Saturday, March 31, 2007
The Sandy Berger mystery, on Fox
If you're not doing anything at 9 pm EDT tonight, watch the documentary on Sandy Berger on Fox. The first couple of minutes are very hard-hitting. I'll put up anything particularly interesting in an update. (NRO regular Andy McCarthy was interviewed for the show, and reports that it will rebroadcast on Sunday afternoon.)
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds links to the associated print coverage. Personally, I'm on the edge of my seat to see if Fox will ask the really interesting question: Given Sandy Berger's astonishing admissions, why did the Justice Department cut him such a sweet deal? My own longstanding speculation -- and it is rank speculation -- is that the Bush administration wanted a trial even less than Sandy Berger. But again, why?
UPDATE: Andy himself gets to the question I ask above, or at least the problem: "He ends up getting the sweetheart deal of all time." But he doesn't know why, either. John Ashcroft's Justice Department made a bizarre decision to let Sandy Berger off the hook for a serious crime, and it deliberately kept the 9/11 Commission in the dark about the existence of the investigation. The implications are not simply that Sandy Berger got off the hook. We actually do not know the documents Berger took, and therefore we do not know whether the 9/11 Commission saw everything it needed to see.
5 Comments:
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Sat Mar 31, 09:52:00 PM:
But again, why?
The republicans have repeatedly (and futilely) tried to be "nice" to democrats.
What's going on with the Cold Cash Jefferson investigation? Completely off the radar scope...
Hillary's campaign finance scandal? Most people don't even know it exists...
The actual WMD we did find in Iraq? Never mentioned...
I've concluded the current crop o republicans are basically retards.
By Gordon Smith, at
Sun Apr 01, 08:53:00 AM:
Purple,
Your comment is a list of things that aren't true. Even retarded folks have hearts, and where do expect I'll find examples of Congressional Republicans "being nice" to the Democrats they marginalized, sidelined, and ignored for the last six years?
"The actual WMD we did find" - Did you find it next to the magical pony?
Jefferson, who's a crook, is being investigated, will be tried and convicted. Even the Congressional Black Caucus will let him go then.
There is no Clinton campaign finance "scandal".
Lastly,
With all the things the Bush administration are wrapped up in, it's fascinating to me that the right-wingosphere is so hung up on the Berger thing. Something odd went on, to be sure. Maybe y'all will turn up the next big U.S. Attorney-style scandal here, but it looks to me like you're just staring into the clogged toilet to avoid noticing that the house is on fire.
By TigerHawk, at
Sun Apr 01, 09:56:00 AM:
Screwy, a couple of things.
First, the questions that hang over the Berger investigation and plea bargain point toward the Ashcroft Justice Department. It should be interesting to non-partisans, rather than partisans, why John Ashcroft's prosecutors went out of their way to protect Sandy Berger. This smells like a conspiracy, but for some strange reason virtually nobody in the mainstream media has been paying attention. The Fox documentary is arresting because it is so unusual given the potential magnitude of the problem, and even Fox buried it against the NCAA Final Four.
Second, if one is interesting in national security, rather than a political result, this is a big scandal, not a small one. As the Fox documentary made clear, there is a real question whether this wasn't a bi-partisan plot to subvert the 9/11 Commission. That's pretty creepy stuff.
By Dawnfire82, at
Sun Apr 01, 11:58:00 AM:
"The actual WMD we did find" - Did you find it next to the magical pony?"
Actually, they were scattered throughout buried bunkers belonging to the Republican Guard, exactly where they were predicted to have been by the way, but in far fewer numbers than expected. [I've personally known two sergeants who were present at their discovery, (in two different locations) One of them was terribly burned by a booby trap, but lived.] Dollars to doughnuts that the rest of that story involves Russians, diplomatic chicanery, and some flying bullets and will remain classified until the end of time.
Maybe it would do you some good to actually consider news and ideas that do not jive with your pre-set worldview (i.e., dogma) instead of dismissing them out of hand. I know that "Bush lied, et al" is easier to remember and everything, but it's not true.
By Escort81, at
Sun Apr 01, 04:25:00 PM:
There is no question that Saddam had WMDs during the 1980s and 1990s because he used them in the '80s, and inspectors found stockpiles in the '90s. The question was how much he had left when the inspectors were forced to quit Iraq.
There is also no question that Saddam's regime, if left intact (particularly if sanctions had been lifted so that the Iraqi people wouldn't have to suffer deprivations), had the technical ability, and could have reconstituted much of the stockpiles of WMDs that exisited at the end of GW1 and were found and destroyed in the 90s.
The problem was the existence of Saddam's regime and the possibility that he could hand off a small amount of WMDs to non-state players to use against the West, and whether the U.S. was willing to live with that chance in a post-9/11 world. The fact that a small amount of chemical weapons would not result in casualties near the magnitude of 9/11 is secondary -- the use of chemical weapons would certainly strike terror in any western city.
Let's suppose that 3 small armory buildings were discovered after the fall of Baghdad and that 2 tons of operational chemical weapons were discovered (let's say in happened in late 2003), and network news programs were invited in to film it. Does anyone think that the conditions in Iraq would be any different today, all other things being equal? Or, would that 2003 discovery simply make some Americans feel better in 2007 about taking out the regime? The fact that significant stockpiles of WMDs weren't found and publicized has little to do with the conditions on the ground in Iraq from 2003-2007.
The debate should be less about WMDs not found an more about what degree of force (both size and ROEs) would have been necessary in 2003 and 2004 to kill the insurgency in its infancy.
