[BenLurkin]

Gorelick's Wall . . . BUMP!

[hoosiermama]

See this? Here's the most important paragraph IMO:

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. Mr. Trie later told investigators that between 1994 and 1996 he raised some $1.2 million, much of it from foreign sources, whose identities were hidden by straw donors. Ms. Gorelick resigned as deputy attorney general in 1997 to become vice chairman of Fannie Mae.

[arjay]

Absolutely nothing will be done about her. Mr. Kean, the so called Republican chairman, gave her a rousing commendation and said he wished people would stay out of their business.

The 9/11 commission is politics at its worst. Not only are they not focusing on fixing things in the future, they are giving way too much security information to our enemies.

Many politicians on both sides of the aisle would sell the rest of us down the river just to get their faces on TV.

[Texas Eagle]

Well, damn it! Why is the Republican Party sitting on its fat asses while Rush Limbaugh and the Wall Street Journal does its dirty work?

Where's Bill Frist's outrage? Where's Dennis Hastert's outrage? Where's John McCain's outrage?

Spineless sonsab****es.

[LdSentinal]

I'm sure the media will pressure Gorelick to testify in public like they did with Condi Rice.

Yeah right . . .

[VRWC For Truth]

[Kryptonite]

Gorelick had the unmitigated gall to come on cable news programs a week or so ago and say that the problem was the wall between intelligence and the FBI but that the Klintoon administration allowed sharing of information during the so-called Y2K *crisis", leaving an inference that Y2K was a 9/11-type event that Slick Willie's hawks dismantled. Y2K was a computer scare, not a terrorist scare, beyond the usual Times Square babble. She is absolutely complicit in the scheme to control the FBI and the intelligence community which she herself identified as problematic on national TV.

My hat is off to James Sensenbrenner for coming on Fox and MSNBC to call for her resignation tonight, and to John Ashcroft for de-classifying the smoking gun.

[AlienCrossfirePlayer]

I wrote to my Congress people (Bond, Talent, and Todd Akin) asking them to support Sensenbrenner in calling for the resignation of Gorelick. It was the least I could do.

[Lancey Howard]

Yep. The jig is up. Gorelick and the Democrats thought they could be sneaky and put this pig Gorelick on the Commission specifically so that she would be conveniently overlooked as a witness. Instead, they set themselves up to look like fools.

Ah, well....
The Bush team knew, weeks ago, what was going to come out from Ashcroft's testimony and so they "agreed" to "cave" and let Rice testify. This little masterstroke of sandbagging was, in retrospect, magnificent. Gorelick now has no excuse - -she cannot refuse to testify without looking like the biggest hypocrite on the face of the earth. And the Democrats can only sit by silently and pout. All that's needed now is for the Republicans to duplicate the insidious Democrat catcalls that were directed at Bush when they were trying to force Rice to testify.

By the way, I haven't heard from the scumbag "9-11 widows" of 'Today Show' fame - - what do they have to say about the Gorelick memo?

[HardStarboard]

Someone please give me a link to an e-mail list for all Senators that I can paste into the "To" slot on an e-mail. I want to mail the following to every one of those folks - fraud on the 9/11 Commission is being perpertrated and its got to be stopped.

I urge you all to e-mail something along the following lines:

Honorable Senators:

The revelation today that a 9/11 Terrorism Commission member was instrumental in the promulgation of a regulation that, as testified to by virtually all witnesses before the Comission, resulted in the DOTS not only not being connected, but in the DOTS not flowing to any central clearing point to be analyzed, is frankly astounding.

The fact that the individual in question, Jamie Gorelick, when faced with the fact of her involvement in a regulation she authored while in government that is a linchpin to the investigation, did not resign from the commission is astounding. As Senator Sennsenbrenner has pointed out, the published rules of the Comission's call for resignation in the case of such a conflict of interest.

I add my voice to those calling for, not only her resignation, but for her to be a witness before the Commission to explain why the regulations she promulgated went far beyond the legal requirements in force at the time, of seperating areas of involvement of the FBI and the CIA.

Anything less than Ms Gorelick's resignation will taint any findings that this already far too partisan endeavor may set forth. For the 9/11 Commission to be of service to the public, it must be above reproach - and the inclusion of an individual whose acts in government, however sincere at the time, resulted in one of the key impediments to intelligence gathering that might have prevented 9/11 is impermissable. The potential for conflict of interest is far, far to obvious, and, yes, even probable.

I call on you, collectively and individually, to act to resolve this violation of the public trust.

Sincerely:

Name, e-mail, and location.

Freepers - we need to stop this commission from becoming totally usless and totally without credibility. I have watched much of it - it has a chance to do some good, but not with a Comissioner such as Gorelick in place. This is the pot investigating the kettle. Uhh uhh. No way! Help clean up the 9/11 Commission

[spodefly]

This committee is just a bunch of career politicians and life-long bureaucrats pretending to be doing the work of the people ... part partisan witch hunt, part theater, designed to provide cover to the true nature of the failures before 9/11.

No credibility. No integrity.

[Barlowmaker]

If Jamie Gorelick were a Republican, you can be sure our colleagues in the Fourth Estate would be leading the chorus of complaint that the Commission's objectivity has been fatally compromised by a member who was also one of the key personalities behind the failed antiterror policy that the Commission has under scrutiny. Where's the outrage?

Outrage became highly selective when America's "Fourth Estate" became integral members of America's subversive "Fifth Column" on or around Richard Nixon's election in 1967.

[Brian Allen]

Gorelick's Wall
The Commissioner belongs in the witness chair.

Thursday, April 15, 2004 12:01 a.m. EDT

We predicted Democrats would use the 9/11 Commission for partisan purposes, and that much of the press would oblige. But color us astonished that barely anyone appreciates the significance of the bombshell Attorney General John Ashcroft dropped on the hearings Tuesday. If Jamie Gorelick were a Republican, you can be sure our colleagues in the Fourth Estate would be leading the chorus of complaint that the Commission's objectivity has been fatally compromised by a member who was also one of the key personalities behind the failed antiterror policy that the Commission has under scrutiny. Where's the outrage?

At issue is the pre-Patriot Act "wall" that prevented communication between intelligence agents and criminal investigators--a wall, Mr. Ashcroft said, that meant "the old national intelligence system in place on September 11 was destined to fail." The Attorney General explained:

"In the days before September 11, the wall specifically impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. After the FBI arrested Moussaoui, agents became suspicious of his interest in commercial aircraft and sought approval for a criminal warrant to search his computer. The warrant was rejected because FBI officials feared breaching the wall.

"When the CIA finally told the FBI that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were in the country in late August, agents in New York searched for the suspects. But because of the wall, FBI headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al Qaeda attack to join the hunt for the suspected terrorists.

"At that time, a frustrated FBI investigator wrote headquarters, quote, 'Whatever has happened to this--someday someone will die--and wall or not--the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.' "

What's more, Mr. Ashcroft noted, the wall did not mysteriously arise: "Someone built this wall." That someone was largely the Democrats, who enshrined Vietnam-era paranoia about alleged FBI domestic spying abuses by enacting the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Mr. Ashcroft pointed out that the wall was raised even higher in the mid-1990s, in the midst of what was then one of the most important antiterror investigations in American history--into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On Tuesday the Attorney General declassified and read from a March 4, 1995, memo in which Jamie Gorelick--then Deputy Attorney General and now 9/11 Commissioner--instructed then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and United States Attorney Mary Jo White that for the sake of "appearances" they would be required to adhere to an interpretation of the wall far stricter than the law required.



Ms. White was then the lead prosecutor in cases related to the Trade Center bombing. Ms. Gorelick explicitly references United States v. Yousef and United States v. Rahman--cases that might have greatly expanded our pre-9/11 understanding of al Qaeda had investigators been given a freer hand. The memo is a clear indication that there was pressure then for more intelligence sharing. Ms. Gorelick's response is an unequivocal "no":

"We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation" (emphases added).

In case anyone was in doubt, Janet Reno herself affirmed the policy several months later in a July 19, 1995, memo that we have unearthed. In it, the then-Attorney General instructs all U.S. Attorneys about avoiding "the appearance" of overlap between intelligence-related activities and law-enforcement operations.

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. Mr. Trie later told investigators that between 1994 and 1996 he raised some $1.2 million, much of it from foreign sources, whose identities were hidden by straw donors. Ms. Gorelick resigned as deputy attorney general in 1997 to become vice chairman of Fannie Mae.

From any reasonably objective point of view, the Gorelick memo has to count as by far the biggest news so far out of the 9/11 hearings. The Mary Jo White prosecutions and the 2001 Moussaoui arrest were among our best chances to uncover and unravel the al Qaeda network before it struck the homeland. But thanks in part to the Clinton Administration's concern with appearances and in part to its legacy, these investigations were hamstrung.

Ms. Gorelick--an aspirant to Attorney General under a President Kerry--now sits in judgment of the current Administration. This is what, if the principle has any meaning at all, people call a conflict of interest. Henry Kissinger was hounded off the Commission for far less. It's such a big conflict of interest that the White House could hardly be blamed if it decided to cease cooperation with the 9/11 Commission pending Ms. Gorelick's resignation and her testimony under oath as a witness into the mind of the Reno Justice Department. What exactly was the purpose of the wall?

[BfloGuy]

Thank God (and I'm not even a believer) for the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

I read Front Page Magazine, World Net Daily, NewsMax, and the Washington Times but they're all, unfortunately, preaching to the choir.

WSJ gets read and this is a good example of its bringing an issue, ignored in the mass media, to the entire country.

[backhoe]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1117579/posts
GORELICK GATE: Developing...
various FR links | 04-14-04 | The Heavy Equipment Guy

[The Raven]

At that time, a frustrated FBI investigator wrote headquarters, quote, 'Whatever has happened to this -- someday someone will die -- and wall or not -- the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.' "

Who would'a thunk that overreaching liberalism was behind this. I used to have the mindset that we got sucker-punched on 9/11. Until I read this editorial.

And the whole mechinism returns in January when the temporary Patriot Act expires.

[The Raven]

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.

ping

[Toespi]

Starting to look like we need a commission to investigate "the commission."

[Dante3]

Gorelick must be removed from the commission if it is to have even a little credibility.

As Dick Morris stated: Gorelick is the one person who is responsible for failure to prevent 9/11

Gorlick has a vested interest to put the blame on someone else since it is she who is the guilty party.

[Condor51]

Hey people, let's not forget all the pieces of this pie.

Yes 'Gore-Lick' (he-he) put up 'The Wall', BUT this non-sharing bidness all started with the Church Committee (Sen Frank Church D-Idaho) back in 1975 & 76 and implemented in a 1978 EO by... drum-roll ... Jimmah Carter! Then to add fuel to the fire we have the Torricelli Amendment which Prohibited By LAW, federal agents from using 'criminals' for informants/paid agents.

So it's not just 'Gore-Lick', it's the DEMOCRATS in general who've once again been proven as enemies of America. (but we already know that)

---

In other commission news, Commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste is looking into a 'report' that President Bush once drove down the same street as Lee Harvey Oswald and were both stopped at the same red light. It's reported that he thinks this is very damaging to the President in that it's feasible that at the time, he could have stopped the assassination of JFK - yet he did NOTHING!