Glenn Reynolds has more on former Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s guilty plea over stealing documents from the National Archives. He quotes The Washington Post‘s story on the sordid affair.
The terms of Berger’s agreement required him to acknowledge to the Justice Department the circumstances of the episode. Rather than misplacing or unintentionally throwing away three of the five copies he took from the archives, as the former national security adviser earlier maintained, he shredded them with a pair of scissors late one evening at the downtown offices of his international consulting business.
The document, written by former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, was an “after-action review” prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration’s actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It contained considerable discussion about the administration’s awareness of the rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil. . . .
Berger’s archives visit occurred as he was reviewing materials as a designated representative of the Clinton administration to the national commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The question of what Clinton knew and did about the emerging al Qaeda threat before leaving office in January 2001 was acutely sensitive, as suggested by Berger’s determination to spend hours poring over the Clarke report before his testimony.
So here we have a former National Security Advisor stealing classified documents related to a major government investigation and shredding them to protect his former boss. If a Republican had done something like this, the press would be demanding his head on a platter — but when a Clinton-era official does it, off to the memory hole it goes.
Berger deserves to get the book thrown at him for this kind of absolutely irresponsible behavior — yet all he’s getting is a slap on the wrist. One would think that a former National Security Advisor would have more respect for the law and for ensuring that classified documents aren’t lost, stolen, or destroyed. Then again, perhaps given the tenor of his former workplace, that’s asking too much.
Compared to the report that came out yesterday validating the criminal manipulation of intelligence that led us to wage war in Iraq two years ago, the “tenor of the Clinton-era workplace” couldn’t seem more innocent by comparison.
Except the report said nothing about any “manipulation of intelligence” whatsoever. In fact it says quite the opposite:
No doubt our intelligence systems are broken, but looking at the people who were running them throughout the last decade, that’s hardly surprising.
And of course, you’re whole argument is emblematic of why the Democrats have no clue — a Clinton official deliberately sabotages the 9/11 Commission investigation by shredding notes that would have implicated the lax security policies of their administration, and the first reaction the Democrats have is to immediately change the subject.
I’ll let the Sandy Berger incident resolve itself. He committed a dumb and criminal act and deserves to pay for it. I was merely pointing out the idiocy in talking about the “tenor of the Clinton-era workplace” in the midst of the three-scandal-a-week Bush administration.
“Analysts who worked Iraqi weapons issues universally agreed that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.”
Judging from what Colin Powell said just this week, I have my doubts as to whether he concurs with that statement.
Except what Colin Powell says was this:
Which hardly indicates that there was some grand conspiracy to make up evidence to go to war. The CIA believed that Iraq had WMDs. So did every other foreign intelligence service on the planet. They weren’t all lying, but they were all sharing the same conduits of information – conduits that Saddam Hussein was manipulating to try to convey the impression that an attack on Iraq would lead to the use of those weapons. Hell, Saddam himself was routinely lied to by his own scientists who disposed of some of those weapons without his knowledge and could only speak freely once he was safely in a cell.