Well, it’s a big enough issue that Berger has resigned from his advisory role to Kerry until the matter gets cleared up.
Am I allowed to ask “what planet are you from?” in Great Debates? 
On line, this story is front page news today on CNN.com, usatoday.com, yahoo.com and nytimes.com. (Berger’s face was prominent on the CNN home page for hours this afternoon.) In print, I saw this as the big front-page story for two different newspapers today… in Boston, no less! The Berger story has been as pervasive as any news item I’ve seen in the past 48 hours.
Maybe you just have a different definition of “all over this” than I do, but I’m not sure what more you want.
-P
Wow, so Berger, in the course of reviewing thousands of pages of material, took a few copies of documents he’d already reviewed during his time in office, leaving the originals. He then maliciously returned all of them he could find when informed of the mistake.
Even if you convinced me that he intentionally smuggled them out, all it would look like is that he felt like prepping for Congress at home with a beer, a TV, and a comfy chair. Big fucking whoop.
Oh, please. Every classified document has a brightly colored cover sheet that reads
TOP SECRET
on the top and bottom. The only way one could “mistakenly” get such documents mixed up with notes is if the reader were literally blind.
But what’s killing me now is the Republican partisans calling for Berger’s head for mishandling documents. That’s fine, as I said, he sound be held to account for his actions, intentional or not. But I’d love to hear those same R’s express their feelings on the Valerie Plame case with equal vigor.
Well, as a conservative who has been publically calling for the heads of anyone who can be shown to have ‘outed’ Valerie Plame, and who strongly supports an investigation into the Chalabi/Iran affair, I think I’m being even-handed here when I say that Berger should be in deep doo-doo.
Everyone keeps calling him a ‘Clinton official’. He’s not - he’s a KERRY official. He’s an advisor to the Kerry campaign, and I would guess that it was in this capacity that he was going through the archives in the first place. Why copy documents and sneak them out? Possibly as ammo for Kerry? Perhaps they were worried that the Bush administration would level blame at Clinton unfairly, and having copies of the intel assessments would allow them to vociferously deny it. Or perhaps the Kerry team needed to know what liabilities the Democrats were facing in Clinton’s records, and Berger went over the line in getting him the information. These are all possibilities.
Of course, it could also be something completely different. But that’s what investigations are for.
I take leaks of top-secret material very seriously. The entire governmental apparatus in D.C. is shoddy about keeping secrets. In peacetime, it’s inexcusable. In wartime, it’s despicable, and depending on the nature of the documents and the motivation behind removing copies, it’s lock-him-up-for-a-long-time serious.
Likewise, if it can be shown that, say, Dick Cheney or Scooter Libby passed top secret intelligence to Ahmed Chalabi which made its way to Iran, I would argue that they should not just be removed from office, but should be serving time in a federal penitentiary. It’s going to take a few serious head-crackings before the idiot politicians and functionaries learn that TOP SECRET means keep your freaking yap shut, and don’t copy the damned material.
Not anymore he’s not. And I think other links have said he was an unofficial Kerry adviser (so OFFICIAL would not apply), as opposed to what he was with Clinton.
Wrong. As the link in the OP notes, “Clinton asked Berger last year to review and select the administration documents that would be turned over to the commission.” So his role with Kerry has nothing to do with this unless you want to just fling accusations about.
They sure are. There’s absolutely no reason to believe any of them happened, and it would look just a tad bit improper if Kerry was attacking Bush with classified information, but hey, they’re possible.
I shouldn’t have even said this. The way to say it was: He is not a Kerry official, he was an informal adviser (see the link in the OP). He is no longer a Kerry adviser. So the term “Clinton official” is accurate.
I think I have to agree. A potential motivation for Berger to take copies of top secret documents in apparent violation of law is to provide the Kerry campaign with politically damaging info. about our terror policy. Even if that wasn’t the reason, it’s a stupid thing to do because of the damage it could cause to Kerry and his campaign, in light of the inevitable suspicion surrounding such actions. I certainly hope Kerry had nothing to do with this.
I don’t think the guy should be locked away for good or anything, but I think if he technically broke laws, even inadvertently, he’s got to be held accountable in an appropriate way.
So what should the debate be? Whether or not Berger should have resigned?
Not sure I follow your reasoning here. How would exposing “politically damaging info.” about Clinton do Kerry the least bit of good? This seem just a bit less plausible than passing info to Fatima of the Quivering Thighs.
Bet on it. With anybody fool enough to bet otherwise.
Off hand, it looks like a summary inquiry followed by a very stern talking to. About all its worth.
“…on Saturday, Jan. 11, Cheney invited Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador, to his West Wing office. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were also there… Sitting on the edge of the table in Cheney’s office, Myers took out a large map labeled TOP SECRET NOFORN. The NOFORN meant NO FOREIGN – classified material not to be seen by any foreign nation… Staring intently at the 2-by-3-foot Top Secret map, Bandar, a former fighter pilot, asked a few questions about air operations. Could he have a copy of the large map so he could brief Crown Prince Abdullah? he asked, referring to the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia. ‘Above my pay grade,’ Myers said. ‘We’ll give you all the information you want,’ Rumsfeld said. As for the map, he added, ‘I would rather not give it to you, but you can take notes if you want.’”
“Plan of Attack” by Bob Woodward, p. 264
So, who’s calling for Rumsfeld’s, Cheney’s, and Myers’ resignations?
If so, maybe the conservatives here on the SDMB are as incensed about this as they are about Berger, but the conservatives that appear on TV, write op-ed columns, or spout bombast over the radio, OTOH…
Everything I’ve read so far indicates that the documents he took were related to the Clinton administration. How was Berger going to provide Kerry with damaging info about the current administration’s policies (or ANY damaging info) with documents from the Clinton administratoin?
I can’t imagine how he would have.
Me, if the situation warrants it. All we have so far is Woodward’s account, which may not be complete. Perhaps the documents had already been declassified, or approval had been given by whoever needs to give approval to share that information.
If not, hang 'em high. For too many years now, “Top secret” information has been leaked willy-nilly by both Republicans and Democrats for political purposes. The stakes are too high to allow this foolishness to continue.
I think it would be the other way around - the Kerry team might want copies for DEFENSE. Say someone in the Kerry camp said, “You know, Clinton didn’t do badly with terrorism, but what if the Bush administration starts to claim that it’s all his fault? And what if the documents that exxonerate Clinton mysteriously vanish? Why don’t we see if we can’t get our own copies, just in case?” Or even, “If Bush claims that Clinton failed at X or Y during the debates, I need an answer. Can someone get me copies of those documents so I can study them?”
That sort of thing. It may be far-fetched, but it’s hard to see any non-farfetched reason why Sandy Berger would take a risk of smuggling classified information out of a secure area.
“exxonerate” - Freudian slip!
As all the media stories note, this all went down a while ago, and it happened when Berger was briefing for the 9/11 commission.
I find the link to any sort of Kerry angle pretty implausible. This all happened in the context of preparing to testify for the 9/11 commission, and it already makes sense in that context (though no less a crime). The documents in question were all produced to the commission, so there’s no evidence of hiding anything or tampering with that. And the information itself was seen by the commission and many other people as well, so it’s not clear why Kerry would especially benefit from anything Berger did even if Berger had Kerry in mind. It’s not really clear what the motive would be for anything more nefarious, given that the CONTENT of the documents could all be legally stored in Berger’s head, notes or copies or no.
I agree: this was outrageous behavior from someone who should know better. Luckily, he’s a Democrat, and the prosecutors are Republicans, so instead of quietly burying everything, someone will actually have to take responsibility for what he did for once. Amazingly, Berger has confessed to what he did and seems to be cooperating with investigators.
But given your intense dislike for leaks, how seriously do you take the leak of the investigation itself, which for all intents and purposes seems to have partisan motives?
As I noted, little hard to have any movement on this front when the people investigating are the political cronies of the people under investigation. That lust for independant investigations really cooled off once the Republicans got in power, no?
Sure. Just like the Democrats were all for the special prosecutor law when Reagan was in office, then found it a horrible abomination once it was applied to them. This isn’t a Republican or Democrat thing - this is obnoxious Washington political behaviour, and both sides engage in it freely. Just like Bush is all about executive privilege, and the Republicans support him on that, but when Clinton was in power, invoking executive privilege was seen as tantamount to an admission of guilt.
And if Bush loses in November, you’ll see Democrats who found against Executive Privilege under Bush supporting it under Kerry, and Republicans opposing it. Both sides tend to put the good of their party ahead of the good of the country sometimes.
But if you think they are bad, you should see the way the Canadian government works.
Is this a fact? As it was reported on the radio this morning, the National Archives contacted Berger when they noted that certain documents were missing, and he immediately stated that he had them and returned them. Simultaneously to the National Archives alerting Berger, the FBI was also informed, and began an investigation. Apparently, the FBI has not yet talked to Berger.
Just to clarify.
Can NOFORN information be given to foreign governments? Not normally, but I have seen circumstances where it has been done.
It’s a decision that has to be vetted by somebody, though, that decides that the operational needs of the moment demand the disclosure.
Not knowing the circumstances of the case you mention, RTFirefly, I can’t automatically condemn it. Sorry. It hardly measures up to the level of Sandy Berger sneaking classified material home.
I think info. related to the Clinton admin. might (and I stress a big fat might) be damaging to Bushco if, for instance, it was shown that during, say, Clinton’s second term, some intelligence was gathered that might be related to, oh, I don’t know, 9/11, and it could be shown that the Bush admin. ignored it. Clinton has gone on record a couple of times as having advised Bush that bin Laden would be one of his biggest concerns, and said that Bush seemed disinterested.
I personally don’t think any speculation is worthwhile, I’m more concerned with appearances. If there’s no issue, there’s no issue. I wouldn’t put it past some folks in Washington to spread vicious rumors, though, so that’s where the main concern lies.
No, there is a relevant issue to debate: Assuming it was not an honest mistake, why did he do it? What’s in those missing documents? Also, were those the only copies? The AP story says only, “The missing documents involve two or three draft versions of the report as it was evolving and being refined by the Clinton administration, officials and lawyers say. The Archives is believed to have copies of some of the missing documents.” Some? Or all?