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.
-snip-
(Mary Laney in the Chicago Sun-Times, April 19, 2004)
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Mr McCarthy eloquently describes his thoughts on why the memo was written:
"My own sense, for what little it may be worth, is that the point was to mollify civil-liberties activists and conspiracy theorists who trumped up baseless fears that the government would dishonestly use FISA authority to investigate people who were not national-security risks — but I am not the person who wrote the guidelines, and we should probably give her the benefit of the doubt regarding her intentions. But good intentions hardly mean the actions they spawn will be sound."
However, other information given in the article makes one wonder about the timing. Ms Gorelick in her op-ed piece points out that it was written with only two cases in mind. But:
"And her hyperventilating about acting to protect the two cases (including mine) from the threat of having convictions reversed is specious. By the time she penned her March 1995 memo, the first World Trade Center bombing prosecution had been over for a year and my case was in its third month of trial. The only conceivable threat to eventual convictions would have been (a) if the prosecutors and agents in my case had learned information about defense strategy by virtue of the government's continuing investigation of some of our indicted defendants for possible new crimes; or (b) if the continuing investigation had turned up exculpatory information about the defendants in my case and I had not been told about it so I could disclose it. Far from being unique to national-security matters, that situation is a commonplace when the government deals with violent organizations (which tend to obstruct justice and routinely plot to kill or influence witnesses, prosecutors, and/or jurors, thus requiring continuing investigations even as already indicted cases proceed).
To avoid constitutional problems in such a situation, the government regularly assigns a prosecutor and agent who are not involved in the already indicted case to vet information from the continuing investigation before it is permitted to be communicated to agents and prosecutors on the indicted case. This way, the team on the indicted case learns only what it is allowed to know (viz., evidence of new crimes the defendants have committed), but not what it should not know (viz., defense strategy information and incriminating admissions about the indicted case made without the consent of counsel); and the government maintains the ability to reveal any exculpatory information (as federal law requires). As Gorelick's 1995 memorandum recounts, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York had already made sure that was done in my case long before Gorelick's memo.
There was no need for Gorelick to do more; what she did served only to place additional, unnecessary barriers to information sharing which — her memo, again, acknowledges — were not required by existing law."
More and more questions to for the commissioners to ask Ms Gorelick when she testifies under oath.