I watched part of that hearing today (well yesterday)and tuned in right at the moment John Lehman was calling the cops and firemen not worthy of the boy scouts, and that was enough for me, I turned the channel. If I watch even 3 minutes of those hearings I get too pissed.
Investigator or Obstructionist? (Gorelick)
5/19/04
David N. Bossie
When Attorney General John Ashcroft appeared before the September Commission, he revealed that the much criticized wall, the Department of Justice policy limiting communication between law enforcement and intelligence agents, was put in place by Jamie Gorelick, while serving as deputy attorney general for President Clinton.
Ms. Gorelick immediately defended herself in The Washington Post, claiming pre-existence of the wall while distancing herself from its heightening. She downplayed it as a critical issue while The Post complicity accused Mr. Ashcroft of a "smear".
But multiple sources show the wall was central to any failure to connect dots prior to September 11. Mr. Ashcroft revealed for the first time Ms. Gorelick's central role and exposed to the other commissioners their colleague's role in implementing this much-criticized policy.
Before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1995, then-deputy attorney general Ms. Gorelick testified about taking on the "special project" relationship between law enforcement and intelligence and spending several months on the effort, principally to prepare Justice to fight transnational crimes, such as terrorism. Out of her project came the wall.
Documents just released by Justice trace the building of the wall, starting with Ms. Gorelick instructions to Mary Jo White, then prosecuting the blind sheik for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and Ramsey Yousef for terrorist activities, to separate counterintelligence and criminal investigations.
Ms. Gorelick's direction to Ms. White created barriers "which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is being used to avoid procedural safeguards . . . " This was the very foundation of the wall.
Over Ms. White's complaints, this became the new Justice Department policy. Documents show Ms. Gorelick directly reviewed Ms. White's suggestions, some were changed, some rejected and some included. Ms. Gorelick then sent the policy with a hand-written note indicating her approval to the attorney general. The attorney general formalized Ms. Gorelick's new policy in July 1995.
Problems immediately surfaced of intelligence and law enforcement coordination and its hampering of terrorism investigations.
Justice Department investigators looking into the Wen Ho Lee fiasco examined this issue in their final report. In it, the relationship between Justice's criminal division and FBI intelligence is described as "dysfunction" and "broken". The General Accounting Office reached the same conclusion in a report, finding the policy led to "significant decline in coordination between the FBI and Criminal Division". Commission hearings have clearly established that the wall created extensive problems that remained until the Patriot Act tore it down.
Justice documents, and her testimony before the Intelligence Committee, prove Ms. Gorelick was directly involved in the building and guarding of the wall.
Incredibly, prior to Mr. Ashcroft's disclosure, the commission was not aware of these material facts. Ms. Gorelick failed to disclose the documents and her work on this central issue. In fact, the Commission's document request to the Justice Department only went back to 1998, after Ms. Gorelick left Justice. Just how active was Ms. Gorelick in shaping this document request and did she intentionally lead the commission away from finding out about her involvement?
Either way, how did Ms. Gorelick permit this inadequate document request to go forward? How did the commission remain in the dark about the Justice wall deliberations in 1995? Why hasn't the commission called upon Mary Jo White, a leading terrorism investigator and prosecutor, especially since she has repeatedly complained about Justice policies hurting her investigation?
Ms. White stated "If I could single out one significant concern that I had about our counter terrorism efforts prior to September 11th (dating from at least 1995), it was that I feared we could be hampered in our efforts to detect and prevent terrorist attacks because of the barriers between the intelligence side and law enforcement side of our government". Ms. Gorelick's policy.
As a commissioner, Ms. Gorelick has consistently questioned why senior members of the Bush administration failed to have enough meetings and "shake the tree" for information. She has led the commission away from the fact that her own work led to the atmosphere, which created intelligence failures.
In response to Sen. Kit Bond's call for Ms. Gorelick to testify, Commissioners Kean and Hamilton disclosed Ms. Gorelick has been privately interviewed by the commission -- and not under oath, no doubt. The commission also said Justice witnesses were limited to those who worked at Justice within four years of September 11. Interestingly, that excludes Ms. Gorelick and her work on the wall.
As if her conflict of interest was not bad enough, Ms. Gorelick is now judge of fact and a witness in the same proceeding. Ms. Gorelick has recused herself from Justice matters while she was at Justice, but continues to attack the Bush administration's Justice. Apparently, she has also recused herself from disclosing her involvement in a key topic of the inquiry.
Ms. Gorelick is hopelessly conflicted and may even have obstructed the commission from gathering critical facts regarding government policies contributing to September 11. Any commission report or recommendations will be totally flawed if the commission does not study the blueprints and construction of the wall, which documents show, took place in 1995 and reveal the fingerprints of Commissioner Jamie Gorelick.
David N. Bossie is the president of Citizens United and the former chief Investigator for the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight. His new book is "Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11".
e would have it backwards and miss the point entirely if we were to attribute The Gorelick Wall and the attendant metastasis of al Qaeda during the clintons' watch, (which, incidentally, was then in its incipient stage and stoppable), to the '60s liberal mindset. 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 its 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.
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The Mary Jo White Memo:
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ary Jo White's memo is documentation of the clintons' and Gorelick's willful, seditious malfeasance. The memo explicitly warned that the protective wall the clintons and Gorelick were busy erecting (doubtless to blind domestic law enforcement to the clintons' illegal foreign schemes) would (also) blind domestic law enforcement to terrorist plots foreign and domestic. From this it follows that Gorelick's Wall was not the clintons' and Gorelick's simple (albeit monumental) blunder. Rather, Gorelick's Wall was no less than the clintons' and Gorelick's malfeasance--willful, self-serving and seditious--with the metastasis of al Qaeda and 9/11 the sorry endpoint. NOTE: Bin Laden declared war on America throughout the clintons' watch. Had the clintons understood that this was war, not crime, that a terrorist war requires only one consenting player, Gorelick's Wall would be just another clintoncorruption footnote. "The Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again. They released him [bin Laden]. bill clinton It is critical to understand that this same terrorism-is-crime-not-war flawed, dangerous thinking animates John Kerry, and the left, generally. A post-9/11 America must never again put these dangerous pre-9/11 dinosaurs in any positions of leadership. To do so would be to place at grave risk no less than our very existence.
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Some evidence the commission is overlooking? I can get this info in my living room but the commission doesn't seem to see the same thing. Strange...
Does this have any truth to it?
" But Gorelick, like other researchers, traced the statutes limiting intelligence sharing to the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush in the 1980s. Under those presidents, intelligence sharing was permitted for spying on foreign suspects but not criminal prosecutions."
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/04/19/gorelick_fires_back_at_critics/