Posted 11:03 AM by Robert

Considering The Archivists
 
Sandy Berger's apparent theft of confidential government documents seems to have been caught by alert and surprisingly clever employees of the National Archives, not agents of the FBI or any other intelligence service. That all seems to have happened in the last quarter of 2003, with the resulting investigation still ongoing.  Who are these archivists who caught the Great Slippery One? I don't know anything about them.

But it is possibly interesting that back in April of this year the President's "sudden" appointment of Allen Weinstein as the Archivist of the United States - replacing John Carlin, who was appointed by Bill Clinton in 1995 - produced quite a kerfuffle for the filling of such an apparently obscure, technical position.  Although he has tendered a resignation latter, John Carlin remains the Archivist of the United States.

Although Professor Weinstein has worked closely with the Senate in the past, there were many paranoid-flavored chatterings on the left about his facilitating "excessive secrecy," the coming release of the Presidential papers of George H. W. Bush (there is a 12 year cooling off period before such release, which is soon ending), even characterizations of this highly qualified and distinguished man as a "Zionist insider" in the thrall of Israel(!), and so on ... and on ... and on. 

Indeed, the resulting kerfuffle was so substantial that one can recall asking one's self at the time: Is somebody stirring this up? Why would anybody do something like that?

Why indeed!