Posted on 08/12/2005 6:21:30 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
In March of 1995, Louis Freeh, then FBI Director, and Mary Jo White, the New York U.S. attorney investigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, received a directive written by Jamie Gorelick, President Clinton’s number two official in the Justice Department. That directive—which has come to be known as the “wall of separation” memo—ordered Freeh and White to “go beyond what is legally required” in following information-sharing procedures between intelligence agencies and agencies charged with criminal investigations of suspected terrorists. At issue, seemingly, was a White House concern to avoid “any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance” that the civil liberties of terrorism suspects were being undermined.
As has come to light in the past few days, the Gorelick Memo seems to be at the heart of the non-passing of information discovered by a counter-terrorism military operation known as “Able Danger” to the FBI that Mohammed Atta and three of the other 9/11 hi-jackers had set up an al-Queda cell in Brooklyn, New York, as early as a year prior to the 9/11 attacks. Furthermore, the information that White House or Department of Defense attorneys denied “Able Danger’s” request to give that information to the FBI was furnished to staff members of the Sept. 11 Commission—of which Jamie Gorelick was a sitting member—as early as October of 2003. But that information was not given to Commission members then and does not appear in the Commission’s final report.
As has been reported in the New York Post today, by Deborah Orin, and quoted in a story on NewsMax.com (go here), Mary Jo White wrote to the Justice Department about the Gorelick directive, complaining, “It is hard to be totally comfortable with the instructions to the FBI prohibiting contact with the United States’ Attorneys Office when such prohibitions are not legally required.” According to Orin in the Post account, White was so frustrated that she sent a second memo excoriating the Gorelick “wall of separation” as “hinder[ing] law enforcement,” saying that its prohibitions “could cost lives.”
The questions now are why did Commission staffers not inform the Sept. 11 Commission members of “Able Danger’s” October 2003 report of prior knowledge of an al-Queda cell in Brooklyn, New York a year before the 9/11 attacks? Why is Mary Jo White’s testimony in the Sept. 11 Commission investigation not included in the Commission’s final report? And, finally, why was the Gorelick directive ever written in the first place?
An article from FrontPageMag.com from May of 2004 may shed some light on the reasons for the Gorelick directive (go here). The story suggests strongly that the Clinton Administration worked strenuously, in 1995, to re-organize the ways in which intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI were allowed to communicate with each other and with U.S. Attorneys Offices investigating foreign and domestic espionage cases and that the Gorelick Memo itself is an outgrowth of policies erected under Clinton’s “Presidential Decision Directive 24”:
“In April [2004], CNSNews.com staff writer Scott Wheeler reported that a senior U.S. government official and three other sources claimed that the 1995 memo written by Jamie Gorelick, . . . created ‘a roadblock’ to the investigation of illegal Chinese donations to the Democratic National Committee. But the picture is much bigger than that. The Gorelick memo, which blocked intelligence agents from sharing information that could have halted the September 11 hijacking plot, was only the mortar in a much larger maze of bureaucratic walls whose creation Gorelick personally oversaw.”
That maze includes FBI and CIA investigations into the leaking and/or theft of sensitive missile and nuclear information to the Chinese even as illegal donations to the Democratic National Committee were being traced to Bill Clinton’s old Arkansas friend, Johnny Chung. The bureaucratic nightmare created by PDD 24 effectively stalled these investigations until safely after the 1996 Presidential Election, and led to, among others, Wen Ho Lee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory espionage case. As Mary Jo White wrote in her letter of protest regarding the Gorelick directive, PDD 24’s “instructions leave entirely to OIPR [Office of Intelligence and Policy Review] and the (Justice Department) Criminal Division when, if ever, to contact affected U.S. attorneys on investigations including terrorism and espionage.” And whom did Clinton appoint to head up the OIPR? An old friend of Janet Reno’s from Florida, Richard Scruggs. So, as FrontPageMag pointed out, “for the first time in the history of the Justice Department,” a political appointee was “put in charge of the Office of Intelligence and Policy Review (OIPR). OIPR is the Justice Department agency in charge of requesting wiretap and surveillance authority for criminal and intelligence investigations on behalf of investigative agencies from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.”
It must be noted that the Gorelick directive to Freeh and White explicitly mentions the FISA court and prohibits the sharing of information gathered by its investigative agencies with US Attorneys Offices.
The upshot of PDD 24 was that all investigations into espionage activity—including efforts by the CIA, FBI, and the United States Military counter-intelligence operations (like “Able Danger”)—were to be overseen and approved (or not approved) by political appointees that answered directly to a White House that had every reason prior to the 1996 Presidential Election for keeping those agencies from sharing information with each other or with US Attorneys Offices.
It looks like the non-sharing of the “Able Danger” information by staff members of the Sept. 11 Commission with Commission members themselves is much worse than simply an effort to shield Jamie Gorelick for some responsibility for the intelligence failures that, it is now clear, helped to make the 9/11 attacks possible. What is becoming increasingly obvious is that the Gorelick Memo itself was perhaps part of a much larger effort by the Clinton Administration to shield itself from investigations that would imply its complicity in the passing of sensitive military and nuclear intelligence to the Chinese in return for millions in illegal campaign donations in the run-up to the 1996 election.
Representative Weldon—can you spell “MemoGate”?
For a related story, go here:
http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=16180&catcode=13
I think that was a non american airliner, maybe an Egyptian airline....it wasn't the TWA 800. flight..
Bump.
I think Chronwatch was started to report on the Chronicle.....
Well done and well said, my FRiend. I think it's time for Free Republic TV. Global in scope crushing the brain dead.
Hi yo, America, AWAY!!!!!!!!!
Very typical of this "Two-Party Cartel". Protect themselves & let us pay the price. BOTH PARTIES are at fault. Only showing us again that we MUST vote outside of this cartel.
It is now becoming clear why Gorelick was kept on the commission - to protect Klinton and herself.
Exactly why Bush and the MSM will squash the issue. It's bad for the NWO.
We need FR TV!!
Ooops!!! I stand corrected! You are right!! I was elwrongo!!!
WHile the Liberal News Media is ignoring this, they are giving free airtime to the suspiciously professional Sheehan commercial. They are busy being participants to the faux sheehan rent a mob grass roots fakery.
I wonder how many of the same suspects in the Gorlick wall scandal are helping engineer the sheehan anti war protesting. (juan williams bought it hook line and sinker)
While leaving our borders completely unprotected. Makes on think about who is on who's side, doesn't it?
Good question. We have a right to know this.
I believe this event is going to separate the men from the boys.
Today on Rush's show, a democrat guy called - and he was livid at the democrats. He was fit to be tied that the dems knew in 2000 about this and didn't do anything.
Demographically, the guy represents thousands of similar democrat callers. This could devastate the democrat party for 2006 and 2008 .. that's what they are all thinking tonight .. the game is over!
CNN supposedly has a program that "checks the blogs" and tells viewers. I have only seen it once but it was OBVIOUS they only consult looney left Blogs and ignore forums.
FR TV would even kill off FNC.
"FR TV would even kill off FNC."
Good, FNC is CNN-lite anyway.....
Well .. I know circumstances are different this time. When we first knew this information, we couldn't get to first base with it .. but this time things are different.
We must be patient and allow this to play out. It will not happen overnight and we have to steel ourselves for the fight.
Roger that. But we need to get as many of these criminals to "face the music" now. Firts on my list is the "First Thing", Hillary. She is as much of a put-up job as was her demonic "husband".
...and why the MSM is working overtime to flood the august slow month with ANY other stories. Manufactured like sheehan anti-war protester, sex filled like teachers having sex or the runaway bride cutting grass, or ANYTHING but more democrat humiliation.
PAY NO MIND TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN.
Call me cynical, but that's been my feeling with this, as well.
The President has been waaaaaaaay to kind toward the Clinton administration, IMO.
The way things are looking, that unreciprocated kindness has a good chance of allowing the Clinton's to move back into the White House and continue, with the leftwing MSM, distorting everything about President Bush while they resume their quest to make this a second rate socialist nation unrecognizable to earlier generations of Americans.
Was Mary Jo White even called to testify before the Commission?
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