Posted on 04/29/2004 10:37:40 AM PDT by Congressman Billybob
John Kerry, apparent Democrat nominee for President, is the more important person with the less important problem. Jamie Gorelick, member of the 9/11 Commission, is the reverse. So in explaining why each is unfit for the position he seeks and the one she holds, we begin with Kerry. We’ll use a version of a game we all played at an early age, “Pin the Tail on the Donkey,” to deal with Kerry and Gorelick.
This week ABC came up with a videotape of Senator Kerry saying the opposite then of what he’s saying now about his “medals thrown over the fence” photo op in 1971. After that ABC report, Kerry attacked President Bush as if he had brought the charge, rather than a network just reporting the facts and letting the public sort it all out (now there’s a novel concept for reporting the news).
Charles Gibson on ABC’s “Good Morning America” challenged Kerry by saying that he (Gibson) was there and saw him (Kerry) throw his medals over the fence. When Kerry thought the interview was finished, but the camera and his mike were still live, Kerry complained to an associate about Gibson and his whole staff, “God, they’re acting like the Republican National Committee.”
Anyone dumb enough to think that ABC News or any part of that network is acting for the RNC is too dumb to be out in public without a keeper. He might as well accuse Fox News of acting hand-in-glove for the Democratic National Committee. But if Kerry is challenged over his off-air but on-mike comment, he will either deny he ever said it, or claim he meant the opposite, or both.
These, and many other instances of Kerry on record contradicting Kerry on record, suggest a modified version of the well-known children’s game. It is: Pin the Truth on the Donkey. Participants would be blindfolded, spun around, and then given a change to pin any of the contradictory statements of candidate Kerry on the appropriate part of his anatomy.
Finding out a Kerry policy position in advance is like ordering the soup du jour in a cheap diner. In advance you have no idea what to expect. You ask the tattooed waitress what it is. You may or may not trust what she says. You may or may not like the soup when it comes. But tomorrow, it will be something different.
And as for Kerry’s getting testy with the White House for what ABC did, I don’t think the lines of control run very strongly between those two institutions. If Kerry doesn’t want his patrician comfort disturbed like that in the future, I humbly suggest that he put out a mimeographed list of questions the press should not ask him. Just trying to help out here.
We now turn our attentions to Jamie Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 Commission. She was previously a Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno. Remember Janet? She was in all the papers. The hero of Waco, defender of Elian Gonzolez, the goddess of “no credible evidence.” But I digress.
A principal issue before the 9/11 Commission is the “wall” between the FBI and the CIA As usual, the American press has been positively lame in doing its homework. Let’s put some history on the table. Congress played a major role in creating this wall, though since the members of the Commission are beholden to Congress, the Commission hasn’t pointed a finger at the honorable Members of the House and Senate.
During World War II, the Defense Department created the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS). It combined both civilian and military personnel to engage in espionage, and also to engage in special operations. Only now, a half century after the war, are some of the extraordinary efforts of the OSS behind enemy lines being described.
After the war, especially because of events in Germany and in Eastern Europe, it was clear that we were entering what came known as the Cold War with the U.S.S.R. For intelligence purposes, we needed to maintain a wartime level of spying on the other side, even though we were not actually at war.
Therefore, Congress passed a law in 1947 to create the Central Intelligence Agency. And as Congress wrote that law, it was aware of the history of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany which could go anywhere and do anything, overriding all laws and restraints. Congress did not want to create an “American Gestapo,” so from the beginning they separated federal law enforcement (which remained with the FBI), and intelligence, which was outside the United States and expected on occasion to use methods that would never be admissible in court in an ordinary criminal trial.
So the truth is that this wall was originally created by Congress, not by accident but deliberately. Fast forward to the Clinton Administration and the work of Deputy Attorney General Gorelick. She wrote a memo that defined the limits on contacts the FBI could have with the CIA The FBI, of course, is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. So any official policy set by Justice, including in the Gorelick memo, was binding on the FBI.
And what did the Gorelick memo do? In its text it states that it “increases the protections” of the separations between these two federal agencies. Commissioner Gorelick, in an article in the Washington Post, claimed that her memo made it easier for the agencies to communicate. Both the operation of her memo and its explicit text say the opposite. She also claims that her memo was for the purpose of protecting the civil liberties of Americans. But there is a more nefarious explanation for the Gorelick memo.
Consider what was going on at the time. According to press reports then, Bill Clinton had had a conversation with an Indonesian businessman, James Riady, in Clinton’s limo in Little Rock in 1992. Riady promised Clinton a $1 million contribution to his campaign, which he made good on. The conversation was reported by an employee of Riady, John Huang, who’d been brought into the Commerce Department and later the DNC at Bill Clinton’s behest. After Huang was found guilty of violations of federal election laws, he turned state’s evidence.
And where did Riady’s $1 million come from? According to press accounts then, Riady’s Lippo Group and Lippo Bank were both co-owned by government and military officials in communist China. Riady would have needed approval of his partners to take $1 million out of the till and give it to the DNC to buy influence with the American President.
If it were established on clear evidence that a President of the United States accepted $1 million from government officials in China, that President could have been not only impeached by the House, but convicted by the Senate and removed from office. The idea of foreign (and potentially hostile) governments using their money to influence or control American elections have been anathema for centuries. Witness the XYZ Affair during President Jefferson’s administration. (If you don’t recall that, look it up in Google, or in your College Outline Series on American History, volume I, to 1865.)
But there was an information problem for the US government to sort out the evidence of money flowing from the Chinese Communists to the Democratic National Committee as a result of the Clinton-Riady conversation. Attempts by foreign governments to use money and influence to get decisions they wanted from the federal government were under the jurisdiction of the CIA But questions of criminal law violations, such as felonies under the election laws for illegal campaign contributions, were under the jurisdiction of the FBI.
Anything that made it harder for information gathered by the CIA about Chinese money to get in the hands of the FBI, would make it harder to prove the whole case including where Riady’s money ultimately came from. Enter the Gorelick memo. It made such communication even more difficult than the prior law.
What was the upshot of the Riady investigation? In the last days of the Clinton Administration, Janet (“the Just”) Reno negotiated a deal under which Mr. Riady returned from Indonesia to plead guilty to violating the federal election laws. He received no jail time, but he paid the largest fine ever assessed, $8.6 million dollars. But he never did say where he got that money. Nor did he state under oath that he sent that money to the DNC because of a commitment he made personally to Bill Clinton. It’s possible that the fine itself was paid with Chinese money, because the narrow guilty plea did keep the Chinese skirts clean, at least in court.
In short, it might be true that Jamie Gorelick wrote her “wall” memo not to protect the civil rights of all Americans, but to protect the job of just one American -- her boss’s boss, Bill Clinton. If so, it was only an unintended byproduct of her memo that it prevented the FBI from opening the computer hard drive in Minnesota that may have unraveled the entire 9/11 plot before it happened.
Should Jamie Gorelick be serving on the 9/11 Commission? More likely, she should be serving time in a different type of federal institution. It is certain that she should be required to testify before the Commission under oath about her memo that contributed to the “wall” between intelligence and law enforcement.
What are we to make of Jamie Gorelick continuing as a member of the 9/11 Commission? If Jesse James had been charged with bank robbery, should his brother Frank have served on the jury that sat in judgment? If Clyde Barrow had been charged with murder, should his girlfriend Bonnie Parker have been on the jury? When the President of Enron (eventually) goes on trial for corporate fraud, should his chief accountant serve on the jury?
The dishonesties of John Kerry discussed here about his Vietnam medals are small potatoes in the scheme of things. By themselves, they don’t amount to a hill of beans. They are only relevant to the extent they are part of a lifelong pattern of dishonesty established by self-contradictions, all of them caught on tape.
The dishonesties of Jamie Gorelick discussed here are of a far greater importance. All by themselves and with nothing else, they constitute a dagger stabbed into the heart of American security.
In both cases, however, it is vitally important that we all put ourselves in the role of five-year-olds at a birthday party. It is time to play “Pin the Truth on the Democrat.” And the first two Democrats who require that treatment are John Kerry and Jamie Gorelick. But there are other candidates for such treatment as well.
Terry McAuliffe, Chairman of the Democrat National Committee, comes to mind. If all the necessary truths were stuck in his backside, he’d be wearing so many pins he’d look like a porcupine. And Sidney (“Squid”) Blumenthal, who bought his way into the job of Washington Bureau Chief of the bankrupt Salon.com – don’t get me started. And speaking of target-rich environments, Bill Clinton’s memoirs, such as they are, will come out in June.
Mark Twain said, “Truth is valuable. Let us economize it.” Twain was kidding, of course. Let the truth games begin.
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About the Author: John Armor is an author and columnist on politics and history. He currently has an Exploratory Committee to run for Congress.
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©) 2004, Congressman Billybob & John Armor. All rights reserved.
Please ping this out. John, note that your namesake gets a deserving reference in this piece. He's gone but not forgotten.
John / Billybob
Excellent article. You argue your case well.
I wonder, though, whether the importance of "the Wall", Gorelick's part in erecting it, and effective communication between the CIA and the FBI in hindering terrorist activities aren't being exagerated for political purposes.
In 1992 terrorists had no trouble detonating a bomb in the basement of the towers - long before Gorelick played her role. The neocons' dissatisfaction with the performance of our intelligence agencies began even earlier.
Many good points in there. But as a helpful suggestion, try to shorten it a bit. Don't oversell your points, like this:
If Jesse James had been charged with bank robbery, should his brother Frank have served on the jury that sat in judgment? If Clyde Barrow had been charged with murder, should his girlfriend Bonnie Parker have been on the jury? When the President of Enron (eventually) goes on trial for corporate fraud, should his chief accountant serve on the jury?
You make the same comparison three times re/ Jesse Jame, Clyde Barrow, and the Enron Pres. Just one comparison is enough.
Nicknames for people, like Sidney (“Squid”) Blumenthal, are great in this forum. But if you want actually pursuade our opponents to change their minds, you shouldn't call their current friends names.
All suggestions made in the interest of helping.
Keep up the good work. I like what you're doing.
Actually, the bombing was in 1993 and the Gorelick memo came into play, hindering that investigation and then ultimately led to 9/11:
The memo grew out of the Justice Department's prosecution of the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center -- the act that apparently gave Osama bin Laden the idea to try again in 2001.
"During the course of those investigations," wrote Gorelick in 1995, "significant counterintelligence information has been developed related to the activities and plans of agents of foreign powers operating in this country and overseas, including previously unknown connections between separate terrorist groups." But Gorelick wanted to make sure that the left hand didn't know what the right was doing. "(W)e believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."
The problem, of course, is that the inability to share information is precisely what hampered federal agents in tracking down the 9-11 hijackers. As Attorney General Ashcroft testified, this artificial wall impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, who was arrested prior to the 9-11 attack, as well as Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both of whom were identified by the CIA as suspected terrorists possibly in the United States prior to their participation in those terrible attacks. "Because of the wall, FBI Headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al Qaeda attack to join in the hunt for the suspected terrorists," Ashcroft told the commission.
More on Gorelick:
On Aug. 22, 1996, just a few days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, Ms. Gorelick oversaw a critical Justice Department meeting with the FBI. Immediately after this meeting, as it happened, all serious inquiry into the fate of TWA 800 came to an end.
On the next day, for instance, the FAA began to inquire whether any dog-training exercises had ever taken place on the plane that would become TWA 800. On the same day, as CNN reported, the FBI now claimed publicly for the first time that the explosive residue found along the right wing "could have been brought on the plane by a passenger and was not part of a bomb." Likewise, after the meeting, the FBI would do no more eyewitness interviews, at least not for the next two months. The Bureau only did a handful after that – and all of those for the wrong reasons.
"Evidence strongly suggests it was Gorelick – not the ineffectual Freeh – who not only misdirected the FBI's investigation into Oklahoma City, but also the FBI investigation into TWA Flight 800. The parallels between the two cases are shocking. And in each case, the Clinton administration constrained the FBI for the same reason: to advance the re-election chances of its standard bearer. "
Although [Jayna]Davis does not document Gorelick's role in Oklahoma City, media accounts routinely describe her as the director of the Oklahoma City task force, the so-called "field commander." As Davis has told me, someone in Washington called the FBI in Oklahoma City and issued a two-word directive on its investigation into Islamic terrorism: "Kill it."
John / Billybob
As for the nicknames, note that I used them only on the two most reprehensible people -- Reno and Blumenthal. Your point is well taken that that's off-putting to some readers. It's a trade-off between the power of fire-breathing and the power of logic. Knowing that, I deliberately chose the former in these two instances.
I appreciate your thoughtful comments.
John / Billybob
John / Billybob
In 1992 terrorists had no trouble detonating a bomb in the basement of the towers - long before Gorelick played her role. The neocons' dissatisfaction with the performance of our intelligence agencies began even earlier.<<<
I did a "huh, what" on your comment above. Evidently you are not aware that the prohibition between FBI and CIA communication on cases involving both criminal and intelligence data preexisted the 1993(sic) WTC bombing.
I believe that the wall came in somewhere around 1976. (Result of the Church Committee hearings)
Gorelick's action was to increase height of the wall and increase the severity of penalties for violating the wall. Essentially she put a non-involved (read uninterested and uninformed)US Justice Department attorney in between any communication between the FBI and the CIA. The purpose was to insure that human rights of defendants in criminal cases weren't being violated by information collected outside the "criminal investigation community"; ie: the intelligence community.
Simply put, she made it so no FBI or CIA agent would ever attempt to communicate across the divide put in place by FISA - Federal Information Surveillances Act. The process was simply too intimidating - involving weeks of effort to get the right hearings and by the time any contact for info sharing was granted - the reason for it had evaporated or morphed into something else.
And Jamie Gorelick did this after 1993 WTC!
Read up on FISA: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/Terrorism/fisa_faq.html
Of all explanations, this is the simplest as well as the most logical answer based on the cascades of felonies being committed at the time by the clintons and their crooked cronies who were involved in the wholesale looting of everything not nailed down - including secrets.
They are still getting away with their crimes and planning another go-around. I hope Bush and Ashcroft (who by now probably know what really went on behind the clinton smokescreens) will someday "out" this entire gang of scoundrels and the name "clinton" becomes forever enshrined in the same lexicon of calumny as "Benedict Arnold". They deserve it richly.
Richly!
But it's hard to see how any of this could have been avoided, or why lawmakers should be blamed...considering the failures, excesses, and historical examples which the Wall was designed to prevent. Don't we have here another example of Generals (lawmakers) fighting the last war?
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