Sandy Berger is back … as one of Hillary Clinton’s top foreign policy advisors

Yes, the man who got away with destroying key classified documents related to the Clinton administration’s failed counterterrorism policies is now a part of Team Clinton: V.08. Via Richard Miniter (emphasis added):

As many of you know, Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and I no longer get along.

Once a cordial and helpful source, Berger turned on me in January 2002 when the first installment of a Sunday Times (U.K.) series that I co-wrote appeared. He phoned my hotel room at something like 6AM, screaming that I was accusing him of “murdering 3000 people.”

He promised that he was going to ruin and destroy me. I asked him to not forget to perform this vital task. But he proved unreliable and I had to become semi-famous on my own.

Later, the blogosphere renamed him “Sandy Burglar” when he struck a plea deal admitting to stealing and destroying hundreds of pages of classified material stored in the National Archives. He said he needed access to it to prepare his testimony before the 9-11 Commission; it seems equally likely that he wanted to keep it out of the hands of the commission and of future historians and journalists.

My informed sources suggest that what Berger destroyed were copies of the Millennium After-Action Review, a binder-sized report prepared by Richard Clarke in 2000—a year and half before the 9-11 attacks. The review made a series of recommendations for a tougher stance against bin Laden and terrorism. There are 13 or more copies of this report. But only one contains hand-written notes by President Bill Clinton. Apparently, in the margin beside the recommendations, Bill Clinton wrote NO, NO, NO next to many of the tougher policy proposals. [I’m shocked! Not. –ST]

You can see why Clinton might be happy to see these records vanish down the memory hole.

So Berger was stuffing in pants and socks and later shredding the evidence that President Clinton did not want to take a tougher line on bin Laden, following the 1998 attack on two U.S. embassies that killed 224 people (including 12 American diplomats).

Now for the Hillary connection…

So what does the Democratic front-runner and former First Lady do?

She makes Berger one of her top three foreign policy advisers.

What I wanna know is where in the hell are the howls of outrage over the fact that Hillary Clinton has hired on someone who compromised classified documents in the name of protecting his fanny, not to mention his bosses’?

I don’t even have to remind everyone of the drawn out, overblown drama that was pLamegate, in which Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, and many other admnistration officials were vilified by the usual suspects over the belief that they purposely outed a ‘covert agent’ as revenge against her husband, using information that was supposedly to remain classified. The impression one got from reading what the far left wrote about pLamegate was that they would have only been satisfied with a public flogging – of the literal variety.

I’m checking out the blogger reactions to this news at Memeorandum, and I don’t see one lefty blog condemning Hillary’s decision to hire this criminal as one of her top foreign policy advisors. No, I’m not surprised, but all the same, it’s just one more example of the left’s blatant hypocrisy on issues related to national security. They’ll scream all day long that the administraton is guilty of “hiding” things from the American people, and of misusing classified information against political enemies, yet when one of their own – the top contender for the Dem nomination for president as of this writing – brings on staff a convicted criminal who not only stuffed classified documents down his pants, but hid some of them underneath a nearby construction trailer, what do you hear?

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Silence.

Beldar is justifiably livid, and has a lengthy post expressing his disgust here.