Posted: Monday, August 2, 2004 10:00 pm
So the Berger affair apparently was just another Washington flap, drummed up to make political points and blown out of proportion because the press had a slow day.
The Wall Street Journal reported on the matter last Friday, although hardly anybody else mentioned it. An e-mail from Portland pointed it out to the D-H.
As you'll recall, a couple of weeks ago Samuel "Sandy" Berger, the former national security adviser in the Clinton administration, was accused of having taken classified material home from the National Archives, which is against the law. He had obtained access to the material in order to answer questions from the 9/11 Commission.
On Friday the Journal reported that officials looking into this admittedly unauthorized removal of classified material had reported that "no original materials are missing and nothing Mr. Berger reviewed was withheld from the commission …"
This conclusion, according to the Journal, apparently lays to rest any question of whether material was withheld from the commission or destroyed - which had been inferred as the dark motive for Berger to take the material with him.
The story was emphatic that "no originals were missing and that all the material that Mr. Berger had access to had been turned over to the commission."
So, if all the stuff that Berger reviewed is accounted for, and if nothing is missing, what's so important about him having taken some of it with him in the first place? It still sounds like a breach of the law on handling classified records. But it does not sound like some underhanded scheme to thwart the 9/11 commission, or to hide something, or to shift blame to the Bush people. It was, as Berger has said himself on TV, just a dumb thing to do.
The story was on the front page of our paper when it broke. It evidently didn't merit that kind of play. It was not important. And if it was interesting, it was interesting only as an example of how politics sometimes works to distort harmless events. (hh)