Berger's Comeback
Richard Miniter
As many of you know, Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and I no longer get along.
Once a cordial and helpful source, Berger turned on me in January 2002 when the first installment of a Sunday Times (U.K.) series that I co-wrote appeared. He phoned my hotel room at something like 6AM, screaming that I was accusing him of “murdering 3000 people.”
He promised that he was going to ruin and destroy me. I asked him to not forget to perform this vital task. But he proved unreliable and I had to become semi-famous on my own.
Later, the blogosphere renamed him “Sandy Burglar” when he struck a plea deal admitting to stealing and destroying hundreds of pages of classified material stored in the National Archives. He said he needed access to it to prepare his testimony before the 9-11 Commission; it seems equally likely that he wanted to keep it out of the hands of the commission and of future historians and journalists.
My informed sources suggest that what Berger destroyed were copies of the Millennium After-Action Review, a binder-sized report prepared by Richard Clarke in 2000—a year and half before the 9-11 attacks. The review made a series of recommendations for a tougher stance against bin Laden and terrorism. There are 13 or more copies of this report. But only one contains hand-written notes by President Bill Clinton. Apparently, in the margin beside the recommendations, Bill Clinton wrote NO, NO, NO next to many of the tougher policy proposals.
You can see why Clinton might be happy to see these records vanish down the memory hole.
So Berger was stuffing in pants and socks and later shredding the evidence that President Clinton did not want to take a tougher line on bin Laden, following the 1998 attack on two U.S. embassies that killed 224 people (including 12 American diplomats).
Now for the Hillary connection…
So what does the Democratic front-runner and former First Lady do?
She makes Berger one of her top three foreign policy advisers.
The ever-wise Jonathan Adler has some interesting thoughts on this over at the Volokh Conspiracy.
And I have a few questions:
Did she bring him aboard to reward him for his criminal destruction of classified material? Or did she sign him up because of his stellar record in fighting bin Laden in the late 1990s?
