Posted on 04/12/2004 5:47:39 AM PDT by wjersey
The activities of the 9/11 commission remind us that official Washington can be sorted by degrees of culpability. It is not to be cynical to suggest that what passes for inquest in the capital is often an elaborate effort to find a just dispensation of blame. How outcomes are received by the public mostly depends on whether an investigative panel succeeds at preserving the appearance of "independence," or at least "balance."
Yet, by some trick of fortune, Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general under President Clinton, is right now in the position of asking the questions, not answering them.
Gorelick, a key political ally of Al Gore who recently held a patronage position at Fannie Mae, is an exemplar of a certain kind of Washington ideal: the party mandarin who reaps the rewards of loyal service. As is the case with Richard Ben-Veniste, a Watergate prosecutor, Democrats routinely short-list Gorelick whenever they seek a reasonably tenacious partisan for an investigative panel. That in itself does not make Gorelick incapable of objectivity in the matter at hand. But whether her conclusions can be accepted ultimately will depend on whether one believes she has been able to keep an open mind about matters in which her own actions are at issue.
On Tuesday, former attorney general Janet Reno, under whom Gorelick served for three years beginning in 1994, testifies in open session. The questioning can reasonably be expected to focus on steps taken (or not taken) at the Justice Department in the wake of the first World Trade Center attack in 1993 and the 1995 bombing in Oklahoma City — the worst incidents of terrorism inside the United States before the Sept. 11 hijackings. Shouldn't Gorelick provide the commission — and the public — with answers on these topics as well? There is something absurd about the notion that, rather than testifying, Gorelick will instead be asking Reno for information. Are there any questions she can ask to which she does not already have the answer? Gorelick's role with the commission deprives the inquiry of a potentially valuable source of agreement or disagreement with the attorney general's testimony.
Consider one theme that has emerged from the hearings to date: the hapless condition of the FBI's antiterror efforts before the 9/11 attacks. If the attacks in New York and Oklahoma City amounted to failures for the FBI, what steps did Gorelick and other top officials at Justice, of which the agency is a part, take to defend against the next instance? Why did it take 9/11 to shift the FBI's emphasis from enforcement to prevention? Did the poor relationship between Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh contribute to failures to restructure the FBI? Were any steps taken after the 1993 attacks to remove barriers that thwarted useful coordination between the FBI and the CIA?
The drift of the hearings to date has suggested that these questions cut to the heart of the inquiry. Gorelick herself seemed to affirm this when she questioned Condoleezza Rice last Thursday. The commissioner pointed to a report from 2001 that indicated, in her own words, that "we have big systemic problems. The FBI doesn't work the way it should, and it doesn't communicate with the intelligence community." In the ensuing dialogue, Rice seemed to implicate Gorelick in the allegation.
Gorelick: Now, you have said that your policy review was meant to be comprehensive. You took your time because you wanted to get at the hard issues and have a hard-hitting, comprehensive policy. And yet there is nothing in [the policy review] about the vast domestic landscape that we were all warned needed so much attention. Can you give me the answer to the question why?
Rice: I would ask the following. We were there for 233 days. There had been a recognition for a number of years before — after the '93 bombing, and certainly after the [thwarted] millennium [attack in Los Angeles] — that there were challenges...inside the United States, and that there were challenges concerning our domestic agencies and the challenges concerning the FBI and the CIA. We were in office 233 days. It's absolutely the case that we did not begin structural reform at the FBI. [Emphasis mine].
It bears mentioning here that the reforms that were finally enacted in the wake of the 9/11 attacks — as embodied in the Patriot Act — have emerged as a central element of the Democratic party's overall indictment of the Bush administration. (Senator John Kerry, the party's nominee-presumptive for president, has disavowed his own vote for the law on grounds that it was wrongly "implemented" and has been used to erode civil liberties.)
But the larger point is that no one began "structural reform" at the investigative agency before 9/11, though the problems had indeed been apparent for some time — certainly since the 1993 attack, which exposed core weaknesses in the sharing of domestic and foreign intelligence. Few people are better situated to explain these failures than Gorelick. But she happens to be on the wrong side of the witness table.
I think this is more of the "rope-a-dope " strategy. The administration, as Dr. Rice so admirably displayed, was indeed at the helm. But indeed they WERE blind-sided.
Put BenV. Gorelick, and Kerry on the commission, let them flail around, expend a bunch of political capital, and discover (hopefully along with the 'mercan people), that there is no "there", there.
I understand how they were recommended for the committee since the Dem and Republican leaders each selected commission members for each side. What I don't understand is how our side allowed the rules for formulation of the commission to allow dems to select anybody they wanted without any veto power by the Republcians (and vice-versa). This is a major Republican screw-up IMO. But now that it's done, our side should be educating the people about these members and discrediting the dems on the commission BEFORE the report is issued.
I'll be interested to see whether Gorelick is actually in her chair when Reno testifies, or whether she's called away by an "emergency".
Well, I know how I'd have reacted if Clinton had done it in 1998 or 1996 -- particularly in 1996, after he had, the previous year, basically accused Newt Gingrich of driving the Ryder truck to Oklahoma City and Rush of having lit the fuse. I'd have assumed that Clinton was attempting to reverse the outcome of the 1994 elections through his very most favoritest gimmick -- indicting, trying, and convicting his political detractors of some felony charge.
And that would have been a very real possibility. After all, Clintonoid political commentators had run up that "1992 was the rubber match and we won history; time to put Rush in jail!" stuff a couple of years before, in the middlebrow opinion magazines.
I'd have had the same problems with the Patriot Act that I do now (how do you catch terrorists when you afford them civic rights and insist that police and investigative agencies treat them like citizens? and if you make an exception for terrorists, how long before the exception widens to swallow all political opposition to the Executive?), but if they'd been authored by the worst man to be president since Lyndon Johnson, I would have been very, very deeply suspicious.
Very good question. Slick is no longer the Executive. He's just another citizen now. Let's get him in there and answer some tough questions for a change. Of course, it wouldn't be fair to him to let either Hillary or Monica sit behind him -- and cruel and unusual to seat both of them back there. Come to think of it, it might turn into an episode of "Jerry Springer", right there during a hard-news, gavel-to-gavel event.
"How come you don't sing like you're sposed to, Condoleeza?"
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