Two things strike me about Sandy Berger's theft of classified documents. First, it wasn't accidental. He took more than one document that he knew to be classified and removed them knowing that they were held in safekeeping as Top Secret (named.) He and his lawyers admitted as much. They now claim it was inadvertent. In early stories they claimed he thought they were copies. Secret documents are numbered. Copies of copies are uniquely numbered. Even notes based on Top Secret documents are given the same classification as the document they are based on until proven otherwise.
So Sandy Berger stole multiple documents on more than one occasion, seemingly several drafts of the same Millenium response report, presumably for the handwritten notes on each copy. And then he stole his own notes on the documents. Sloppiness might account for one accidental "withdrawal" of a draft. That stretches credulity. Twice or more is criminal intent.
The second thing that strikes me is that it is something that is so remarkably consistent with the Clinton administration attitude toward secret clearances, the inviolate nature of FBI files, especially raw information that might be kept on individuals, and the administration contempt for law. Civil libertarians look at the Patriot Act in alarm but the haunting images of the Clinton administration are still pictures of men and women and children and babies burning in Waco, Texas, as a tank crashed through a wooden building for a gun violation. The civil libertarians who flinch at John Ashcroft's name can't have seen the picture of black SUV's pulling up in front of the Miami bungalow, military-garbed, heavily armed federal police throwing people to the ground, bursting into the home and shoving a gun against the face of a small boy and his uncle. THAT is the lasting image that ought to frighten them.
UPDATE: Sandy Berger's role in releasing classified information on the illegal technology transfer to China is remembered.
