Journal has an excellent editorial on the Berger stuff. They flesh out the point I made here yesterday about John Ashcroft’s testimony and the particular memos in question:

Written by Richard Clarke for the NSC, the key document was called the Millennium After-Action Review because it dealt with al Qaeda attacks timed for the eve of the Millennium celebrations. In his own 9/11 testimony, Mr. Berger described these al Qaeda plans as “the most serious threat spike of our time in government.” He went on to say that they provoked “sustained attention and rigorous actions” from the Administration that ended up saving lives.
But Attorney General John Ashcroft, who has the advantage of having read the document in question, had a different take. In his own 9/11 testimony in April, Mr. Ashcroft recommended that the Commission “study carefully” the after-action memo. He described it as laying out vulnerabilities and calling for aggressive remedies of the type he and the Bush Administration have been criticized for. Mr. Ashcroft further noted that when he took office, this “highly classified review” was “not among” the items he was briefed on during the transition.
Maybe that is because of the potential for embarrassment at the mentality the memo reveals. Mr. Ashcroft testified that the Justice Department’s “surveillance and FISA operations were specifically criticized for their glaring weaknesses.” The most glaring, of course, were the restrictions on the sharing of critical information between intelligence and law enforcement–even within the FBI itself. This was the infamous “wall of separation” that Clinton Deputy AG Jamie Gorelick instructed the FBI director should “go beyond what is legally required.”
From today’s vantage we can see the consequences. Ahmed Ressam was one of the would-be Millennium bombers whom the French had identified to U.S. intelligence agencies as an al Qaeda operative planning to attack America. But the “wall of separation” meant that when an alert U.S. customs officer stopped Ressam as he tried to enter the country from Vancouver, the Justice Department had no idea who he was. This helps illuminate the claim made in the missing memo, according to Mr. Ashcroft’s testimony, that our success in stopping these 1999 attacks was a result of sheer “luck.”
Assuming Mr. Ashcroft’s characterizations under oath are true, it would explain why Mr. Berger’s “inadvertent” actions seemed to zero in on the various drafts of this review. Sources tell us that Archives staff noticed documents missing after one of Mr. Berger’s visits. After gently raising the issue with him, they were shocked to have him return other documents they hadn’t even noticed missing. The result was that the next time Mr. Berger went to the Archives, the documents he was given were all marked.
Mr. Berger attributes the disappearance of this classified information to the kind of “sloppiness” that comes from reviewing “thousands of pages of documents.” But it strikes us as amazing that mere sloppiness could account for how Mr. Berger seized on the same memo during two different visits.