Posted on 01/03/2007 11:48:07 PM PST by Jim Robinson
Investigation into pilfered documents reveals former president signed letter
President Bill Clinton signed a letter authorizing former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger's access to classified documents that later came up missing, according to a newly released investigation report by the National Archives and Records Administration.
The sensitive drafts of the National Security Council's "Millennium After Action Review" on the Clinton administration's handling of the al-Qaida terror threats in December 1999 suspiciously disappeared after Berger said he intended to "determine if Executive Privilege needed to be exerted prior to documents being provided to the 9/11 Commission." Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft testified before the 9-11 commission about the millennium report, urging the panel to ask why the document's warnings and "blueprint" to thwart al-Qaida's plans to target the U.S. were ignored by the Clinton administration and not shared with the incoming Bush security staff.
The NARA investigation report said Clinton signed an April 12, 2002, letter designating Berger – and another person whose named is redacted – as "agents on his behalf to review relevant NSC documents regarding Osama Bin Laden/Al Qaeda, Sudan and Presidential correspondence from or to (Sudanese President) Omar Bashir, contained in the Clinton Presidential records." A subsequent letter from a National Security Council official, May 14, 2002, said Berger repeatedly was briefed that "he was not allowed to remove any documentation from NARA."
Last year, Berger plea bargained a criminal sentence on the charge of unlawfully removing and retaining classified documents. A judge gave him no prison time, a $50,000 fine, 100 hours of community service and a ban from access to classified material for three years
According to the NARA report, after the 9-11 attacks, Clinton administration officials were swamped with calls regarding their handling of terrorist threats, and Berger soon realized he would have to testify. Berger said he put in over 100 unpaid hours of his time to be responsive.
The former White House adviser said the documents up for review were so numerous that he was unable to reconstruct them from memory, so he took 10-to-12 pages of notes and hid them in the pocket of his blazer.
The investigation report says, however, the May 14, 2002, letter stated "notes may be taken but must be retained by NARA staff and forwarded to the NSC for a classification review and appropriate marking. Berger, the letter said, "was made aware of this requirement."
In July 2003, Berger's handling of the papers began to "cause archival concerns in maintaining provenance" after he asked to leave the viewing office several times to hold very private phone calls. Later, in September, Berger once again stepped out of the office and headed for the men's room, but personnel reported an unknown white object beneath his pant leg.
A witness said Berger "bent down, fiddling with something white, which could have been papers, around his ankle."
After Berger's actions aroused suspicion in September 2003, an unnamed archives official hand-numbered drafts provided to Berger as a means of controlling the documents without consulting with NARA general counsel, security, management, the Office of the Inspector General or law enforcement.
In October, Berger returned to the archives office and was given one file folder of documents at a time. The NARA report indicates an e-mail numbered 217 came up missing after he reviewed it. Berger later said he slid the document under his portfolio.
When personnel noticed it was missing, they offered a copy of document 217 to Berger, and he reportedly slid the second file under his portfolio as well. Later, Berger said if he had been asked to return the file "it would have triggered a decision for him to give the documents back."
Instead, Berger said he had to make a private phone call and went to a desk outside the office. However, the phone line remained unlit, and he quickly departed to the restroom, a location from which he was reported to have recently returned.
Berger made numerous suspicious visits to the men's room in which personnel were concerned he might be hiding documents. He said he "went to the restroom on an average of every 30 minutes to one hour to use the facilities and stretch his legs."
According to the NARA report, Berger claimed he accidentally took the files outside of the archives building and didn't want to risk bringing documents back because personnel might notice something unusual. Instead, he took the files to a fenced construction area on Ninth Street, slid them under a trailer and returned to the office to finish his review. After doing so, he returned to the site, reclaimed the documents and took them to his office.
During the visit, Berger is reported to have hidden four documents in his pockets, all versions of the Millennium Alert After Action Review.
Archives officials decided to call Berger and ask him for the documents. He said he didn't think he had any files. They advised him NARA was treating the matter as a security infraction and was going to report the incident to the National Security Council. If Berger admitted to taking the documents by mistake, the incident would be reported as inadvertent removal. But, he maintained that staff members were in error, and he had given the files back to an assistant.
Later that evening, Berger claimed to have found two documents, and NARA made arrangements to pick up the files the following morning. However, NARA reports the documents were an e-mail and a facsimile Berger reviewed Sept. 2, 2003, not classified files viewed Oct. 2, 2003.
Berger said he could not find any additional documents and claimed he must have thrown them away. According to the NARA report, "He had destroyed, cut into small pieces, three of the four documents. These were put in the trash. By Saturday, the trash had been picked up. He tried to find the trash collector but had no luck."
The inspector general was briefed on the incidents Oct. 10. That day, OI investigators recovered documents from Berger's home at the request of his attorney. Six months later, the Department of Justice notified the 9/11 commission.
Berger said if someone had always been with him, he would not have taken any documents.
Despite his April 1, 2005, guilty plea for Unauthorized Removal and Retention of Classified Material, Berger still vehemently denies smuggling any documents in his socks. According to the report, he said he was adjusting them "because his shoes frequently come untied and his socks frequently fall down."
Thanks. Nothing will happen to Clinton and no further legal penalties will land on Berger, although he will never be a National Security Advisor again. And Hillary goes rolling along.
What do you mean?
2002 - 9/11 Commission set up by Congress
3/03 - 9/11 Commission begins first hearings. One of its members is Jamie Gorelick, the person most responsible for the legal firewall between FBI/CIA and sharing intelligence information
Fall/2003 - Briefing given to four 9/11 staff members by defense intelligence officials during an overseas trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia
10/03 - Sandy Berger observed by Archives staff removing documents
3/04 -Madeleine Albright testifies before 9/11 Commission, and defends the Clinton administration's handling of Al-Qaeda and terrorism
4/04 - Condi Rice testifies before 9/11 Commission; states that there was serious problem in sharing intelligence information prior to 9/11
5/04 - Berger testifies before the 9/11 Commission; completely overshadowed by the fact that Richard Clark and George Tenet also testified on the same day (testimony: http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/berger_statement.pdf )
7/04 - Berger steps down as an advisor to the Kerry campaign after it is revealed that he was being investigated for removing classified documents from the National Archive
7/04 - 9/11 Commission report issued without any mention of the Able Danger information
4/05 - Berger pleads guilty to removing classified documents
7/05 - Berger's sentencing is delayed to September, 2005.
8/05 -News breaks about the existence of Able Danger and its ID of 9/11 hijackers in 1999 and attempts to pass this information to law enforcement
that these after action notes would show that the person who argued for aggressive action against AQ, post millenium bombing (thwarted) - was Richard Clarke. now of course, it could be Clarke himself floating that.
Thank you
I've suggested the concept before... President Bush should issue a pardon to William (Jefferson Davis) Clinton on this narrow issue. Issue one to Hillary as well on this same crime. Do you think that would upset any liberals?
an article from 2004:
http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200407210837.asp
Thank you Miss Marple for bringing to the forefront that all 91/92 Attorneys General were fired in the first months of the Clinton Adm. takeover. March I believe. Never had been before.
This confirms there were papers with 'notes', at least, post-it notes. I wonder if these papers with the notes were the ones Berger took:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165268,00.html
Excerpt:
“The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell,” said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. “Had we learned of it obviously it would’ve been a major focus of our investigation.”
Hamilton’s remarks Tuesday followed findings by Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, that made front-page news.
In June, Weldon displayed charts on the floor of the U.S. Senate showing that Able Danger identified the suspected terrorists in 1999. The unit repeatedly asked for the information to be forwarded to the FBI but apparently to no avail. Various news outlets picked up on the story this week.
Weldon told FOX News on Wednesday that staff members of the Sept. 11 commission were briefed at least once by officials on Able Danger, but that he does not believe the message was sent to the panel members themselves. He also said some phone calls made by military officials with Able Danger to the commission staff went unreturned.
“Why weren’t they briefed? Was there some deliberate attempt at the staff level of the 9/11 commission to steer the commissioners away from Able Danger because of where it might lead?” Weldon asked. “Why was there no mention of Able Danger?”
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Sept. 11 commission looked into the matter during its investigation of government missteps leading to the attacks and chose not to include it in the final report.
{….]
According to Weldon, Able Danger identified [Mohammed] Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi (search), Khalid al-Mihdar (search) and Nawaf al-Hazmi (search) as members of a cell Able Danger code-named “Brooklyn” because of some loose connections to New York City.
Weldon said that in September 2000, the unit recommended on three separate occasions that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI “so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists.” However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation, arguing that Atta and the others were in the country legally so information on them could not be shared with law enforcement.
“Lawyers within the administration — and we’re talking about the Clinton administration, not the Bush administration — said ‘you can’t do it,’” and put post-its over Atta’s face, Weldon said. “They said they were concerned about the political fallout that occurred after Waco … and the Branch Davidians.”
Berger took the after action report for the millenium bombings, specifically certain drafts of the report.
the issue of the "notes in the margin" has become one of those "folklore" things now. The left claims the archives has copies of everything, they were submitted to the 9-11 commission, there are no "secret notes", that Berger essentially did nothing wrong because he destroyed copies of documents, he wasn't trying to hide anything. But other articles I have read note that Berger sifted for specific drafts of the report at the archives, that some specific draft had the notes in question, and this is what he grabbed.
that story makes the most sense - after all, why would you steal and destroy documents you knew there were exact copies of (like the final official version of a report) - what's the point.
Bump.
"They obviously had hand-written notes jotted in the margins.
The question is what was so damning Berger was willing to take one for the team."
We might not know exactly what was so damning, but I think we could come very close. There has been a pattern the rats have been in since clinton's election. First clinton was impeached by the US House, then Bush was accused of lying.
Another example more recently was Reid claiming the Republicans were a "culture of corruption", since we have found many rats were in the same culture and more.
Anyone who wants to add more examples, feel free. We may get better insight into why Berger stole those documents if we collectively think about it a little more.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Friday, Dec. 30, 2005 10:44 a.m. EST
Ex-CIA Big: Bill Clinton Authorized Extralegal Interrogations
The man who ran the Central Intelligence Agency's Bin Laden desk during the 1990s is accusing President Clinton of giving the CIA carte blanche to circumvent U.S. law and interrogate terrorist suspects in any way the agency saw fit - a directive that led to the establishment of secret CIA prisons on foreign soil.
"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture," recalled Michael Scheuer, who headed up the agency's Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, in an interview Wednesday with the German newsmagazine Die Zeit.
Scheuer said Clinton replied: "That's up to you."
(((TOTAL DAMN QUIBBLER AND COWARD .. THROUGH AND THROUGH)))
According to an Agence France Press summary of the Die Zeit interview, Scheuer explained that the Clinton administration "had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system."
The top Bin Laden hunter recalled that the extralegal directive came after "President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda."
The secret CIA interrogation process became known as "renditioning," Scheuer said, explaining that it included moving prisoners without due legal process to countries without strict human rights protections.
"In Cairo, people are not treated like they are in Milwaukee," he told Die Zeit.
"The Clinton administration asked us if we believed that the prisoners were being treated in accordance with local law. And we answered, yes, we're fairly sure."
Scheuer's revelations contradict a much ballyhooed Nov. 2, 2005 report in the Washington Post, which insisted that "the secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."
After mistakenly claiming that renditioning began under President Bush, the Post noted that "considerable concern lingers [within the CIA] about the legality, morality and practicality" of the program.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/30/104637.shtml
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
HERE'S THE OIG'S REPORT ON THE BURGLAR'S INVESTIGATION
CAN WE FIND AN INTELLIGENCE EXPERT IN BLACK MARKS?? lol
bttt
Missed the thread when I was away at Christmas ... re the OIG's Burglar Report:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1757873/posts
Thank you for your research and posts.
My eyes are tired tonight.
According to this, the RAT also stole 4 numbered classified emails on October 2, 2003. and all the missing documents had the MAAAR (Millenium Report) as an attachment.
I can only imagine what end up being shredded in Little Rock.
He and they have gotten away with it too.
I know .... gets me into a bloody fury!!
Here's a link to all the Burglar's NSC speeches from '95 to 2000:
http://clinton4.nara.gov/WH/EOP/NSC/html/speeches/index.html
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