Posted on 04/14/2004 3:31:42 PM PDT by joinedafterattack
RUSH: Back now to the John Ashcroft audio sound bites from yesterday's testimony before the "Let's Get Bush" commission. This is part of his opening statement.
ASHCROFT: The simple fact of September 11th is this. We did not know an attack was coming, because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies. Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions, and starved for basic information technology. The old national intelligence system in place on September 11th was destined to fail.
RUSH: He did not us mistakenly or accidentally say, "We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade [clearing throat] our government had blinded itself to its enemies. Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls." More on that shortly. Here's Ashcroft bomb number one.
ASHCROFT: In February 2001, shortly after becoming attorney general I reviewed these authorities. Let me be clear. My thorough review revealed no covert action program to kill bin Laden. There was a covert action program to capture bin Laden for criminal prosecution. But even this program was crippled by a snarled web of requirements, restrictions, and regulations that prevented decisive action by our men and women in the field. When they most needed clear, understandable guidance and our agents and operatives were given instead the language of lawyers. Even if they could have penetrated bin Laden's training camps, they would have needed a battery of attorneys to approve the capture.
RUSH: Bombshell number two. This is where he begins to discuss the wall erected by Clinton's justice department 1995 that prevented information on terrorism, information gathered via intelligence, from being shared. Agents knew they'd lose their jobs if they breached the wall.
ASHCROFT: The 1995 guidelines and the procedures developed around them imposed Draconian barriers, barriers between the law enforcement and intelligent communities. The wall effectively excluded prosecutors from intelligence investigations. The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents. In 1995 the justice department designed a system that was destined to fail. In the days before September 11th, the wall specifically impeded the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui. Investigation of Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. After the FBI arrested Moussaoui, agents became suspicious of his interest in commercial aircraft and sought approval for a criminal search warrant to search his computer. The warrant was rejected because FBI officials feared breaching the wall.
RUSH: I have always wondered with this. You know, this was one of the dots that they always complained wasn't connected after 9/11 when all this information started to trickle out. They had Moussaoui's computer, and remember the FBI said no. A bunch of people got together and the advice was a consensus, you can't look at it. And you can't look at it because Moussaoui was a criminal target. These were intelligence people gathering information, and it was not legal for them to have it. It was not legal for them based on Clinton administration era rules, it was not legal for them to know what was on his computer. Here is bombshell number three, the Gorelick memo.
ASHCROFT: This memorandum laid the foundation for a wall separating the criminal and intelligence investigations. As a matter of fact, established the wall following the 1993 World Trade Center attack, which at the time was largest international terrorism attack on American soil, the largest prior to September 11th. Although you understand the debilitating impact of the wall, I cannot imagine that the commission knew about this memorandum, so I have had it declassified for you and the public to review. Full disclosure compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the commission.
RUSH: And you should have seen the members of that commission looking at Jamie Gorelick, and you should have seen Ben-Veniste's face going, "Oh, damn, damn, what are we going to do about this? Bill Clinton didn't tell us about this." In his wide-ranging four-hour testimony, Bill Clinton must not have told these people about this. Bill Clinton let them down. Remember all those stories, Clinton testified, he was open, he was forthcoming, he must not have told them about this. But more importantly, neither did Jamie Gorelick.
Jamie Gorelick even then, at this moment in time, began mouthing to other members of the commission something to the effect, "It's not mine, I didn't do it." The problem is that her signature is on it. I have that memo right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers. It is one, two, three, four pages. It says "secret", but now that's been crossed out because it's been declassified. Says it's to Mary Jo White, U.S. attorney, southern district New York, Louis Freeh, Richard Scruggs, the council of intelligence policy and review, at the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, Joanne Harris, assistant attorney general, criminal division, from Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general, re: instructions on separation of certain foreign counter intelligence and criminal investigations.
You know, you know where this stems from, folks, and it's interesting the way the New York Times reports this today. We'll get to that after the break, because there's only a few precious broadcast seconds remaining here. I'll tell you where this comes from. This comes from the Omar Abdul Rahman World Trade Center explosion bombing of 1993, the blind sheik. The Clinton administration, you've heard the media, the Democrats, the New York Times demanding that Bush racially profile these hijackers. If we would have racially profiled the hijackers, why, it would have prevented 9/11. That's the purpose, one of the many purposes of this memo, to protect civil rights, to make sure we didn't offend anybody. Clinton didn't want bad numbers, we weren't going to offend a soul that might vote for Democrats. So we're going to build this wall to protect the very suspects that engage in this activity.
COMMERCIAL BREAK
RUSH: The New York Times today on the Gorelick revelations by Ashcroft. It's an excerpt by Philip Shenon and Eric Lichtblau. "He surprised the commission by introducing a 1995 memo declassified by the justice department two days earlier that was written by one of the commission's Democrat members, Jamie Gorelick, who was the deputy to Ms. Reno," who was hapless. (I added that.) "The memo, Mr. Ashcroft said, put in place the wall that had a debilitating impact on the ability of counterterrorism investigators to share information with their counterparts in criminal investigations. Full disclosure compels me to inform you that its author is a member of this commission, he said, looking warily toward Ms. Gorelick. Commission officials said they'd never seen the memo before. Ms. Gorelick declined to comment on the issue after the hearing. 'I really don't want to be a witness here.'"
Uh, all right, now based on this New York Times story the obvious question here that no one's asked, the one person who did in fact know about the previously classified memo was Jamie Gorelick. Why didn't she make the commission aware of it before Ashcroft revealed it yesterday? The reason is simple: She was covering up for herself and her administration. Why didn't Bill Clinton, I ask again, mention this in his wonderful, forthcoming, and open (crying) it was so wonderful, we were in tears, why can't all witnesses be as forthcoming as Bill -- why, he stayed two hours longer than he was supposed to -- he's such a wonderful man, why can't we get him back in office again, damn it! (Crying.) That was the coverage of Clinton. Why didn't Clinton tell anybody about this? She says she doesn't want to be a witness, but she should be, and she may be. This is such a sham.
Now, I'll tell you something else about this. I want to add to my analysis of why they constructed the wall. Let me just explain it again. We’ve been talking about this for the longest time on this program. These hearings have done so much to validate the information that I've tried to impart on this program for over two years now. The Clinton administration builds this wall where intelligence or data that is learned as a result of intelligence gathering cannot be shared with law enforcement. And when you are trying and prosecuting and trying to apprehend these terrorists as part of your legal system, you have just rendered your intelligence-gathering apparatus meaningless.
So if it's intelligence people rather than criminal investigators who stumble across Zacarias Moussaoui's computer they can't look at it! They're in violation of the law! So, couldn't find out the what was on it and it led to a whole bunch of conundrums and people had no decisions and didn't know what to do and then it led to no dots being connected and all hell broke loose. And look how long it's taken us to finally get to the answer. In a commission intended to find blame and place it at the feet of George W. Bush and his administration, guess where it actually ends up? A point that I made in the first hour, the reason that was destined to happen is because the Democrats are pursuing a lie.
They are pursuing a notion that George Bush personally knew and is therefore responsible for 9/11. And they're doing it as a campaign issue, because their candidate is so pathetic on the stump that he can't carry the water. If they gave him all this information, I shudder to think what it would sound like if he tried to use it. It would land with a thud. It would land like an empty condom is what it would land -- visualize that -- it would land like an empty condom hitting the sidewalk as you're walking around listening to rap music which he claims to like. It's important, and serious. So they got to rely on all these other commission members and all these other techniques to try to nail Bush, but they're pursuing a lie. And it's not going to work, folks. I know that many of you have lost faith in the notion that right prevails, that truth prevails. I haven't. And I doubt that I ever will, based on my intelligence guided by experience. And I'm telling you that they're pursuing a lie here, and this was destined to happen.
There's another explanation. I said that one of the reasons that they erected the wall is because Clinton's concerned with not offending anybody. These are racial suspects, they are dark-skinned and they don't look like Caucasians and so we're not going to racially profile, we're not going to prejudge anybody. We can't find out even if there are people of this type interested in committing crimes against the United States so forth and so on, so we don't bother or offend anybody, and it's also because we don't really take the threat seriously. If they took the threat seriously they wouldn't have done this garbage and that's another thing. But the third point is this. Who are the Clinton people, who were they? Jamie Gorelick, Clinton, Gore, all these people -- and this is the great danger posed by John Kerry, if you ask me -- are sixties relics.
These are people whose formative experiences in their lives are their experiences hating government, protesting government, protesting this, protesting that, protesting the establishment, protesting authority. These are people who grew up hating the FBI. These are people that grew up hating law enforcement. These are the people who gave law enforcement the name pigs. These are the people that made returning Vietnam soldiers feel like scum when they got off the plane back in California from Vietnam. These are the people that joined Jane Fonda; these are the people that joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War like John Kerry; these are the people that suspected law enforcement, these are the people that were suspicious of authority, and they now are in charge of it when Clinton assumes office? And what's the first thing they do, handcuff the FBI, handcuff the pigs, make sure that the FBI can't run roughshod over harmless, innocent anti-American citizens, because anti-Americanism is patriotism, too. Anti-Americanism is justified, dissent these people always believed is what made America great. And the FBI they viewed as the enemy.
So they finally end up by hook or crook in the White House, and, lo and behold, they took it out on the military, gays in the military, turned the military into a social experimentation playground and then neutered the FBI, gave the FBI all this responsibility but didn't fund it, set them up to fail. It's no wonder Louis Freeh is fit to be tied. He's getting blamed, his hands were tied, he couldn't do diddly squa. It was left to the CIA the CIA couldn't share anything they learned with the FBI because the FBI was not allowed to get involved in criminal investigations, because whatever they learned from the CIA was inadmissible. And sitting right on this commission, the woman who authored the memo establishing this stupid wall, has the audacity to sit in judgment of the Bush administration, been in office a total of 233 days when this happened. And go through the charade and carrying the water of the Democrats who are trying to establish as truth a falsehood that Bush could have stopped this. It is just mind-boggling. And so there are now increasing calls for Ms. Gorelick to ship up and shape out. Not only are there calls for her to resign, there are calls for her to sit in the witness chair and to explain this. Now, Jamie Gorelick appeared on Lou Dobbs Tonight last night and he asked her a question. He said, "Let me quote John Ashcroft, saying that the government had blinded itself to our enemies by separating counterterrorism from criminal investigation, citing flawed legal reasoning and pointing to a 1995 memo written by none other than you."
GORELICK: Well, yes, except that his deputy attorney general, one of my successors, Larry Thompson, wrote a memo before 9/11, in August of 2001, leaving those policies in place and just reiterating the aspects of this that indeed allow -- in fact, require -- sharing of information between the intelligence and the criminal side. Slade Gorton pointed out in his exchange with John Ashcroft, a fairly tough exchange I might say, that in the four areas that Attorney General Ashcroft says were problematic and that he inherited, he left three of them in place.
RUSH: You know what this is? This is -- if you saw it, this is -- Ashcroft's had this four-color brochure, this little pamphlet that he held up, and there were a number of areas that they were from the Clinton years, and he had approved some of them and didn't approve others, and this was during this early transition period. There had not been a full review and study of any of this. They had to establish the office. They had to start setting about setting it up in their own ways. This is a really lame attempt to all of a sudden shift the blame to Ashcroft. Well, if this is so bad, he left it in place. Is it in place now? It's not in place now. We've got the Patriot Act now. Do you think the Patriot Act would have ever seen the light of day with Janet Reno and Jamie Gorelick and Bill Clinton? It never would have.
The wall that they built was designed to prevent anything like the Patriot Act from taking place. Now you've got liberals singing from both sides of the street. On the one hand they horribly hate the Patriot Act, they editorialize against it in newspaper after newspaper after newspaper, and yet then they contradict themselves by saying that "If Bush only racially profiled these 19 hijackers, why, this could have been stopped." The very idea -- you just stop and consider the thinking that even creates this wall; that information gathered by intelligence agencies is not usable when pursuing terrorists, for the technicality that the administration chose to pursue terrorists in the legal system? I mean, folks, it's hard to conclude any other thing except they didn't want the problem of capturing these people. They didn't want the hassle of dealing with this. That's how I read this. Now, they can do all of the, you know, after-the-fact, you know, massaging of this and trying to switch it around in their favor they want, but I mean just look at what happened when, take a look at who these people are and from where they come, the sixties and so forth, and some of this makes a frightening, frightening deal of sense.
I think it would be appropriate if Jamie Gorelick were to apologize to the 9/11 families for structuring this wall. I think Jamie Gorelick should personally go to her cheering section of 9/11 families in the hearings, and after she apologizes publicly, apologize personally to each one. Yeah. Tit-for-tat. Don't hold your breath.
Funny you should ask that. Today's Daily News did a cover story about this, and here's what it said about that:
Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, and Mary Fetchet, whose son Brad was killed, said they were left "speechless" by the spectacle.
I guess their DNC talking points didn't come in on time, so they didn't know how to respond to Ashcroft's charges!
There is no transcript yet, so I am quoting submitted testimony, page 5, second paragraph:
"... the group found that there were far fewer legal impediments to information sharing between the law enforcement and intelligence communities than many people in both communities had thought, and the the principal obstacles were ones of agency culture and lack of understanding. There are simply no walls or restrictions on sharing the vast majority of counterterrorism information. There are no legal restrictions at all on the ability of members of the intelligence community to share intelligence information with each other."
Thanks, that certainly nails it.
Gore Lick, APOLOGIZE.
APOLOGIZE.
APOLOGIZE.
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