Over at Pajamas Media Richard Miniter has posted the OIG Sandy Berger report here. Richard's editorial note on the report focuses on the pertinent questions:

What was role of Omar Bashir, President of the Sudan, and his relationship to Berger and President Clinton during the days when he offered to cooperate in the capture of Osama Bin Laden?

What was in the ten to twenty pages of notes Berger is believed to have taken out of the reviewing room against regulations during his first session?

Who was the person or persons Berger contacted during the numerous “private cell phone calls” he was allowed to make during his active review of the classified documents?

Exactly what was in the documents Berger stole from the archives, some of which he has confessed to destroying?

The list can be extended as one reads the OIG report carefully. We are confident that by releasing this document in this manner we can call upon the networked intelligence of the Web to find within these pages not only more questions, but the beginnings of the answer to the central mystery of this entire incident: “Who was Berger looking to protect from the 9/11 Commission’s inquiry? Was it just himself and his role in our National Security in the Clinton years? Or were there others that the documents would either embarrass or implicate?

JOHN adds: I've read the report; it's generally consistent with what has been in the press over the past year, although it contains Berger's confession in fuller and more dramatic form than I think I've seen reported.

It seems clear that the main focus of Berger's concern was the After-Action Report that was done following the capture of the Millenium Bomber around the beginning of 2000. Here is the main thing that puzzles me about the OIG report: is it possible that Berger was destroying the only copies of these documents? And if not, how could it possibly be worth his while to go to the trouble and risk of destroying them?

In any normal document management system, the documents would be scanned and numbered. Electronic files would be maintained in various locations and no one would work with anything except redundant paper copies. It sounds, however, as though the National Archives may have been working with an antiquated system. When employees there first began to suspect that Berger was stealing documents, they had no easy way to keep track of the documents, so they hand-numbered them sequentially. This later enabled them to prove that documents were missing.

So it's possible, I guess, that the Archives really didn't have duplicates, or, more likely, that duplicates or electronic files existed somewhere but were not easily retrievable.

That's a question I'd like to see whether anyone can shed more light on: were these unique documents, and if not, what benefit could Berger gain by destroying them?

Posted by Scott at 08:23 AM  |    |