Berger On The Grill
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
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Scandal: Remember Sandy Berger? He was Bill Clinton's national security adviser. Until Tuesday, he was a top adviser to John Kerry. Now, he's in big trouble.
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The former Clinton White House official is being investigated for taking notes and classified documents from the National Archives as he prepared for the 9-11 hearings.
Berger claims he accidentally took the documents, some of which he later threw out. He claims further he wasn't trying to hide anything from the 9-11 commission and would cooperate with any investigation. He blamed it all on <font color=blue>"sloppiness."<font color=black>
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Sorry, but Berger's bizarre behavior raises many questions. Included among those are some hypothetical ones, such as:
What if President Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had done the same thing?
Can anyone seriously doubt the media would today be asking, <font color=blue>"What did the president know, and when did he know it"<font color=black>? Or that media pundits would be calling for Rice's resignation?
Yet, the Berger story mainly got covered by the unconventional Web-based media. It was buried in both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, and got only cursory treatment elsewhere.
Once again, so much for media objectivity.
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Of course, Democrats see a GOP plot in all this. But that's a little far-fetched. <font size=4>Berger was caught by National Archives employees stuffing classified documents into his jacket and pants. That doesn't sound to us like the theft was <font color=blue>"inadvertent,"<font color=black> as Berger says.
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With the 9-11 panel's final report due this week, we may never know whether the missing documents would have cast a damning light on Clinton's anti-terrorism efforts.
As the Associated Press reported, Berger discarded <font color=blue>"two or three copies of the highly classified Millennium terror report (that) included critical assessments about the Clinton administration's handling of the Millennium terror threats as well as identification of America's terror vulnerabilities at airports and sea ports."<font color=black>
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It's hard to have much sympathy for Berger. He's one of many Clinton administration officials who has ripped Bush and his top aides for <font color=blue>"incompetence"<font color=black> in the war on terror — a war we think should have begun under Clinton's watch, but was left to Bush.
Now, the incompetence shoe is on the other foot.
Berger was a top national security adviser to John Kerry. So was diplomat Joseph Wilson, another Clinton appointee, who lied about Iraq seeking nuclear materials in Iraq. See a pattern here?
Kerry hoped to show the Democrats could be tough on national security. Instead, by relying on Clinton administration retreads, he only raised questions about his own campaign's integrity.
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