And The Great ChinaGate Wall
Posted on 08/11/2005 8:48:47 AM PDT by Maria S
A member of the group, the "Jersey Girls," who lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks, is defending 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick against allegations that, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, she blocked critical intelligence that had identified the two 9/11 hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center.
"Gorelick gets a bad rap with that whole, you know, 'wall thing,'" Lorie Van Auken told WABC Radio's John Gambling - referring to Ms. Gorelick's 1995 directive prohibiting intelligence agencies from sharing evidence on suspected terrorists with law enforcement.
Calling it insread "the Reno wall," Van Auken insisted that its primary impact was limited to the investigation into so-called 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui, where investigators were prevented from searching Moussaoui's computer until after the 9/11 attacks. Van Auken offered no comment on reports that the Gorelick restrictions bottled up critical intelligence on 9/11 conspirators Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, whose hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center.
But Rep. Curt Weldon, who revealed earlier this week that military intelligence had identified Atta and al-Shehhi as terrorist threats operating inside the U.S. two years before the attacks, blamed the Clinton Justice Department's "wall."
"There was no reason not to share this information with the FBI," he complained in a radio interview Wednesday night, "except that the firewalls that existed back then were so severe that they wouldn't let these agencies talk to one another."
bbc s/b bbl. LOL
The staffers had to know what to hide. Only the commissioners could've told them that if they, the commissioners, wanted plausible deniability. In other words, saying to the staffers, here's what I don't want to know.
Correct, read FrontPageMagazine.com ^
"... its primary impact was limited to the investigation into so-called 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui ..."
THIS IS A BIG FAT LIE!! The memo - which Gorelick wrote - not Reno - impacted EVERYTHING!! - not just that one investigation.
Naturally I had to check my pings one more time before leaving the house :-)
And Old Friend, GREAT catch. Make sure a lot of people read that.
....but we have to consider that in any bureaucracy staff members 'learn' what the bosses do and don't want to 'know' and what the bosses do and don't want to act upon. Certainly the staff members may deserve a lot of blame here, but the bosses (i.e., Commission members) don't get "off the hook" just because they weren't informed -- they may not have wanted to know.
If the commission staff had believed that the Commisioners truly wanted to turn over every rock, this would have been briefed to the Commission.
Yes! I was just posting the same thing, before I finished reading the thread! Deniability is all the rage with mindless bureaucrats like Gorelick, et al. Don't know what the excuse is with some of the R. members, though!
That's an absolutely incredible article. I've just sent it to nearly everyone in my e-mail address book.
The wall was created to keep Clinton out of jail, and Sandy Berger stole to protect Clinton's legacy.
Once we realized the Commission members were going to surround and protect Gorelick instead of force her resignation when it became apparent that she created the Wall and was at least 50% of the problem between intelligence agencies, we all knew they were going for a particlar result. And the truth be damned.
I do hope Weldon investigates Gorelick's position as a Board Member of Schlumberger ... Maybe it WAS all about oil.
Gorelicker is an obvious target and should get tarred and feathered along with the staff members. But this goes much much deeper than her.
The Jersey Girls need to wake up.
And so does Roger Ailes at Fox....enough Aruba already...you have a "REAL" STORY HERE ROGER....HELLLOOOOO
Springsteen loves Jersey girls, but of course he campaigned for Kerry.
He craved both the Nobel Peace Prize and a place in history among the greatest of American presidents. He wanted either destination far more than he wanted the tasks and trials and stops that were the necessary work to actually get to either place.
He is the only president I am aware of for whom the establishment of legacy was actually mentioned as a primary activity during his service.
Reagan had the class to wait for history. Clinton is and has always been impatient to be great. He is not now ready and he likely never will be. Greatness stems from achievement not positioning.
As I was watching the events on television, watching my husband being burned alive in a building, I would have thought the president would have gotten up and told children: "Please excuse me, but I have something important to attend to." I would hope that we’d have somebody in office that would act like the commander in chief if, God forbid, we’re ever under attack again.
Lead presenters are 9/11 family members and Family Steering Committee cofounders, Monica Gabrielle, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie Van Auken. After the FSC members' 18 months of lobbying finally forced a 9/11 investigation and the Commission's creation, they submitted hundreds of unanswered questions that Commissioner Jamie Gorelick promised would be their investigation's "road map".
******
Jamie Gorelick of the Commission participated in a 1996 Justice Department meeting which decided to treat organized crime as a higher priority than terrorism. This led to
the decision by federal prosecutors to dismiss as a "hoax and a scam," the testimony of mobster Greg Scarpa Jr. Scarpa testified that he relayed messages from Ramzi Yousef -- who in 1996 and '97 was housed in a cell next to Scarpa in the New York Metropolitan Correction Center -- to another Al Qaeda operative next door. Cooperating with authorities in hopes of obtaining a lighter sentence on racketeering charges, Scarpa befriended Yousef and copied his notes. In those missives, Yousef -- then on trial -- discussed blowing a plane up as part of a strategy to obtain a mistrial. He also passed detailed schematics of the bombs to be used and how they could be smuggled past airport security. Working with the FBI, Scarpa set up an outside phone line from which Yousef could patch phone calls from jail to anywhere in the world. But when Yousef made such calls, the FBI agents found themselves stymied because he spoke dialects of Urdu or Baluchi.
And when the TWA Flight 800 blew up, investigators found trace explosives favored by Yousef on the plane, but rejected sabotage as a cause in favor of mechanical failure. Scarpa Jr. was already slated to provide key testimony in several high-profile mob trials. High-ranking officials, like Jamie Gorelick -- now the FBI's chief counsel -- shut down the criminal investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 for fear that their outstanding cases against various mobsters would unravel. [21]
Gorelick is manifestly culpable.
And here we are. Just like clockwork, a low-level stoolie gets her marching orders and hesitantly steps up to the plate. How do you like the spotlight now, Joisey Gal? The leftists never told you you'd have to pay for all that free face time and notoriety, did they?
Exactly. Gorelick should be shamed, but the left has no conscience. Gorelick probably still believes she did the right thing. Disgusting.
Well, it's pretty damned apparent we're not getting a lot of brain thrust from the "Jersey Girl"...
"It's a, like, 'wall thing,' y'know?"
Bump that, Prime. :-)
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