I have lived with classification of information my entire professional life. I am disgusted with the circus unfolding before us regarding Mr. Sandy Berger and his illegal antics.
Be reminded that he was the national security advisor to the president and held every clearance available in our government. From that experience, he knows that you must have a current clearance to review secure documents. He knows that if you take notes from a classified document, you must have the notes reviewed by a classifier to determine if they are classified. He knows that all classified documents are accountable. He knows that you cannot remove classified documents from a secure area without logging them out. He knows that a classified document cannot be destroyed without permission of the custodian. And he knows that he has no reason to put things down his pants unless he is hiding something or knows he is doing something wrong. I wonder if his disdain for the nation’s secrets made it easier for the Chinese to acquire U.S. secret missile plans during his reign in office.
From our national experience with Watergate, we must ask why he went to the archives to take documents. We must ask who sent him to do this, and why the media has chosen to discount this significant occurrence and relegate it to the second section of the newspaper. Apparently the media has decided to assign this event to the “not important” category. Surely they burned up page one for months with Watergate and rightly so. I wonder if we would be reading a two-inch column on page 13 if Condoleeza Rice had stuffed secret documents in her bra and walked out of the archives.
Joel Carlson
FBI special agent in charge (retired)
Stanwood
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