Posted on 04/24/2004 4:34:38 AM PDT by Elkiejg
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Nail Bush/ Save Clinton Legacy Commission
Acronym would be NB/SCL Commission
In view of her non-partisan support from the Republican mainstream that's reason enough for the American public to distrust mainstream Republicans.
Mainstream Republicans helped get her hired by DOJ and now we citizens have been advised by the mainstream Republicans to stay out of the commission's act.
We are no longer citizens in the view of dem Rats and mainstream Republicans. We are a mere audience to be entertained. Our votes are our applause. I'm taking a bucket of rotten tomatoes with me to the next election.
Guess I'll have to write a fan letter to the mainstream Republicans' agents to get them to include Ms Gorelick's knowledge of the missing John Doe II and the center fuel tank explosion in one of their acts.
I've suggested more than once that someone should hire a private investigator and find out what Hatch, Lott, et al have in their FBI files that keeps them in line when Hillary snaps her fingers. Once that is discovered and publicized, then Hillary loses her ammunition.
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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. Gorelick Agonistes |
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Rampant '60s liberalism was not the underlying rationale for The Gorelick Wall. Rather, The Gorelick Wall was the underlying rationale for--The Gorelick Wall was (insofar as '60s liberalism was the Wall's apparent impetus) a cynical cover for --the willful, methodical malpractice and malfeasance that was the product of the virulent clinton strain of rampant '60s liberalism. While it is true that The Gorelick Wall was the convenient device of a cowardly self-serving president, The Wall's aiding and abetting of al Qaeda was largely incidental, (the pervasiveness of the clintons' Nobel-Peace-Prize calculus notwithstanding). The Wall was engineered primarily to protect a corrupt self-serving president. The metastasis of al Qaeda and 9/11 were simply the cost of doing business, clinton-style. Further confirmation of the Wall-as-cover-for-clinton-corruption thesis:
Conversely, that it never occurred to anyone on the commission that Gorelick's flagrant conflict of interest renders her presence on the commission beyond farce calls into question the commission's judgment if not integrity -- Washington's mutual protection racket writ large, I suspect. The Gorelick Wall is consistent with, and an international extension of, two essential acts committed in tandem, Filegate, the simultaneous empowering of the clintons and disemboweling of clinton adversaries, and the clinton Putsch, the firing and replacement of every U.S. attorney extant.
Allegations of international clinton crimes swirling around the White House in 1995 and beyond support The-Wall-as-cover-for-international-clinton-crimes thesis. Once the clintons' own U.S. attorneys were in place, once the opposition was disemboweled by the knowledge that their raw FBI files had been in the possession of the clintons, once domestic law enforcement was effectively blinded to foreign data by Gorelick's Wall, the clintons were free to methodically and seditiously and with impunity auction off America's security, sovereignty and economy to the highest foreign bidder.
Reverse Gorelick |
I could not agree with you more. I feel completely sold out by Spector and McCain. Since apologizing seems to be so important these days, then I apologize for voting for McCain. Clearly that vote was wasted.
"According to a 1998 Senate testimony of former CIA director James Woolsey, powerful financier Khalid bin Mahfouz' younger sister is married to Osama bin Laden,. (US Senate, Senate Judiciary Committee, Federal News Service, 3 Sept. 1998, |
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Kean is either an utter moron or he is also fatally compromised. Either way, he should follow Gorelick on the way out and perhaps also into the witness chair. His presence on the commission raises some interesting questions.... Gorelick grooming Kean (and his ego) during the hearings, solicitously picking off dandruff droppings from his jacket, evoked images at once servile and simian. Not a good thing. Not NOW. |
The same thing happens if they are replaced. It's time for the good people of Utah, Arizona, and Tennessee to step up to the plate.
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e would have it backwards and miss the point entirely if we were to attribute The Gorelick Wall and 