Welcome back!

Historians spend a lifetime examining such minutiae,often the question is not what it is, but who knew.

It’s extremely unlikely that many — or any! — copies of the hand-annotated copies would be made, as that would imply creating new controlled documents, which is known in the trade as “a pain in the ass”. Consider that (by more or less the same rules I described above) a copying machine ends up classified at the combined classification of all the material ever copied. (I’d bet NSA or CIA could recover a lot from the copier drum of any xerographic copier or printer, which means you declassify them the same way you declassify a highly classified disk drive: with a thermite grenade.)

Yes, this does mean that you might very well have copiers for different “compartments”, if only because at these levels the only person who is cleared for all the compartments is POTUS and maybe DCI.

This makes it seem perfectly plausible to me, by the way, that Berger was removing and concealing the only copies of some documents that included the hand-written annotation. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten around to saying that explicitly.

The odd thing is if this piece is correct it would seem Clarke would be the one who’d want to remove the after action report, not necessarily Berger. Curious. Is Clarke just smarter than Berger?

I doubt that there is anything about AQ in the Balkans that is missing. That information is widely available in both classified and unclassified sources. Supporters of the 1999 Kosovo war have spread enough disinformation about the Serb 1998 counterinsurgency campaign that there is no need to cover it it up. There is a constant convultion of “ethnic cleansing” that occurred during the 1999 war with a relatively clean CI campaign conducted by the VJ against Islamic extremists that makes a Clinton cover up unnecessary.