- WASHINGTON -- Sandy Berger,
the national security adviser under Bill Clinton and now a foreign policy
adviser to the Democratic White House challenger, John Kerry, is under
criminal investigation for removing classified counterterrorism documents
from the National Archives in Washington.
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- The inquiry, which began several months ago but whose
existence was only revealed yesterday, relates to papers which Mr Berger
reviewed for three days last summer and autumn to prepare for testimony
to the commission examining the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.
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- Officials at the Archives, a repository for presidential
documents, are said to have told the FBI they saw the former national security
adviser place papers in his jacket and trousers, and then discovered that
some documents were missing. They include notably a top-secret review carried
out in early 2000 of the Clinton administration's handling of the threat
from al-Qa'ida during the December 1999 millennium celebrations, when terrorist
attacks were widely feared, as well as handwritten notes taken by Mr Berger.
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- In a statement, Mr Berger admitted he improperly took
some documents and notes with him when he left the Archives building, and
expressed "deep regret" for his "sloppiness". But,
he insisted, he had no intention of withholding any documents from the
commission. Indeed, as far as he knew, "every document requested from
the Clinton administration was produced", Mr Berger declared.
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- The early 2000 "after-action review" was drawn
up by Richard Clarke, the counter-terrorism chief for the Clinton and George
Bush administrations, who has since emerged as a bitter critic of what
he says was the neglect of the terrorist threat by the Bush administration
before 11 September 2001.
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- Mr Clarke told The Washington Post it was "illogical"
to believe Mr Berger had sought to conceal the review "because everybody
in town had copies of this thing". David Gergen, a journalist who
served as an adviser for Republican and Democratic administrations, and
had a stint alongside Mr Berger in the mid-1990s during the Clinton administration,
was also sceptical. "I think it's more innocent than it looks,"
he said.
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- Moreover, the timing of the leak about the Berger inquiry
has aroused some suspicion - coming as it does just 48 hours before publication
of the commission's report - even though the FBI investigation itself has
been in progress for months.
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- Some Democrats saw the affair as a deliberate bid by
the Bush campaign to smear their party, and divert public attention from
the report itself. The report will be critical of the Clinton and Bush
administrations, but it is the latter which may come out worse. Not only
is it expected to cast doubt on assertions by the Bush White House of links
between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa'ida that were used to justify the increasingly
unpopular invasion of Iraq last year.
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- The report will also suggest that Iran was a far greater
terrorist threat than Iraq, and actually allowed eight of the hijackers
to transit across its territory on their way to the US. Mr Bush's critics
will seize on this finding as further evidence that he went after the wrong
target when he launched his war against Saddam, despite strong international
opposition.
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- In his statement, issued with Lanny Breuer, his lawyer,
Mr Berger said the mistake happened after he reviewed "thousands of
pages of documents" in connection with requests from the commission,
and "inadvertently" took a few of them from the Archives. After
he was told some were missing, "I immediately returned everything
apart from a new document that I had apparently discarded". However
embarrassing the disclosures, Mr Berger can console himself that he is
not the first high-ranking official to find himself in a similar predicament.
John Deutch, CIA director from 1995 to 1996, was prosecuted for keeping
17,000 pages of classified material on his home computer. He was about
to plead guilty to a misdemeanour charge when he was pardoned by Mr Clinton
in January 2001.
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- © 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=542993
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