Berger Says He Bungled, But Pundits Believe Berger Burgled
by Bill Fancher and Jenni Parker
July 21, 2004
(AgapePress) - The admission that Clinton administration National Security Advisor Sandy Berger took papers on the Clinton handling of terrorism from the National Archives and then lost them has Capitol Hill scrambling for explanations.Berger, who has been an advisor to presidential candidate John Kerry on foreign policy issues, recently confirmed that he is under criminal investigation for taking documents pertaining to terrorism from a secure reading room at the National Archives. Yesterday Berger resigned as an informal advisor to the Kerry campaign.
According to the former security adviser's story, Clinton had sent him to examine the material before it was turned over to the 9-11 Commission, and Berger claims during his review he happened to stuff some papers in his pockets by accident.
Employees at the National Archives caught him on video removing copies of the classified documents, and they reported the incident. Although Berger claims he took the restricted papers "inadvertently" and deeply regrets "the sloppiness involved," some conservatives are not buying his explanation.
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Gary Bauer |
Conservative pundit Gary Bauer finds the whole story astonishing. He notes that, despite Berger's contention that he took the documents innocently, certain reports suggest Berger "stuffed the papers down his pants in order to remove them undetected," and though some of the documents were recovered, others remain missing.The activist-spokesman notes significantly that that Berger is "not a low-level bureaucrat or a naïve intern -- he was Bill Clinton's top national security man." He wonders along with others, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert, what information in those papers was so embarrassing that a man with decades of experience handling sensitive and highly classified documents would risk being caught stealing them.
And since Berger was a top advisor to Kerry, Bauer also wonders about what he says Bush campaign officials are already asking: "Did the classified documents end up in the possession of anyone in the Kerry campaign?" In any event, Bauer says he hopes both law enforcement and Congress will thoroughly investigate this "disturbing theft."
Conservative Paul Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, is equally suspicious of Berger and says the way the supposed accident occurred simply does not jibe with what he calls "sloppy error." If one is merely being sloppy, Weyrich says, "you don't shove papers in your pants as you're leaving. That's just absurd."
Berger claims he took the papers home by mistake and later returned all but a few that he must have discarded -- again, accidentally. The documents in question are believed to be critical of the Clinton administration and its response to certain terrorist threats, perhaps even suggesting that the Clinton administration ignored the presence of Al-Qaeda operatives in the United States.
That is one reason Weyrich says the entire situation smells. "I think clearly we have an attempt here to cover up some of the more critical aspects of what happened when [Berger] was national security advisor," he says.
But regardless of what the documents contained, Weyrich feels strongly that a man who was once in charge of the nation's security should know better than to remove such classified documents from the National Archive, which is a criminal act. The FBI has been investigating the matter for several months.
