The commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has a critical dual mission to fulfill — to help our nation understand how the worst assault on our homeland since Pearl Harbor could have occurred and to outline reforms to prevent new acts of terrorism. Under the leadership of former governor Tom Kean and former congressman Lee Hamilton, the commission has acted with professionalism and skill. Its hearings and the reports it has released have been highly informative, if often disturbing. Sept. 11 united this country in shock and grief; the lessons from it must be learned in a spirit of unity, not of partisan rancor.
At last week's hearing, Attorney General John Ashcroft, facing criticism, asserted that "the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents" and that I built that wall through a March 1995 memo. This is simply not true.
First, I did not invent the "wall," which is not a wall but a set of procedures implementing a 1978 statute (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA) and federal court decisions interpreting it. In a nutshell, that law, as the courts read it, said intelligence investigators could conduct electronic surveillance in the United States against foreign targets under a more lenient standard than is required in ordinary criminal cases, but only if the "primary purpose" of the surveillance were foreign intelligence rather than a criminal prosecution.
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(Jamie S. Gorelick in The Washington Post, April 18, 2004)
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The 9/11 Commission hearings are something to watch. The commission is supposed to be a group of intelligent people who are looking into and learning about how to prevent in the future what happened that horrible September morning when terrorists commandeered commercial jetliners and flew them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania. Thousands of Americans died in those horrific crashes and explosions. They were killed by men who were consumed with hatred of Americans, Christians, Jews and all people who live in an advanced technological society. Those hate-filled, disillusioned Muslim men apparently had planned their evil attacks for months. The 9/11 Commission is to look into how those terrorists were able to plan such an horrific attack without our intelligence services learning of it and preventing it. That's what we're told the commission is supposed to do. That's not what the 9/11 Commission appears to be doing. Watch and listen to the testimony for even a few minutes and you get the distinct feeling that this is a political inquisition, and that anyone on the Republican administration's side is going to get hammered with accusations instead of questions.
Of particular note is the harsh treatment of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Take a look at the harshest questioner of Rice on the panel, Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick pummeled Rice with questions — no, accusations — on how poorly the administration had done and how poorly Rice's national security efforts had been in not preventing the 9/11 attacks.
Rice was asked repeatedly by Gorelick why her office of national security didn't put together all the pieces of information that were coming in regarding terrorists who wanted to do harm to America and Americans.
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(Mary Laney in the Chicago Sun-Times, April 19, 2004)
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| The Gorelick Rosetta Stone |
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 BumpGorelick's Wall was not just a monument to political correctness and lawyer-think run amok, it was a strategic keystone of the Clinton Administration's wholesale auction of America's security, sovereignty and economy.
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