1995: CLINTON TEMPERS ANTI-TERROR BILL; GORELICK DEFENDS DECISION CITING CIVIL LIBERTIES

The Washington Post Archives | May 4, 1995 | Kenneth J. Cooper

[nwrep]

May 4, 1995

Kenneth J. Cooper; Washington Post Staff Writer

Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick yesterday said the Clinton administration planned to drop its proposal to give the president absolute power to designate groups as terrorist organizations.

Under the administration's proposed legislation to combat international terrorism, Americans would be prohibited from raising funds to support groups the president deemed as terrorist. The original bill would not allow court challenges to the president's designations.

"We will recommend deletion of the assertions in that bill that the president's designations are unreviewable or conclusive," Gorelick said in testimony to the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime.

Asked later by a reporter about the change, Gorelick referred to criticism from civil liberties groups and said administration officials had decided the ban on court challenges was not necessary. But Ira Glasser of the American Civil Liberties Union complained that Irish American mothers would have still been subject to criminal prosecution for raising funds to support orphans of Irish Republican Army members when it was regarded as a terrorist group.

[nwrep]

Freepmail for fill text.

[nwrep]

PING

[mewzilla]

There are no words...

[Bob]

There are no words...

Yes, there are. (It's just that they'd get us banned.)

[kcvl]

bttt

[zeaal]

I can't imagine, she is so determined that there WAS information regarding 9/11 .... hmmm ... have to contemplate this one a bit.

[July 4th]

Nice post. Further evidence that Gorelick should not be on the committee, but testifying BEFORE IT!

[Sloth]

Well, frankly I'm glad Clinton didn't have the authority to unilaterally designate, say, Gun Owners of America as a terrorist group.

[Peach]

Well lookie here.

[oneonly]

Trust not in the United Nations
By YOSEF GOELL


The Rwanda genocide, whose 10th anniversary is now being marked, constitutes one of the blackest pages in the annals of human society since the Holocaust which decimated the Jewish people in Europe half a century earlier.

It is not at all certain that the Nazi genocide of the Jews could have been prevented short of a much earlier defeat of the Hitler regime in Germany.
What is so chagrining in the case of the Rwanda genocide is that it apparently could have been forestalled at a very early stage of the mass killings in which more than 800,000 Tutsis were hacked to death by their Hutu neighbors, and additional scores of thousands of Hutus who refused to join in the bloodbath were also killed.

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The main actors in the world community seem to have learned next to nothing from the dismal history of their cowardly inaction in these most horrible events of the 20th century.

The current "anniversary" was highlighted by an abject apology by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who in a ceremony in the Rwandan capital Kigali, accepted personal and institutional responsibility for the failure of the international community to prevent the massacre. At the time, Annan had been head of the UN peace-keeping agency.

The fact is that there was sufficient cause at the time for apprehension over the outbreak of a spasm of mass killings between Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda. The ethnic killing and cleansing had already been going on for the better part of the previous decade, nearly unreported by the world media. But it was sufficiently worrisome to justify the positioning of a UN peacekeeping force of 2,500 blue helmets. The Canadian commander of that force, Gen. Romeo Dallaire, urgently asked for more troops, but was denied. He later declared that he could have prevented the mass killings if he had had double the force. Instead he was ordered to withdraw his forces from Rwanda.

Dallaire later had a nervous breakdown.

NEITHER ANNAN nor then UN secretary-general Butrous Butrous Ghali (ironically, both Africans) suffered nervous breakdowns, but instead proceeded to accuse each other of having received – and failed to act on – Dallaire's urgent call for help. Then US president Bill Clinton, who six years ago delivered his own apology in Rwanda, was instrumental in rejecting any US intervention and in also scotching any build-up of UN forces.
The UN, Clinton is reported to have said, "has to learn when to say no."

Our own Yad Vashem is loath to make any comparisons between the Nazi genocide of the Jews and other ethnic massacres, whether of the Armenians in 1915 or of the Tutsis. It is true that the close to one million Tutsis and Hutus hacked to death constitute but a fraction of the six million annihilated by the (technologically super-advanced) German Nazis.

On the other hand, one can only note with a shudder that close to one million Rwandans were murdered in a 100-day paroxysm, and most were hacked to death with machetes and other low-tech weapons.

Even more horrific was that while the Holocaust was carried out by killer "specialists" away from the eyes and sensibilities of most Germans, the genocide of the Tutsis was carried out by their Hutu neighbors, family members, clergymen and the like.

What is especially worrisome on this 10th anniversary is that an eerily similar genocide and ethnic cleansing is being carried out these very days against the black tribes of southern Sudan by Arab militias controlled by the government in Khartoum.

Last week Secretary-General Annan used the commemoration of the 1994 genocide to draw attention to the western Darfur region of Sudan, where the country's latest civil war has pushed an estimated 100,000 civilians west across the desert border into Chad.

US President George W. Bush has also come out with a warning to the Khartoum government against a possible genocide. We should not hold our breath that these warnings will be backed up by military force by either the UN or the US.

Which should bring us back home to ourselves. In a world full of bloody ethnic and national conflicts, Jewish Israel is the only country in the world which continues to be overtly threatened with extinction by its Arab enemies; the Arabs do so with impunity, and the world responds by blaming Israel for fighting back in self-defense.

The lesson to learn is not that "the whole world is against us" but that the world continues to be an extremely dangerous place for countries the size of Israel and for populations the size of the Jewish people.

Until the dawning of a messianic age in which a corrupt UN will be revamped, we in Israel must continue to depend on our own new-won ability to defend ourselves and never be deluded into relying on feckless international forces to do that job.

[BlessedByLiberty]

You have uncovered the most damning evidence against Clarke and this Commission that I've seen.

GORELICK STEP DOWN & TESITFY! is a demand the public must make. She is on the wrong side of that dais and her conflict of interests are glaring. Louis Freeh's publicly naming her in his editorial this morning along with your find means this woman needs to be grilled!

Thank you for your investigative skills.

[steve-b]

It's just that they'd get us banned.

If Billzebubba had gotten the power to designate organizations as "terrorist" by a stroke of the pen, without review or recourse, being banned would be the least of your problems.

[Bryan24]

Un-freakin-believable.

There is absolutely NO WAY that Gorelick should have been allowed on the 9/11 Commission. NO WAY!!!!

[prairiebreeze]

I've thought from the beginning that ex- Deputy Attorney General Jamie "Feckless" Gorelick should be sworn in and asked why the incineration of civilians took precedent over the investigation and effective counter-measurers related to terrorism threats and acts toward America.

Ms. "Feckless" undoubtedly would have overwhelming concern for the civil liberties of terrorists.

Prairie

[the Real fifi]

Great work!!

[Peach]

Did you hear Roger Hedchock (sp?) read a letter an FAA official wrote to Kerry?

I think the letter was written in '98 or '99 and it went directly to Kerry regarding Boston airports. The FAA official predicted that dedicated terrorists could storm the cockpits and plunge the plane into buildings. Same FAA official even mentioned how catostrophic it would be if several planes were taken over by terrorists on the same day in a planned attack!

And what did Kerry do? Nothing. Not one darned thing.

I'd say that's a bigger warner than anything in the August 6 PDA.

[Shermy]

Gorelick mentioned here:

http://edition.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/01/gore.immigration.ap/

Gore effort ''compromised'' naturalization process, report says

August 1, 2000

WASHINGTON (AP) -- One of Vice President Gore's attempts to improve government -- by erasing a massive backlog of citizenship applications -- produced such confusion that thousands of people became citizens without adequate background checks, the Justice Department says.

The rush to naturalize 1.2 million new citizens in fiscal year 1996 "compromised the integrity" of the process at the Immigration and Naturalization Service, according to a report released Monday by the Justice Department's inspector general.

The report said there is no evidence that the 1996 presidential election motivated the crash program, but at least one official in Gore's government-reinvention office told investigators he felt pressure to have the backlog erased in time for the new citizens to vote in November.

The 684-page report concluded that there was no evidence to support critics' claims that the crash "Citizenship USA" program, a part of Gore's government reinvention effort, was designed to influence the election or "further inappropriate political ends."

About 1.2 million people were given citizenship from October 1995 to September 1996 under the program that eliminated a massive backlog of nearly 500,000 citizenship cases at the Immigration and Naturalization Service. At the time, the waiting period for citizenship was as much as three years.

Critics complained that the rush program was aimed at producing hundreds of thousands of new voters who were likely to vote Democratic in the 1996 presidential election in November. The program succeeded in erasing the backlog by Sept. 31, 1996.

Neither the White House nor officials at the National Performance Review Office -- Gore's government-reinvention operation _ intervened to lower standards or change procedures to get applicants naturalized in time to vote, the report said.

But the National Performance Review Office was aggressively involved in pressing for a speedup of applications at INS early in the program, the report said.

At least one NPR official, Douglas Farbrother, "believed that the (citizenship) program had a deadline that was directly connected to the upcoming election," although others at NPR viewed it as a good government initiative, the report said.

In March 1996, Farbrother raised concerns with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick and senior INS officials that the program was lagging behind schedule and made his views known to the extent that Gorelick threw him out of his office, according to the investigators.

Farbrother told investigators that he understood that citizenship applicants had to be naturalized in time to register to vote in the November 1996 election and that "this was one motive for the NPR's involvement" in the Citizenship USA program, according to the report.

But the report concluded that while some may have hoped for political benefit, "we did not find evidence that officials of INS or the (Justice) Department adopted this as a goal." After May 1996, the NPR had little involvement in the program, the report said.

Still, the investigators found that the crash program -- which intensified even more after the March meeting in Gorelick's office _ put quantity over quality and "compromised the naturalization process."

The investigation, involving 1,800 interviews and review of 80,000 pages of documents, confirmed media reports at the time that the INS had processed applicants so quickly that in many cases citizenship was granted before the INS received criminal background checks from the FBI.

Investigators found at least 1,300 such cases in Chicago, 2,500 in Los Angeles and nearly 1,000 in Miami. There likely were tens of thousands of cases where applications were approved without complete background checks, according to the investigators. But the report said there was no way to determine how many unqualified individuals might have gained citizenship.

[Damocles]

I found this quote interesting from Ms. Gorelick. A little unfocused and looking in the wrong direction, but accurate none the less.

The penalty for failure could be severe. "Massive networking makes the US the world's most vulnerable target," said William Studeman, former deputy director of the CIA. Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney-general, was even more blunt in her address to a Senate hearing on the subject: "We will have a cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbor."

From The Sunday Times - May 17, 1998

[Quilla]

Still, the investigators found that the crash program -- which intensified even more after the March meeting in Gorelick's office _ put quantity over quality and "compromised the naturalization process."

Well, now we know why they call her Gorelick.

[Damocles]

Another one from a different source. These people had their eue onthe wrong ball...

Speaking at a Senate hearing last November, Jamie Gorelick, former U.S. deputy attorney general, was brutally blunt: "We will have a cyber equivalent of Pearl Harbour at some point, and we do not want to wait for that wake-up call." I [internet]-War, she added, "can disable or disrupt the provision of services just as readily -- if not more than -- a well-placed bomb."

The Ottawa Citizen - April 19, 1998, Sunday, FINAL EDITION