Thursday, January 18, 2007

Answer: What Are Clinton's Chestnuts?

Question: What was Sandy Berger trying to protect when he was snagged for stealing national security documents?

Cashill.com has a piece on what Sandy Berger, Clinton's National Security Advisor, was really after when he stole and destroyed national security documents.

If not the most skillful of embezzlers, Samuel “Sandy” Berger is a far more formidable character than the media would have us believe. When he made his now storied sorties into the National Archives, he risked his career and his reputation in so doing, and he knew it. Rest assured, he would not have done so were the secrets to be preserved not worth the risk of pilfering them.

Burglar was portrayed as a bumbling, absent minded professor type by Clinton. Everyone knows that absent minded professors cram their pants with top secrets documents. It's right in their CV. This ridiculous allegation was never questioned by the press.

In his first term, Clinton had hired this millionaire trade lawyer and lobbyist to be deputy national security advisor, not because of Berger’s foreign policy experience, which was negligible, but because of his political instincts, which were keen and reliable. Clinton entrusted Berger with some very sensitive assignments, particularly in relationship to China, and rewarded him for his trust with the job of National Security Advisor in his second term. This job does not require Senate confirmation. It is unlikely that Berger could have gotten any job that did.

Many of Clinton's advisors never passed security clearance. Remember John Huang and Chinagate?

Based on the testimony of a retired USAF Lt. Col. who was assigned White House duties, Cashill states:

At that time Col. Buzz Patterson carried the "nuclear football" for President Clinton. Given his security clearance, Patterson was entrusted with any number of high security assignments. One morning in "late-summer,” Patterson was returning a daily intelligence update from the Oval Office to the National Security Council when he noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka."As Patterson relates, "I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons." As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same. "I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community," Patterson writes, "and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it." The President’s hand written comments on the documents verified the same.

The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults as early as January 1995 and shared those plans with the FBI almost immediately. The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing and very possibly an Iraqi contract agent. His accomplice was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9-11 and allegedly Yousef’s uncle.

In a chestnut shell, Berger was trying to hide Clinton's knowledge of a possible airborne attack on the US five years before 9/11. And there's more. A lot more...

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