Free Republic

Clinton administration National Security Adviser Samuel ‘Sandy’ Berger today said he “still can’t say for sure” what happened to several classified documents he removed from the National Archives in October 2003, but that they may have gone up in smoke. Mr. Berger, who was convicted of the crime, fined $50,000, sentenced to 100 hours of community service and barred from the Archives for three years, allegedly smuggled out some of the documents in his socks. Today his attorney released a statement from Mr. Berger in response to this week’s report on the Inspector General’s probe of the case. According to...

Two college students arrested Wednesday in a string of nine rural Alabama church arsons told authorities that the first fires were set as “a joke” and later blazes were intended as a diversion, federal agents said. A third college student was arrested later Wednesday in the serial arsons, according to WVTM-TV of Birmingham. Benjamin Nathan Moseley and Russell Lee Debusk Jr., both students at Birmingham-Southern College, appeared in federal court Wednesday and were ordered held on church arson charges pending a hearing Friday. Matthew Lee Cloyd, reportedly a student at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was arrested midday, the...

From the Maha - CLINTON: I think handling the aftermath of a natural disaster is different than preventing a terrorist attack. I actually believe that the federal government has been quite good about that, in spite of the breakdowns that led up to 9/11. There were any number of terrorist attacks prevented in the 1990s and there have been a lot of terrorist cells broken up -- CLINTON: Well, I would repeal the tax cuts for upper income people. I myself have gotten four tax cuts while young Americans have gone off to risk their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan,...

Sandy Berger, the top Clinton national- security official and erstwhile close adviser to Sen. John Kerry, has finally confessed what he spent nearly a year heatedly denying: that he intentionally smuggled classified documents from the National Archives — and deliberately destroyed them. In pleading guilty to a misdemeanor count Friday — for which he'll get a slap-on-the-wrist $10,000 fine and lose his security clearance for three years (but probably not his law license) — Berger admits to secreting the documents in his suit jacket. Then, once he got them home, he cut them to pieces with a pair of scissors....

It is even stranger than Dr Strangelove himself. North Korea, the Stalinist dictatorship that is threatening to plunge the world into nuclear confrontation, has quietly set up a makeshift embassy in Finchley, a north London suburb which was once the home of Peter Sellers. The diplomatic base - the first that the Pyongyang regime has had in Britain - lies hidden inside a 1930s semi-detached house, a far cry from the grandiose symbolism more often associated with the country's "Great Leader", Kim Jong-Il. The choice of a borough that was previously best known as the former constituency of Lady Thatcher...