Posted on 05/05/2004 8:33:53 AM PDT by Lando Lincoln
Scott Jordan
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 3 May 2004
"Recall, too, that during the time of Ms. Gorelick's 1995 memo, the issue causing the most tension between the Reno-Gorelick Justice Department and Director Freeh's FBI was not counterterrorism but widely reported allegations of contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign from foreign sources, involving the likes of John Huang and Charlie Trie." — The Wall Street Journal, Thursday, April 15, 2004
Hats off to the Wall Street Journal for a spectacular observation, perhaps the Rosetta Stone of postmillennial national security. Let its boiled-down essence not escape your attention: the ongoing dividends of Chinagate may well have included 9/11.
And history may be repeating itself. Let me explain.
To set the stage, recall that Bill Clinton ensured his loyal minions populated the US Attorneys' offices nationwide when he fired every last US Attorney at the dawn of his Administration, then appointed his own.
Next, as we have seen through Jamie Gorelick's startling memo1, he saw to it that domestic law enforcement was blinded to foreign intelligence information. He then methodically offered up White House access and key strategic technologies to the highest bidder: China, and Indonesian/Chinese billionaire donors with close ties to China's dictatorial regime.
Intriguingly, Clinton's Department of Justice's signature assault on Microsoft also appears to have been to the benefit of Indonesian/Chinese billionaires, who just happened to be the originating funders of the private venture fund which was the largest shareholder in lead plaintiff Netscape at the time2
With the declassification of former Deputy Attorney General Gorelick's memo, the picture comes into sharp focus: the Clinton Administration was not just:
Inattentive towards terrorism;
Impotent in its response to bin Laden's challenges;
Burdened by petty bureaucratic squabbles and a thong-distracted Chief Executive, blocking urgently-needed intel initiatives3 ;
...but also:
Purposefully malfeasant in hamstringing the intelligence community even beyond Carter-era Church Commission strictures. "Gorelick'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.
Yes, the economy, Clinton's vaunted economy, with its skyrocketing stock-market and spectacular 5.6 per cent 1996 unemployment rate (which of course puts George W. Bush's dismal 2004 5.6 per cent unemployment rate to shame).
This unstoppable economy screeched to an ignominious halt in the second half of 2000 as the tech sector imploded4 — a multi-trillion-dollar evaporation of shareholder wealth driven in significant part by the DOJ's pursuit of tech bellwether Microsoft, which put a measurable damper on enthusiasm for big-cap technology stocks and funding for new tech ventures alike.
Follow the money. The legacy of that Administration is not just one of incompetence and inattention culminating in an innocence-crushing September morning once it was safely out of office. It is one of malevolent, calculated wholesaling of loyalty for political gain, with Gorelick's Wall providing cover by blinding law enforcement efforts that might have made a difference.
Still, Chinagate was exposed, and in a sane world it would have hit the political world like one of the Chinese ICBMs it facilitated. But Clinton was untouchable — immunized! — after the Lewinsky obstruction-of-justice mess fizzled like the captivating but comparatively feeble bottle-rocket it was.
Today the damage extends far beyond the smoldering pits of lower Manhattan and the Pentagon. The world now stands on the cusp of decades of global turmoil in the face of emboldened and metastasized radical Islamism, most recently including al Qaeda's successful gambit towards reestablishing Moorish dispensation in Andalusia5.
Is Chinagate old news? Water under the bridge? Something for the 9/11 Commission's Democrat partisans to pooh-pooh and ignore as they recklessly paint their anti-Bush pastiche?
Not if you continue to mourn the thousands dead on that grim September morning. And not if you consider what other reflexively anti-Defense politician currently angling for the Presidency has financial ties to some of the same scandalous campaign donors as Bill Clinton: John Kerry is today's victorious campaign-donation choice of Chinagate's Huang-linked George Chao-Chi Chu, described as having "unusual access to high-ranking Communist officials in China" 6.
And that is old news, in a way: for in 1996 John Kerry received cash from Johnny Chung and Liu Chaoying, daughter of a powerful Chinese military official, for providing high-level access to Federal securities regulators. Kerry's cash came from transfers sent to Chung on orders from the chief of Chinese military intelligence7.
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it." — George Santayana
Notes:
1. Gorelick Memo is a web-accessible transcription of the Gorelick "Wall".
2. At the time of the DOJ's action against Microsoft was initiated, lead plaintiff Netscape's largest shareholder was the private venture fund of Amerindo Investment Advisors. "The name Amerindo came from the fund's first investors, a group of Indonesian Chinese who wanted [the founder, Cuban expatriate Alberto] Vilar to call the firm American Indonesian Singaporean Investment Co. but settled for an abbreviation." — Fortune, October 25, 1999
3. Caspar Weinberger, Washington Times, Sept. 2, 2003, reviewing Miniter: "The president never supported Mr. Woolsey's urgent request for Arabic-language translators for the CIA in 1994. A separate feud between Mr. Woolsey and Sen. Dennis DeConcini, Arizona Democrat, was allowed to run its course without direction by the Clinton White House, which further set back the CIA director's appeal for Arabic translators." So, as the author concludes, "a bureaucratic feud and President Clinton's indifference kept America blind and deaf as bin Laden plotted."
4. For a graphical econometric analysis of the recession's onset, see http://www.speakeasy.org/~dervish/recession.pdf
5. London Telegraph Bin Laden makes an offer that he cannot deliver
6. Sam Dealey's Fundraiser resurfaces from 1996, The Hill
7. NewsMax, Kerry Took Cash From Chinese Military Intelligence<⇸ij><><
hehe !
1993 : (GORE : CLIPPER CHIP PROJECT FOR BUGGING TELECOMMUNICATIONS) Al Gore once assured the American public that an Orwellian government would not monitor us. Even today, Al Gore will not claim that he planned to enable the government to tap every phone in the United States if it so desired. Al Gore wanted to be Big Brother. Vice President Al Gore spearheaded a project called "Clipper" which was designed to monitor America. Gore's leadership in this scheme to allow the Feds to have easy access to bug American telephones is all too well documented for him to deny. - "Secret Documents: Hubbell Wanted Federal Access to Phones, " by Charles R. Smith, NewsMax , 8/29/02
Oh, look.. something Kerry would like, too:
1993 : (CLINTON RECEIVES LETTER FROM MOCHTAR RIADY URGING HIM TO NORMALIZE RELATIONS WITH VIETNAM)
MARCH 1993 : (GORE : CLIPPER CHIP PROJECT : AT&T TELEPHONE SECURITY DEVICE MEETING WITH BROWN, GORE, HUBBELL, RENO, PANETTA) One document released by the Justice Dept. is a March 1993 Justice Dept. memo from Stephen Colgate, Assistant Attorney General for Administration, to Webster Hubbell. In 1993, Webster Hubbell, the now convicted Rose office law partner of Hillary Clinton, served as the number two at the Justice Department. Both Gore and Janet Reno personally tasked Hubbell to run the Clipper project. Colgate's 1993 memo to Hubbell provides the details of the Gore plan. According to the Colgate memo, Vice President Al Gore chaired a meeting with Hubbell, Reno, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, and Leon Panetta in March 1993. The meeting was on the "AT&T Telephone Security Device".- "Secret Documents: Hubbell Wanted Federal Access to Phones, " by Charles R. Smith, NewsMax , 8/29/02
[SNIP]
The rationale for this shift was provided by the FBI itself. In January 1992, the George H. W. Bush White House asked all security agencies to reassess their "post-Soviet" priorities. At that fateful moment, the chief of the National Security Threat List Unit, in the FBI's Intelligence Division, suggested a radical shift in focus: Instead of neutralizing organized secret warfare by states, the counterintelligence community should target criminal acts by loose networks of rogue actors. The collapse of the Soviet Union, it was foreseen, would provide a fertile operational field for the transnational criminal. The threat list was revised accordingly: Three hundred FBI agents were pulled from intelligence duties and pushed into international crime.
The FBI unit chief who revised the threat list, Robert Phillip Hanssen, would later confess to being a Soviet and Russian agent. But by then the new notions about national security were dogma. In May 1994, FBI director Louis J. Freeh told Congress that "criminal cartels are now richer and stronger than many nations." The New York Times echoed that judgment: "The threats [today] are less nations than gangs. The harm they can do the United States is . . . a law-enforcement problem."
This doctrine was refined by former Carter defense secretary Harold Brown, whom Clinton chose to head the Commission on the Roles and Capabilities of the United States Intelligence Community. Brown redefined international terrorism — traditionally considered a form of political warfare — as a form of "global crime."
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