Posted on 04/14/2004 2:45:21 AM PDT by kattracks
WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft highlighted a bitter hearing on the 9/11 terror attacks yesterday by blaming the Clinton administration for intelligence failures that led to the catastrophe.In a stunning salvo, Ashcroft pinned the "single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11" on Jamie Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 commission who served as former President Bill Clinton's deputy attorney general.
Ashcroft's accusation was part of a storm of finger-pointing during the televised hearing into intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks.
Former FBI boss Louis Freeh and his agency came under scathing criticism for its fumbling of terrorism investigations.
"I read our staff statement as an indictment of the FBI," said panel chairman Thomas Kean, a Republican.
Other witnesses blamed Congress or Ashcroft for denying them funds and staff to fight Osama Bin Laden's followers, while some said bureaucratic infighting often left them ignorant of major developments and terror threats. The bickering, excuses and picture of a confused government before 9/11 were disheartening to families attending the hearing.
Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, and Mary Fetchet, whose son Brad was killed, said they were left "speechless" by the spectacle.
Ann MacRae, a Manhattan mom whose daughter Kat died in the World Trade Center, said she found the former officials' excuses sickening. "I didn't like how my daughter's death was reduced to budget deficits," she said.
Ashcroft presented the most belligerent defense of his administration, laying much of the fault on the Clinton era Justice Department and particularly Gorelick.
As Gorelick sat smirking, Ashcroft aides handed out a declassified Justice Department memo authored by Gorelick that Ashcroft said erected a legal wall that thwarted terror probes by forbidding the sharing of information between criminal and intelligence agents at the FBI.
"We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies," he said. But Ashcroft repeatedly was challenged by other witnesses and panel members.
Republican commissioner Slade Gorton, a former Senate colleague of Ashcroft's who sat next to Gorelick, challenged him for saying the "wall" kept the FBI from stopping 9/11.
"If that wall was so disabling, why was it not destroyed during the course of those eight months [of the Bush administration]?" asked Gorton, who produced an August 2001 memo by an Ashcroft deputy that reaffirmed the wall separating intelligence and criminal case work.
Thomas Pickard, who was acting FBI director during the summer of 2001, alleged Ashcroft had expressed little interest in terrorism in the months before 9/11. The attorney general heatedly denied Pickard's comment.
Pickard also said that his appeal for more counterterror funds was rejected by Ashcroft on Sept. 12, 2001.
Lack of funds and staff to fight terror was a complaint by other witnesses.
Freeh said that when he sought to hire nearly 2,000 linguists and agents to fight Islamic terrorism, he was allocated just 76 new hires.
In defending his agency, Freeh said, "I would ask that you balance what you call an indictment, which I don't agree with at all, with the two primary findings of your staff: One is that there was a lack of resources, and two, there were legal impediments."
Former Attorney General Janet Reno said the FBI had bigger problems than money.
She complained that the FBI's infrastructure was so ancient that the bureau "didn't know what it had and that it didn't share the information."
Cofer Black, the CIA counterterror chief before 9/11, pounded his fist on the table as he pleaded with the commission to believe that agency "heroes" did everything they could to kill terrorists. "We gave it all we had," Black said. "We didn't have enough people to do the job, and we didn't have enough money by magnitudes."
Black added: "We are profoundly sorry. We did all we could. We did our best."
Originally published on April 14, 2004
Thus, the entire topic of White House dithering and the dashed efforts of the CIA's OBL task force never came to light. Despite being thoroughly outlined in Steve Coll's book Ghost Wars (Coll is Managing Editor for the Washington Post, his book published a few weeks ago).
Previous news accounts say that AG Ashcroft denied the funds on Sept. 10, 2001. Is the Daily News not checking their facts again?
That was an in your face testimony. I have to wonder why Gorelick is on the panel, and not in front of it.
Did this man sleep through the Clinton years?
I have to wonder why Gorelick is on the panel, and not in front of it.In other news, Scott Peterson was appointed judge in his own trial.
And in the Michael Jackson case, the Nation of Islam as been assigned the job of supplying the jury pool.
Finally, some good comes from the work of the Commission.
Tenet is a miserable failure. Bush should have fired him when he took office, long before 9/11.
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