Sandy Berger and Clinton Security Lapses: A History
The image of Sandy Berger stuffing notes into his socks at the National Archives
conveys the culture of carelessness and corruption under Bill Clinton far better
than anything the 9/11 Commission will report. The Commission fails to see that
the fundamental explanation for America’s porous security before 9/11 is not
structural but cultural. Eight years of Clintonian indiscipline exposed America
to attack by disciplined terrorists.
America’s elite are too enlightened to notice that lax morality produces lax
security. But America’s enemies are happy to notice even if America’s elites
won’t. Like robbers sizing up a slipshod neighborhood as an easy target, the
terrorists saw from the security lapses America casually accepted during the
Clinton years that a 9/11 attack was possible.
…
Recall when ex-bar bouncer Craig Livingstone, elevated to a security position
in the Clinton White House by Hillary Clinton, “inadvertenly”(Berger’s word for
cramming notes into his clothing) lifted 900 FBI files on political appointees
from the Bush Sr. and Reagan administrations.
…
When one of Clinton’s CIA directors, John Deutch, inadvertenly took home a
CIA-issued computer with top secret information on it, Sandy Berger rushed to
his defense, and succeeded in persuading Clinton to pardon him. “Berger and
other senior White House officials believed Deutch deserved a pardon even though
his home computer security violations were egregious. They cited his overall
contributions to the government over many years and the fact that there is no
evidence that any of the classified material he mishandled was ever obtained by
unauthorized individuals,” reported the Washington Post back then.
…
During the Clinton years, you could always count on a report about something
missing, from laptops White House interns lifted to computers and documents
untraceable at vital agencies. After the State Department lost a computer once,
the Clinton administration explained it away merely as an official forgetting to
close a door to a “secure” conference room. When White House officials walked
off with hundreds of thousands of dollars of presidential souvenirs from Air
Force One at the end of Clinton’s term, that was explained away as precedent.
When a spy placed an eavesdropping device in the State Department, that too was
an accidental oversight. Apparently he just walked through the front door. The
FBI reported after the incident that its officials had seen a Russian spy
loitering near the Foggy Bottom entrance.
Hazel O’Leary, Clinton’s Energy Secretary, had figured out his security ethos
early on, and just dispensed with security badges for visitors to nuclear labs.
Placing security badges on foreign visitors, she famously explained, was
discriminatory. Then it was learned that nuclear secrets had been nabbed by
Chinese Communists. Sandy Berger’s response? “We’re talking about breaches of
security that happened in the mid-1980s.”
Berger was criticized at the time for being blasé about security lapses and
failing to report Chinese espionage at nuclear labs to Congress, and for having
gone out of his way to interfere with a Justice Department investigation of
Loral Space & Communications Ltd. for an illegal transfer of missile technology
to China. Berger’s Loral lobbying (the press reported that Loral chairman
Bernard Schwartz was one of the Democrats’ largest soft-money contributors
during 1995-1996, and had hired a former National Security Council spokesman)
was successful.