Sandy Burglar Berger
I'm way behind the curve of the blogosphere, but apparently not of many oldline media, in reporting that former President Clinton's national security advisor, Sandy Berger, is under investigation for taking classified documents from a secure archive. He reviewed the documents for three days in preparation for testimony to the 9/11 commission.

According to what I have heard on radio and television news, he and/or others are claiming Berger took the documents "inadvertently." I heard a sound bite of Sen. Joe Lieberman saying exactly that.

I have almost 20 years experience working with classified documents and worked full-time inside classified vaults (actually, fully secure office areas) in two different assignments.

It is not possible to "inadvertently" take a document home under the conditions Berger is reported to have been granted access to them: no briefcases allowed, each document serial numbered and inventoried, records annotated as to who was granted access and when, etc.

And, so reports go, Berger stuffed notes he made from the documents into his pants. NB: that means the notes were just as secret as the source documents.

This excuse is so ludicrous that I hardly know how to respond. But consider: Berger has no choice except to claim stupidity and incompetence rather than admit deliberate theft. So his defense is, "Yes, I, the national security advisor to the former president of the United States, centrally responsible for the guarding of the lives of our citizens from foreign threats, am in fact a blundering, absent-minded idiot."

So how can he or other Clinton-administration officials defend their counter-terrorism actions and policies when the NSA himself is so self-confessedly stupid? Why should we have any confidence at all the the former administration knew what it was doing when the NSC was headed by such a forgetful inept?

Update: Has anyone reading ever stuffed documents (or anything else, for that matter) into your socks inadvertently? I thought not.

Update: Turns out about the socks that, "The Berger team is denying it, which doesn't mean it's not true of course. ... Of course, being cleared of the sock-stuffing is not exactly getting cleared" (link).

Update: I heard on radio news (7-21) that federal investigators have confirmed that Berger was witnessed stuffing papers into his socks.

by Donald Sensing, 7/20/2004 02:45:44 PM. Permalink |