Free Republic

"...So it's my clear belief that the wall itself developed this culture which restrained in a substantial way the exchange of information in the intelligence and law enforcement communities. The Bellows report, which was part of some recommendations following the Wen Ho Lee case, indicated that it was part of the culture at the FBI that if one made a mistake and shared information that was later deemed to be inappropriate, it was called a career- ender, so that the risk of a person sharing information improperly was at least known in the culture of the law enforcement community to...

Did Ashcroft brush off terror warnings? NBC exclusive: 9/11 commission interviews FBI officials who contradict Ashcroft testimony By Lisa Myers Senior investigative correspondent NBC News Updated: 7:32 p.m. ET June 22, 2004 WASHINGTON - The 9/11 commission is busy writing its final report, but is still investigating critical facts, including the conduct of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft. NBC News has learned that the commission has interviewed two FBI officials who contradict sworn testimony by Ashcroft, about whether he brushed off terrorism warnings in the summer of 2001. In the critical months before Sept. 11, did Ashcroft dismiss threats of...

The good news is that the Sept. 11 commission has stopped playing the blame-Bush game, at least for a while. The “brethren” (to use Democratic Commissioner Jamie Gorelick’s phrase) will gather again May 18 in New York to discuss the performance of emergency-response agencies after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The commission’s last session, with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, has left some lingering questions. Like, what’s going on between the White House and the Justice Department? After the meeting with Bush, the commissioners were quoted as saying how well it had gone,...

Saturday, May. 01, 2004John Ashcroft received a rare public rebuke from his own boss last week when the White House revealed that President Bush told the 9/11 commission he was "disappointed" in him for ambushing Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, a former Justice Department official. Ashcroft not only attempted to blame her for setting up barriers to intelligence and law-enforcement information-sharing in his testimony to the panel earlier this month, using a just-declassified memo she'd written in 1995; he then furthered the attack by putting yet more documents on his Website the day before Bush's interview with the commission. Most experts say...

The Washington Post's Tuesday editorial on, as the editors there call it, "Mr. Ashcroft's Smear," is a transparent effort to help close ranks around beleaguered Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, the former Clinton-administration deputy attorney general whose conflict of interest has riven the 9/11 Commission. For the most part, it adopts wholesale the talking points Gorelick herself ran with in an op-ed that the Post published on Sunday. Though disingenuous, even taken at face value, the editorial actually supports the case for recusal. With knee-jerk predictability, the Post finds that the real culprit in this drama is not Gorelick but rather the...

IN HIS TESTIMONY last week before the Sept. 11 commission, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft loosed a remarkable attack on Jamie S. Gorelick, a commission member who served as deputy attorney general during part of the Clinton administration. The "single greatest structural cause for the September 11th problem," Ashcroft said, "was the wall that segregated or separated criminal investigators and intelligence agents," and the "basic architecture for the wall . . . was contained in a classified memorandum" from 1995 -- which Mr. Ashcroft had conveniently declassified for the hearing. "Full disclosure," he said, "compels me to inform you that...

From Sam Ervin to Earl Warren to Joseph McCarthy, high-powered investigative hearings in Washington have created heroes and villains, made and broken political careers, and rewritten history and biographies in unexpected ways. The Sept. 11 commission's hearings seem certain to take their place in that gallery. In three months, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States will offer its report on the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But the verdict is coming in on the players in this drama in a city that thrives on anointing winners and losers, and on spotting the political implications behind even...

Last week, 9/11 commissioner John Lehman revealed that "it was the policy (before 9/11) and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory." Hmmm ... Is 19 more than two? Why, yes, I believe it is. So if two Jordanian cab drivers are searched before boarding a flight out of Newark, Osama bin Laden could then board that plane without being questioned. I'm no security expert, but I'm pretty sure this gives terrorists an opening for an attack. In a sane world, Lehman's statement...