal of the archival material was an honest mistake.
And that’s the Observer.
And those unanswered terrorists attacks are why Berger was desperate to expunge the historical record so completely, of Clinton's failure to respond. More specifically, to allow the Clinton administration to continue taking credit for stopping the terrorist from getting through by car, at the Canadian border, saving LAX from a millinium attack.
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