Now that the uproar over the Sandy Berger case has died down, an interesting detail is coming to light. The reason for Berger's slap on the wrist "punishment," it turns out, is that Berger has agreed to become a government rat:

"Guilty, your honor," Berger responded when asked how he pleaded.

Berger did not say why he cut up the materials and threw them away at the Washington office of his Stonebridge International consulting firm. Accompanied by his wife, Susan, he offered no explanation when he addressed reporters outside the federal courthouse after the hearing.

"It was a mistake and it was wrong," he said, refusing to answer questions.

Noel Hillman, chief of the Justice Department's public integrity section, would not discuss Berger's motivation but said the former national security adviser understood the rules governing the handling of classified materials.

Berger had only copies of documents; all the originals remain in the government's possession, Hillman said.

The charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material is a misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of a year in prison and up to a $100,000 fine.

Under a plea agreement that still must be approved by Robinson, Berger would serve no jail time but would pay a $10,000 fine, surrender his security clearance for three years, and cooperate with investigators. Security clearance allows access to classified government materials. [Emphasis added.]

Y2K? I wonder......

In (ahem) unrelated news (on a different page in today's Inquirer), there's this:

WASHINGTON - Pursuing information that they missed evidence a decade ago, FBI agents searched the former home of convicted Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols and found blasting caps and other explosive materials apparently related to the 1995 attack, officials said yesterday.

FBI officials said the material at the house in Herington, Kan., was buried in a crawl space that was not checked by agents in numerous searches of the property during the original investigation of Nichols and Timothy McVeigh.

"The information so far indicates the items have been there since prior to the Oklahoma City bombing," Agent Gary Johnson said in a telephone interview from Oklahoma City.

The extraordinary discovery, just three weeks from the 10th anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people, is likely to prove a new embarrassment to an FBI already burned by missteps in this case and in the pre-Sept. 11 period.

Nichols, who is serving multiple life prison sentences on federal and state charges, has not lived at the property for years, and FBI officials said the information that led to the discovery indicated that Nichols buried the evidence before the April 19, 1995, attack.

That, coupled with Nichols' connection to Ramzi Youssef, bothers me. Who is Ramzi Youssef, you ask? Not much -- just the Iraqi-connected guy behind the first World Trade Center bombing:

Nichols, who had been married to a Filipino, traveled on many occasions to the Philippines, a nation known to harbor elements of Islamic fanaticism. Based on the testimony of a variety of witnesses, it’s believed that Nichols allied himself with a group of Islamic militants located in Cebu City in the Philippines, where he was instructed in the art of bomb-making by Ramzi Youssef, an Iraqi agent. Nichols, in turn, passed on this know-how to his buddy and crime partner, Timothy McVeigh. Moreover, Ramzi Youssef is the same individual who was subsequently convicted of participation in the 1993 Twin Towers bombing. In the referenced Insight magazine piece, Stephen Jones stated, "We went to the Philippines four times to investigate Terry Nichols’ meetings with Ramzi Youssef and other known terrorists". And Jones believes that there is a "prima facie" case for Iraqi involvement in the terrorist assault upon the Murrah Building. There are also reports that McVeigh had Iraqi telephone numbers on his person when he was arrested.

Leave that crawl space alone!

This lingering aroma stench has long bothered former Clinton CIA Director James Woolsey:

Former CIA Director James Woolsey also expresses skepticism that Timothy McVeigh, executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, and his accomplice Terry Nichols, sentenced to life in prison and awaiting further trial on murder charges, could have planned and executed this monstrous crime all by themselves.

Woolsey believes the work of persistent investigators, reporter Jayna Davis and Middle East expert Laurie Mylroie, are onto something, as many clues in their separate probes point ominously toward Baghdad.

"[W]hen the full stories of these two incidents [Oklahoma City and the first Trade Center bombing] are finally told,” he told the Journal, "those who permitted the investigations to stop short will owe big explanations to these two brave women. And the nation will owe them a debt of gratitude.”

Fortunately, I am not alone in my suspicions. Here's Rand Simberg:

we've never really found all of the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing, for the same reason, with an additional one. Not only would proof of a Middle East connection have required undesired action on the part of the Clinton administration, but it would have diluted the politically-useful message that this was the sole act of "angry white men," the same ones who'd been stirred up by Rush Limbaugh into giving the Republicans control of Congress the previous fall.

The woman who wrote the definitive book on a Middle Eastern connection to the Oklahoma City bombing says the classified terror-threat report at the center of a criminal investigation of former Clinton aide Sandy Berger might include information about a high-level al-Qaida operative having visited OKC ahead of the 1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building.

.....Jayna Davis, author of "The Third Terrorist: The Middle Eastern Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing," points out the writing of the report was in the same timeframe Yossef Bodansky, former director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, confirmed that Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri, one of al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden's lieutenants, traveled to Oklahoma City in the spring of 1995 " to insure the smooth execution of the pending terrorist strike against the Murrah federal complex," said Davis.

"Bodansky explained that he did not confirm Al-Zawahiri's mission to the heartland state until late 1999," Davis told WND. "This revelation coincides with Richard Clarke's drafting of the Berger-directed review regarding the realization that al-Qaida had reached America's shores."

Asked Davis: "Was Bodansky's confirmation that the chief lieutenant of the bin Laden terror network traveled to the U.S. to oversee final preparations for the 1995 terrorist strike on the Oklahoma City federal building included in Clarke's draft reports that are now officially missing from National Archives?

"Did Berger and Clarke review Bodansky's skillful analysis of the Murrah Building bomb that drew striking parallels to the techniques used by known Islamist groups for operations in Argentina and elsewhere?"

And a better question now.

UPDATE: Here's more about how the MSM has been covering up the nature of Sandy Berger's crimes. (Obviously, we are not supposed to know what was in the documents which were destroyed.)

MORE: What I think is probably going here is another bipartisan coverup (a phenomenon at least as old as Hadrian.)

UPDATE (04/04/05): Noting that these were not identical copies and that there remain many unanswered questions, Rand Simberg asks rhetorically:

....does anyone think that this reporting would have been the same if it were a Bush administration official accused of the same thing? (Via InstaPundit.)

Hey, let's get our priorities straight! As we all know, the Berger scandal pales in comparison with giving a press pass to a conservative gay reporter and then letting him ask the president friendly questions.

MORE (04/04/05 -- 6:57 p.m.): I just happened to catch a Fox News discussion of the Berger affair with a panel including Brit Hume and the Washington Times' Bill Sammon. No mention is made of the unique notations on these documents; instead, they're referred to as identical copies.

If there's one thing worse than a coverup, it's a bipartisan coverup.

They're the most successful kind!

AND MORE (04/05/05): I think it should be remembered that it was Richard Clarke -- the author of the much-copied-and-stolen classified report -- who alluded to the Terry Nichols/Ramzi Yousef connection in his own book:

On Page 127 [of his new "Against All Enemies"], Clarke notes that it's possible that al-Qaida operatives in the Philippines "taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building." Intelligence places Nichols there on the same days as Ramzi Yousef, and "we do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippines stay and were deadly when he returned."

This ties in to the theory that Clinton quashed investigations into a foreign connection to Terry Nichols. The objective - blame Oklahoma City on right-wing wackos for political purposes.

But we all know that "investigation" is a political synonym for "coverup."

CORRECTION: Technically, what Berger has agreed to do is "cooperate with investigators." "Cooperation," obviously, means doing whatever the investigators say. While the word "secretly" is not used, I would be willing to bet that the nature of the cooperation is as secret as the "investigation."

What I'd like to know is why the Berger prosecution (and onging "investigation") is being handled by Noel Hillman, Chief of the DOJ's Public Integrity Section. His background seems to be in election law and campaign finance.

Surely there's nothing political about this?

UPDATE: Noel Hillman is allegedly investigating the trail of money involving Peter Paul and Hillary Clinton.* Sure hope there's nothing political about that! (Michelle Malkin has a nice photo of the pair.)

*For those who distrust Newsmax, there's more here and here.

BOTTOM LINE: I think it's obvious that:

I can't think of any other explanation for the complete obfuscation of the nature of what was deliberately shredded by Berger. To ignore the notations and dismiss the documents (as Noel Hillman has) as "multiple copies of the same document" requires suspending disbelief. It's disingenuous at least, and hardly serves the interests of "public integrity." I think they know exactly what happened, but have decided that mutual silence is in everyone's interest.

But is their interest synonymous with the national interest?

Why?

ONE LAST ITEM: Via InstaPundit, I see that Dick Morris believes Berger was taking the fall to protect the Clintons. While I agree generally with Morris's analysis, this doesn't explain why Bush's DOJ would be so willing to go along with it.

What does? I know I can't prove a Mideast connection to the Oklahoma City bombing, but if Dick Morris is right, it appears that President Bush's Justice Department is (whether knowingly or unknowingly) "covering for the Clintons."

Am I the only person wondering why?

AND MORE (04/08/05): An anonymous reader emailed me as follows:
To: escheie@yahoo.com
Subject: Cover up reporters
Date: Mon, 4 Apr 2005 00:20:14 +0200 (CEST)

But outside the blogosphere, why is it that the only outfit daring even to ask questions about what shows every sign of being a coverup is WorldNetDaily?

Wrong:

http://www.radioliberty.com
http://www.soundwaves2000.com/radio_liberty/index.asp?how=1
http://www.worldaffairsbrief.com
http://www.newswithviews.com
http://www.4acloserlook.com
http://www.4acloserlook.com/2004archives.html
http://www.4acloserlook.com/2005archives.html
http://www.infowars.com
http://www.prisonplanet.tv
http://www.m2ktalk.com/power.htm
http://www.bushrevealed.com
http://www.riflewarrior.com
http://www.bogritz.com
http://www.expendableelite.com
http://www.rense.com/general58/demand.htm
http://www.karlschwarz.com
http://www.rense.com/general44/gikdeb.htm
http://www.threeworldwars.com
http://www.rense.com/Datapages/chamish.html Hmmm..... I guess I stand corrected, although I think some of the above web sites might make WorldNetDaily look cautious and circumspect.