Posted on 04/20/2004 10:35:17 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
Gorelick must go
Posted: April 21, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
In Sunday's Washington Post, former Clinton administration senior official Jamie Gorelick wrote about her tenure as Deputy Attorney General and her now-infamous "building a wall" memo that has become a centerpiece of the debate over why the 9-11 terrorists could move through the United States without detection.
The issue is not whether "the wall" was a necessity compelled by law, or whether the early decisions of the Bush administration to keep "the wall" in place were themselves correct, as Gorelick asserted.
The only issues are who is going to judge the issue of "the wall," and whether Gorelick ought to be among them?
When 9-11 Chair Thomas Kean growled last week that voices objecting to Gorelick's membership as a judge of the panel deciding the wisdom of her own record should "stay out of our business," the folks who heard him recoiled first in shock and then in anger. Of course the Commission is not pursuing its own business, but the country's business. Kean's outburst tells us all we need to know about the clubby, chummy partnership at work to protect Gorelick at the expense of Commission credibility.
Kean might have more usefully argued that the 9-11 Commission is already so thoroughly discredited by the antics of Commission hack Richard ben Veniste, with assists to Robert Kerrey and Tim Roemer, that not even Gorelick's glaring conflict of interest could do any additional damage. The disease has metastasized, he might have argued, so why bother with surgery on a patient that cannot be saved?
But that's not what Kean blurted out. Rather, he angrily claimed ownership of the process and declared Gorelick non-partisan and bi-partisan in the same breath. Some other Republicans joined the "Defend Jamie" club, a tribute to Washington, D.C.'s legendary stick-together imperative.
By all accounts Gorelick is well and widely liked in D.C. But so what? Could the chief of Dallas Police have served on the Warren Commission? No central figure in the decisions leading up to the intelligence collapse that failed to see 9-11 coming can sit on the commission – period. She can recuse herself from A, B and C all day long, but that doesn't make her qualified to judge the alphabet. She's a witness – not a judge – and she's got to go.
Even a year from now, this will be completely obvious – as obvious as it is today. There isn't a serious student of government ethics that can offer any plausible case for keeping Gorelick on the job. Just expediency and friendship mixed together – her self-interest, and the loyalty of her friends.
Her real friends should buy her dinner, and perhaps a weekend at a nice resort where she can bind up her wounds before returning to appear before her ex-colleagues under oath and on television. Unless this transpires, the Commission, already a comedy full of clowns, will turn into a bitter tragedy for Americans expecting an inquiry and answers – not another piece of Clinton-era political performance art.
Look . . . a person who should be under investigation by the Commission is ON the Commission.See also:It was intended to be a farce from the outset.
It will remain a farce no matter what we do.
Kissinger Wrong Leader For Sept. 11 Investigation
Seattle Post-Intelligencer | December 3, 2002 | Sean Gonsalves
Posted on 12/04/2002 10:55:44 AM PST by Stand Watch Listen
Just when you thought it couldn't get any more Orwellian, Henry Kissinger is named chairman of the "independent" commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. What's next? Pete Rose being named chairman of a blue ribbon committee to investigate gambling in professional sports? Or how about Oliver North being appointed head of a federal probe into the illegal arms trade?
At this point I wouldn't be surprised if the Bush administration appointed O.J. Simpson chairman of a new national task force on domestic violence, given No. 43's post-9/11 concern for women's lib, especially in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. (The Marines are now fighting the feminist cause?)
My mother used to tell me: "Sean, sometimes perception is everything." I'm sure former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Harvey Pitt can relate. Pitt resigned his chairmanship last month, realizing that with his record of meeting with the heads of companies under SEC investigation and with his close ties to the accounting industry at a time when the SEC is supposed to be cracking down on corporate accounting fraud, it was best that he step aside. In a letter to President Bush, Pitt said he was resigning because of the "the turmoil surrounding my chairmanship . . . Rather than be a burden to you or the agency, I feel it is in everyone's best interest if I step aside now to allow the agency to continue the important efforts we have started."
Will Kissinger follow suit? Even though his international consulting firm client list has not been made public, "reports have been widely circulated that it includes Persian Gulf states, oil companies and transportation firms," The Boston Globe reported. The Globe also reported the reaction to Kissinger's appointment by Scott Armstrong, National Security Archive founder and former staff member of the Senate Watergate committee: "He laughed for a solid minute."
Perhaps Armstrong was laughing to keep from crying. Kissinger "has so many clients whose interests are so completely tied up in the results of this investigation," Armstrong told the Globe. "The minute you start talking about clerics in Saudi Arabia, it's in no way in the interests of his clients for the whole truth to be told."
Anyone with even the slightest political consciousness knows the war crimes Kissinger is alleged to have been involved with. But if you are not familiar with some of the lowlights, read Christopher Hitchens' book "The Trial of Henry Kissinger."
In it, you'll read about the esteemed statesman's connection to the bombing of Cambodia and about his role in helping to set the stage for the 1973 coup in Chile that brought Pinochet to power.
Armstrong also told the Globe that when Kissinger left his government post in 1976, he took thousands of State Department documents to help him write his memoirs. Kissinger has yet to return them. Kissinger, Armstrong said, is "a man with a private sense of history. He does not have a credible approach to assuring the public that he's interested in getting to the bottom of things or that we will do so through an open process."
President Bush urged Kissinger's commission to "follow the facts wherever they may lead." One thing the panel ought to get to the bottom of is the report that two employees of the instant messenger service firm Odigo, (which has offices in Israel and, before Sept. 11, in the World Trade Center), received warnings of the pending attack hours before it happened.
In the weeks following the attacks, one of Israel's leading dailies, Ha'aretz, quoted Odigo CEO Micha Macover as saying "Two workers received the messages predicting the attack would happen." And Alex Diamandis, Odigo vice president of sales and marketing, told Newsbytes reporter Brian McWilliams that Odigo workers in New York were warned but that the message did not identify the World Trade Center as the target.
According to Computerworld reporter George A. Chidi Jr., Odigo officials have been cooperating with the FBI in investigating exactly what transpired.
Don't you think it's important to know if, in fact, Odigo employees had better intelligence than the FBI and CIA?
I'd like to see Kissinger go before the International Criminal Court for his alleged war crimes.
But even if he is never tried, I'd feel a lot better if he weren't the chairman of the 9/11 investigation commission, but, instead, devoted the rest of his public life to performing deep voice duets with Barry White or being cast as the voice of cartoon characters in Disney animated movies.
Sean Gonsalves is a staff writer with the Cape Cod Times and syndicated columnist.
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April 14, 2004Gorelick Plan To Block Action on 9/11 Panel Findings(2004-04-14) -- Despite calls for her resignation from the 9/11 commission, former Clinton administration deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick today announced an "innovative plan" to prevent the commission's eventual recommendations from being put into practice.
The proposal, reminiscent of Ms. Gorelick's now-famous 1995 finding which protected potential terrorists from uncomfortable legal proceedings, would place "a wall between the commission's findings and actual implementation."
"We must maintain the constitutional separation between testimony and action," said Ms. Gorelick. "If the 9/11 commission findings resulted in organizational or procedural changes in government, it would have a chilling effect on such panels. How could you get qualified people like me to serve on commissions if they feared that their speculative theories and ideas would be proven impractical through implementation?"
Mention you remember his article about why Kissenger should not be on the commission, and ask if plans to write that Gorelick should also NOT be on the commission.
Kean has fallen for the moderate Republican trap, which is right out of the Democrap terrorist playbook. Kean has tried in vain to preserve "bipartisanship" and "fairness" while Ben-Veniste and the other Dims have turned the commission into a political circus.
The American people deserve better. This commission was supposed to be above politics and now it has devolved into a typical, clubby Washington DC insiders' game. Shame on Kean for letting it happen.
At this point, Kean's reputation is nil. He is just another pathetic Republican idiot who allowed himself to be used as a hack to sell Clark's book and promote F'n Kerry's candidacy.
Hopefully, we can put him out with the rest of the neocon trash. Out on the sidewalk, right next to Arlen Specter.
Kean has been an embarrassing RINO fer his entire career...whichever Pubbie was responsible fer his appointment needs to be looked at fer Lefty Bias as well...MUD
Gorelick Agonistes
Wall Street Journal ^ | April 21, 2004 | Editorial
Posted on 04/21/2004 5:17:27 AM PDT by OESY
Jamie Gorelick has now issued her defense for staying on the September 11 Commission, and the usual media and Democratic suspects are rallying behind her. So let's put the issue as simply as possible: If Clinton-era Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick were not already a Commission member, does anybody doubt that she would be called to testify before it?
The Commission is interviewing nearly every major law enforcement and defense figure in two Administrations, and surely a Deputy AG was one of them. More than that, Ms. Gorelick was the author of a memo that has now become central to the debate over what went wrong before 9/11 in the way the U.S. dealt with terror threats.
Yet Ms. Gorelick now claims she can judge everyone else as a Commissioner because her now famous 1995 memo was no big deal and merely codified existing procedures. Even if we grant her this point, which many others dispute, shouldn't she be required to explain it under oath? What gives her an Olympian exemption?
No serious person on either side of the aisle doubts that the "wall" of separation between intelligence agents and criminal investigators that was memorialized in her memo was a problem. Everyone also now agrees that poor intelligence sharing was one of the key reasons U.S. authorities failed to detect the September 11 plot. We can think of several questions for Ms. Gorelick that would prove far more illuminating than anything that emerged from the Condoleezza Rice show. Such as:
• Ms. Gorelick, you write in the Washington Post that you did not invent the wall, which you argue was just "a set of procedures implementing a 1978 statute (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA)." Yet your 1995 memo to the FBI and World Trade Center bombing prosecutor asked for procedures that "go beyond what is legally required." Is it possible to merely implement the law and at the same time go beyond what it requires?
• Follow-up: Ms. Gorelick, no doubt you know that when the Ashcroft Justice Department finally challenged guidelines of the type you issued, the FISA Appeals Court agreed with your own 1995 assessment that those guidelines had never been necessary. In other words, the court said we didn't need the Patriot Act to permit greater intelligence sharing than your memo had allowed. Then why write a memo that imposed such restrictions?
Far from being unnecessary, Ms. Gorelick's testimony goes to the heart of the U.S. government's 1990s' failure to get its antiterror act together. She is right that before 9/11 the Ashcroft Justice Department endorsed her "wall" policy, but so what? They were wrong too.
What is clear is that for some reason the nature and height of "the wall" underwent a qualitative change in the 1990s, as any investigator or prosecutor who dealt with it now says. Whereas previous interpretations of the FISA statute had limited the ability of prosecutors to produce certain intelligence in court, the new rules effectively prohibited people from communicating at all. There seems to have been destructive tension among Justice, the FBI, and the lower FISA court at the time of the 1995 memo, tension that may in the end explain Ms. Gorelick's behavior. But we won't have a clear picture until she and some of the other major players -- including members of the FISA court -- testify.
The 9/11 Commissioners are only undermining their own credibility in rallying to Ms. Gorelick's defense. Her conflict of interest can't be solved merely by recusing herself from discreet portions of the probe, since as a Commissioner she will still serve as judge and jury on everyone else in government. She should have recused herself entirely from even questioning John Ashcroft. We also take no comfort in Republican Orrin Hatch's endorsement, since one of Ms. Gorelick's former law partners represented him in the BCCI case and he whisked her through Senate confirmation in 1994.
The 9/11 Commission was supposed to be a fair-minded, non-partisan probe that would help our democratic government learn from its mistakes. Ms. Gorelick's failure to resign and testify herself in the face of a clear conflict of interest is reason enough for the American public to distrust its ultimate judgments.
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An excellent question, and ample proof that Gorelick is not only a LIAR, but also needs to be grilled in front of this commision...AFTER she resigns her post!!
FReegards...MUD
BTW...these RINOs who continue to express support fer her are starting to really piss me off!!
How can we make this happen?
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