[TonyInOhio]

The best summary I've read yet about this massive coverup. Anyone doubt what Sandy berger was trying to shove down his pants now?

[Just mythoughts]

WHY???? What was in it for liberals to protect Saddam???
Had they secretly promised Europe they would not interrupt the UN Oil for rotten Food program. What role was Russia playing?

Those Euros were hoping to become somebody during Clintons reign.

[Paladin2]

Don't forget that Richard Clarke should have known ALL about this at the time it happened (1999-2000). Why was this not in his book?

[eyespysomething]

ping

[OESY]

Podhoretz raises significant questions that require answers. If the 9/11 Commission's findings were as important as touted by its members, then it is absolutely essential we get the facts right. Major changes to restructure the U.S. intelligence effort have been made based on the Commission's conclusions, which appear in retrospect to be deeply flawed.

[JediForce]

President Bush must jump out in front of this...and soon. His administration, leaders of the GOP as well as Demonrat leaders have all been saying for years now...that the 9/11 attacks could not have been prevented. We see now that Able Dangers' information could have stopped the attacks if acted on. Deportation, brought in for questioning, or surveillance of Atta may have disrupted their plans to the point of stopping the attacks.

W needs to demand full investigations at all levels of government immediately. Or the chants of Bush lied will just grow louder from the left and their allies in the MSM.

Bush needs to get out front...AND NOW !

JMHO

JEDI

[Republican Wildcat]

The Gorelick article index

[bray]

The clinton-gorelicker cover-up continues!! What did Berger steal from the archives?? What did they know and when did they know it??

Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters

[atomicpossum]

These are just the first cracks. There's a lot more awaiting revelation under the surface...

[Smarti Pants]

I want to see Jamie Gorelick, the Clintons, Sandy Berger and all of the other Some Beaches be literally tried for TREASON and physically hung in the public square.

How do they DARE point fingers at Pres. Bush when they themselves are so guilty they should die, have their names written in the history books as TRAITORS and their children be shamed into silent obscurity forever.

[NormalGuy]

Illinois is embarrassed to report that its role was to have bi-partisan-combine-chief Big Jim Thompson on the commission. Thompson is skilled at leveraging these types of commissions for his personal resume and for pinstripe welfare opportunities.

For those of you not familiar with pinstrip welfare in Illinois it works like this. Thompson comes accross some information that he can hold over some other powerful person's head. But Thompson does not make the information public. He exchanges withholding the information in exchange for a consulting fee or legal fee for doing nothing.

[TomGuy]

I'm betting that not much will come of this.

Nothing has from any of the previous -gate scandals in the last 5 years. Both Dems and Pubs will have a few hearings and make it look like they are serious, and then release another case-closed whitewash document.

Unless more politicians like Weldon pitbull this issue -- bite hold of it and not let go, it will sink into the annals of historical obscurity---for the sake of National Security, of course.

[prairiebreeze]

Because I don't think it can be stressed enough, WHY Gorelick went to such pains to construct the walls, (from 2004):

How Chinagate Led to 9/11
By Jean Pearce
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 25, 2004

As the 9/11 Commission tries to uncover what kept intelligence agencies from preventing September 11, it has overlooked two vital factors: Jamie Gorelick and Bill Clinton. Gorelick, who has browbeaten the current administration, helped erect the walls between the FBI, CIA and local investigators that made 9/11 inevitable. However, she was merely expanding the policy Bill Clinton established with Presidential Decision Directive 24. What has been underreported is why the policy came about: to thwart investigations into the Chinese funding of Clinton’s re-election campaign, and the favors he bestowed on them in return.

In April, 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, who served as the Clinton Justice Department’s deputy attorney general from 1994 to 1997, 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.

It’s a story the 9/11 Commission may not want to hear, and one that Gorelick – now incredibly a member of that commission – has so far refused to tell. But it is perhaps the most crucial one to understanding the intentional breakdown of intelligence that led to the September 11 disaster.

Nearly from the moment Gorelick took office in the Clinton Justice Department, she began acting as the point woman for a large-scale bureaucratic reorganization of intelligence agencies that ultimately placed the gathering of intelligence, and decisions about what – if anything – would be done with it under near-direct control of the White House. In the process, more than a dozen CIA and FBI investigations underway at the time got caught beneath the heel of the presidential boot, investigations that would ultimately reveal massive Chinese espionage as millions in illegal Chinese donations filled Democratic Party campaign coffers.

When Gorelick took office in 1994, the CIA was reeling from the news that a Russian spy had been found in CIA ranks, and Congress was hungry for a quick fix. A month after Gorelick was sworn in, Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 24. PDD 24 put intelligence gathering under the direct control of the president’s National Security Council, and ultimately the White House, through a four-level, top-down chain of command set up to govern (that is, stifle) intelligence sharing and cooperation between intelligence agencies. From the moment the directive was implemented, intelligence sharing became a bureaucratic nightmare that required negotiating a befuddling bureaucracy that stopped directly at the President’s office.

First, the directive effectively neutered the CIA by creating a National Counterintelligence Center (NCI) to oversee the Agency. NCI was staffed by an FBI agent appointed by the Clinton administration. It also brought multiple international investigations underway at the time under direct administrative control. The job of the NCI was to “implement counterintelligence activities,” which meant that virtually everything the CIA did, from a foreign intelligence agent’s report to polygraph test results, now passed through the intelligence center that PDD 24 created.

NCI reported to an administration-appointed National Counterintelligence Operations Board (NCOB) charged with “discussing counterintelligence matters.” The NCOB in turn reported to a National Intelligence Policy Board, which coordinated activities between intelligence agencies attempting to work together. The policy board reported “directly” to the president through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

The result was a massive bureaucratic roadblock for the CIA – which at the time had a vast lead on the FBI in foreign intelligence – and for the FBI itself, which was also forced to report to the NCOB. This hampered cooperation between the two entities. All this occurred at a time when both agencies were working separate ends of investigations that would eventually implicate China in technology transfers and the Democratic Party in a Chinese campaign cash grab.

And the woman charged with selling this plan to Congress, convincing the media and ultimately implementing much of it? Jamie Gorelick.

Many in Congress, including some Democrats, found the changes PDD 24 put in place baffling: they seemed to do nothing to insulate the CIA from infiltration while devastating the agency’s ability to collect information. At the time, Democrat House Intelligence Chairman Dan Glickman referred to the plan as “regulatory gobbledygook." Others questioned how FBI control of CIA intelligence would foster greater communication between the lower levels of the CIA and FBI, now that all information would have to be run through a multi-tier bureaucratic maze that only went upward.

Despite their doubts, Gorelick helped the administration sell the plan on Capitol Hill. The Directive stood.

But that wasn’t good enough for the Clinton administration, which wanted control over every criminal and intelligence investigation, domestic and foreign, for reasons that would become apparent in a few years. For the first time in Justice Department history, a political appointee, Richard Scruggs – an old crony or Attorney General Janet Reno’s from Florida – 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. The court’s activities are kept secret from the public.

A year after PDD 24, with the new bureaucratic structure loaded with administration appointees, Gorelick drafted the 1995 memo Attorney General John Ashcroft mentioned while testifying before the 9/11 Commission. The Gorelick memo, and other supporting memos released in recent weeks, not only created walls within the intelligence agencies that prevented information sharing among their own agents, but effectively walled these agencies off from each other and from outside contact with the U.S. prosecutors instrumental in helping them gather the evidence needed to make the case for criminal charges.

The only place left to go with intelligence information – particularly for efforts to share intelligence information or obtain search warrants – was straight up Clinton and Gorelick’s multi-tiered chain of command. Instead, information lethal to the Democratic Party languished inside the Justice Department, trapped behind Gorelick’s walls.

The implications were enormous. In her letter of protest to Attorney General Reno over Gorelick’s memo, United States Attorney Mary Jo White spelled them out: “These instructions leave entirely to OIPR and the (Justice Department) Criminal Division when, if ever, to contact affected U.S. attorneys on investigations including terrorism and espionage,” White wrote. (Like OIPR, the Criminal Division is also part of the Justice Department.)

Without an enforcer, the walls Gorelick’s memo put in place might not have held. But Scruggs acted as that enforcer, and he excelled at it. Scruggs maintained Gorelick’s walls between the FBI and Justice's Criminal Division by threatening to automatically reject any FBI request for a wiretap or search warrant if the Bureau contacted the Justice Department's Criminal Division without permission. This deprived the FBI, and ultimately the CIA, of gathering advice and assistance from the Criminal Division that was critical in espionage and terrorist cases.

It is no coincidence that this occurred at the same time both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese and ultimately the Clinton administration itself. Between 1994 and the 1996 election, as Chinese dollars poured into Democratic coffers, Clinton struggled to reopen high-tech trade to China. Had agents confirmed Chinese theft of weapons technology or its transfer of weapons technology to nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria, Clinton would have been forced by law and international treaty to react.

Gorelick’s appointment to the job at Justice in 1994 occurred during a period in which the FBI had begun to systematically investigate technology theft by foreign powers. For the first time, these investigations singled out the U.S. chemical, telecommunications, aircraft and aerospace industries for intelligence collection.

By the time Gorelick wrote the March 1995 memo that sealed off American intelligence agencies from each other and the outside world, all of the most critical Chinagate investigations by American intelligence agencies were already underway. Some of their findings were damning:

In an investigation originally instigated by the CIA, the FBI was beginning its search for the source of the leak of W-88 nuclear warhead technology to China among the more than 1,000 people who had access to the secrets. Despite Justice Department stonewalling and the Department’s refusal to seek wiretap authority in 1997, the investigation eventually led to Wen Ho Lee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The FBI first collected extensive evidence in 1995 linking illegal Democratic Party donations to China, according to the Congressional Record. But Congress and the Director of the CIA didn’t find out about the Justice Department’s failure to act upon that evidence until 1997, safely after the 1996 election.

According to classified CIA documents leaked to the Washington Times, between 1994 and 1997, the CIA learned that China sold Iran missile technology, a nuclear fission reactor, advanced air-defense radar and chemical agents. The Chinese also provided 5,000 ring magnets to Pakistan, used in producing weapons-grade uranium. The Chinese also provided uranium fuel for India's reactors.

In many cases the CIA resorted to leaking classified information to the media, in an effort to bypass the administration’s blackout.

Gorelick knew these facts well. While Clinton may have refused to meet with top CIA officials, Gorelick didn’t. According to a 1996 report by the legal news service American Lawyer Media, Gorelick and then-Deputy Director of the CIA George Tenet met every other week to discuss intelligence and intelligence sharing.

But those in the Clinton administration weren’t the only ones to gain from the secrecy. In 1994, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation transferred military-use machine tools to the China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation that ended up in the hands of the Chinese army. The sale occurred despite Defense Department objections. McDonnell Douglas was a client of the Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, L.L.P. (now called Baker Botts), the Washington, D.C., law firm where Gorelick worked for 17 years and was a partner. Ray Larroca, another partner in the firm, represented McDonnell in the Justice Department’s investigation of the technology transfer.

In 1995, General Electric, a former client of Gorelick’s, also had much to lose if the damaging information the CIA and the FBI had reached Congress. At the time, GE was publicly lobbying for a lucrative permit to assist the Chinese in replacing coal-fired power stations with nuclear plants. A 1990 law required that the president certify to Congress that China was not aiding in nuclear proliferation before U.S. companies could execute the business agreement.

Moreover, in 1995, Michael Armstrong, then the CEO of Hughes Electronics – a division of General Electric and another client of Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin – was publicly lobbying Clinton to switch satellite export controls from the State Department to the Commerce Department. After the controls were lifted, Hughes and another company gave sensitive data to the Chinese, equipment a Pentagon study later concluded would allow China to develop intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles aimed at American targets. Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin partner Randall Turk represented Hughes in the Congressional, State Department, and Justice Department investigations that resulted.

The Cox Report, which detailed Chinese espionage for Congress during the period, revealed that FBI surveillance caught Chinese officials frantically trying to keep Democratic donor Johnny Chung from divulging any information that would be damaging to Hughes Electronics. Chung funneled $300,000 in illegal contributions from the Chinese military to the DNC between 1994 and 1996.

It was this web of investigations that led Gorelick and Bill Clinton to erect the wall between intelligence agencies that resulted in the toppling of the Twin Towers. The connections go on and on, but they all lead back to Gorelick, the one person who could best explain how the Clinton administration neutered the American intelligence agencies that could have stopped the September 11 plot. Yet another high crime will have been committed if the September 11 Commission doesn’t demand testimony from her.

[JDoutrider]

"Anyone doubt what Sandy berger was trying to shove down his pants now?

Doubt?

There never was any doubt at this end. Maybe after twelve years of trying to pin the tail on that ass, er, donkey Klinton, we may finally expose that traitorous SOB's true legacy!

Treason is much more than just a word...

Klinton(s), Berger, Gorelick, and that whole crowd should all be sharing a room in Leavenworth...

[hole_n_one]

From yesterday's Hardball on MSNBC.......

And tomorrow on HARDBALL, reports that military intelligence identified Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers as al Qaeda members before 9/11.  We will get reaction from two 9/11 commissioners, plus Kristen Breitweiser, who lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks. 

Of the 3 who were scheduled to provide their "reaction", only 1 showed up on today's Yackball.

It should be too hard to figure the rest out.

[citizencon]

This is the most serious tampering of intelligence and evidence in US history! Watergate pales in comparison and significance. And in that scandal, NO ONE was killed!
Life imprisonment for the main characters: Clinton, Gorelick, Burger, Clark- the "terrorism expert" and Pentagon officials in the Clinton administration.

[Wolfstar]

This is clearly becoming the biggest story of the summer...

I thought the biggest story of the summer was that Leftist witch sitting by the roadside in Crawford, TX.

Or maybe I'm wrong about that, and the biggest story of the summer is Karl Rove?

Or maybe it's John Roberts?

Natalee Holloway?

Maybe when the media gets its collective head out of its collective butt, it might decide to take the national security failures of the Clinton administration seriously.

[Enchante]

Atta's cell was known in 2000 but due to various screw-ups and communication failures the Clinton administration did nothing. The cover-up is unravelling and a series of scandals will be exposed, but the MSM will try hard to ignore, downplay, and/or 'firewall' this off as a secondary story.

Another thread has been discussing the scandal that a key staffer for the 9/11 Commission is Dietrich Snell:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1461535/posts

Snell, like Commssion member Gorelick, has a massive conflict of interest since he played a key role in ignoring and suppressing various info arising from terror prosecutions in NYC; he knew plenty of relevant info for counter-terror investigations but due to "the wall" the dots never got connected -- think he was ready to "blow the whistle" on his own career as well as Gorelick's, etc.?.

Gorelick, Ben Veniste, and Snell all played their annointed roles in controlling the path of the 9/11 Commission. Now what about Christopher Kojm and Daniel Marcus, two KEY senior staff members for the 9/11 Commission who enjoyed HIGH OFFICE in the Clinton administration??? Think they might have a bit of a conflict-of-interest helping them to suppress info embarrassing to the Clintonlites?

I am looking into the backgrounds of other people associated with the commission. Here's one that's not as well known, but this guy may still have a pretty drastic conflict-of-interest, since he was part of the intelligence apparatus of the Clinton administration, yet as Deputy Executive Director for the 9/11 Commission this Christopher Kojm was certainly in a position to control research and assessments of his own department:

http://www.9-11commission.gov/about/bio_kojm.htm

How about Daniel Marcus, General Counsel for the Commission, who was a leading Clintonlite???

http://www.9-11commission.gov/about/bio_marcus.htm

NOW GET THIS: this very same Daniel Marcus, Bill Clinton's very own "Senior Counsel" to the WH Counsel's Office and then Associate Attorney General, is the man signing off on whether Sandy Burglar withheld any documents from the 9/11 Commission!!!!!!!!! (see below) Can you say "THE FIX IS IN??"

-------------------------------------------------

Sandy Berger Cleared of Withholding Documents from Commission

http://www.acslaw.org/bulletins/08-05-04.htm

The investigation into Sandy Berger's handling of classified materials, while preparing for his testimony before the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States concluded that no original materials were missing and no documents reviewed by Berger, President Clinton's White House national security advisor, were withheld from the commission. "We are told that the Justice Department is satisfied that we've seen everything that the archives saw . . . nothing was missing," said commission general counsel Daniel Marcus.

[Diana in Wisconsin]

Bump for morning coffee read. Can't wait! :)

[centurion316]

Something interesting that you won't read in the NY Times

[OESY]

What did these bozos think they were doing? They dropped the ball 'big time.'

Kean and Hamilton can't blame staffers because they set the managerial tone,
have overall responsibility and should be held accountable for dereliction of duty.

Instead of taking time to fully examine all issues, even those deemed "controversial"
by Democrats, the commission rushed out its report in time for the 2004 election
in a vain attempt to do maximum damage to the Bush administration.

Their mistakes may yet prove costly, hopefully only in dollars and not lives.

Next time, we should get a commission that takes their job more seriously--
one that they won't shy from investigating the Jamie Gorelick Wall, the Sandy
Berger deceptions and police surveillance issues related to the Patriot Act.