Selective Memory?

John Kerry (search) appeared to score points in Thursday’s debate by mentioning the thousands of hours of recordings of Arabic terror suspects that sit useless on FBI (search) shelves because we have so few Arabic translators.

What Sen. Kerry did not mention is that the FBI warned of this in the Clinton administration, which did nothing to alleviate the shortage.

Former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke passed the warnings about translators to Clinton officials after the nation narrowly escaped a major terror attack in 2000. The Clinton official in charge of processing these warnings was National Security Adviser Sandy Berger (search). The warnings were among the documents that Mr. Berger removed from the National Archives earlier this year.

As the New York Post reported in July: "Urgent complaints that the FBI could not decipher bugged conversations between members of a Brooklyn mosque and Afghan terrorists because it lacked translators were included in the documents former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger removed from the National Archives."

For the record, Mr. Berger left the Kerry campaign in July after saying that his removal of the archival material was an honest mistake.

And that’s the Observer.

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