Note: You see, it is a question of morals and obligations. Here
was Ms. Gorelick who wrote a secret memo when she was in a position of
power -- as Deputy Attorney General during the Clinton Administration.
That memo increased the difficulty of the sharing of information between the
CIA and the FBI. One could say that "HERE" was one person who may well
have personally, and deliberately, compromised the safety of the United
States, and made the entire 9/11 disaster possible! Is this, or not,
an issue of morals? Who is taking which side on this issue?
What obligation did Ms. Gorlick have to the security of our nation when
she deliberately "built the wall" that prevented sharing of intelligence
-- and built a wall beyond, even, what the law required then?
What obligation did Ms. Gorlick have to disqualify herself from sitting on
this 9/11 Commission?
What obligation does the Chairman of the Commission have to move Ms.
Gorlick OFF the Commission, for deception of her role in the 9/11
disaster?
What obligation does John Kerry have for disavowing Ms. Gorlick as his
prospective Attorney General?
And, finally, is Ms. Gorlick not one of the "enemies" the President has
sworn to protect us from? "Domestic and Foreign!"
And, finally, those "9/11 Families" that allowed themselves, and their
murdered relatives to be converted into a political campaign?
We
predicted1 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.
It was always a terrible idea for
the September 11 commission to drop its report in the middle of a
Presidential election campaign, and we are now seeing why. That body
is turning into a fiasco of partisanship and political score-settling.
To be precise, Democrats are using
the commission as a platform to assail the Bush Administration for
fumbling the war on terror, implicitly blaming it even for 9/11.
That's the clear message of the testimony to be offered this week to
the commission by former Clinton officials, who conveniently leaked
their opinions to the New York Times in advance. Conveniently, too,
former anti-terror aide Richard Clarke has chosen this week to begin
the media tour for his new book pushing the same anti-Bush theme. He's
also scheduled to meet the commission this week.
If you believe this is all a
coincidence, you probably also believe that a reflective, nonpartisan
look at the mindset that allowed 9/11 to happen is possible in today's
Washington. It would be nice if it were. Democracies are notoriously
bad at anticipating crises, and it would help future policy makers to
have a thoughtful look at how and why we missed the al Qaeda threat as
it was massing in the 1990s. In order to take such a detached view,
the Pearl Harbor inquiry waited until after World War II to publish
its findings.
* * *
The 9/11 Commission has instead
been driven from the start by meaner political calculations: To
appease the demands of those (few) victims' families looking for
someone to blame, and to provide a vehicle to embarrass the Bush
Administration. That's the real reason Henry Kissinger and George
Mitchell -- two men who have acted in the past as statesmen -- were
hounded out as the original commission leaders on trivial
conflict-of-interest grounds.
Their replacements are the junior
varsity and have been unable to lift the commission above narrow
partisan scheming. Republican chairman Tom Kean, a former governor
little schooled in defense and foreign affairs, is apparently
oblivious to the political hardball being played around him. Vice
Chairman Lee Hamilton, an ex-member of Congress well-versed in
national security, is a better choice.
But Mr. Hamilton has to contend
with his fellow Democrats, who include hyper-partisans Richard Ben-Veniste,
Jamie Gorelick and Tim Roemer. These three caucus weekly, reporting
back regularly to Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle for political
fine-tuning.
Ms. Gorelick has her own clear
conflict of interest: As Janet Reno's deputy attorney general, she had
a major law enforcement role in combatting the terror threat. Her
Administration's decision to handle the first World Trade Center
bombing in 1993 as a mere "law-enforcement" problem ought to be
central to the commission's probe. She and Mr. Ben-Veniste also
wouldn't mind being Attorney General in a Kerry Administration.
Inside the commission, these
Members have been pushing the argument that Clinton officials warned
the Bush Administration about al Qaeda, only to be ignored by men and
women who were too preoccupied with Iraq and missile defense to care.
So having failed to contain al Qaeda during its formative decade, and
having made almost no mention of this grave threat in the 2000
campaign, these officials now want us to believe that in their final
hours they urgently begged the Bushies to act with force and dispatch.
Sure.
As for Mr. Clarke, he is now
flacking his book by blaming the Bush Administration for failing to
capture Osama bin Laden while offering the novel sociological insight
(in last week's Time magazine) that "maybe we should be asking why the
terrorists hate us." We'd take Mr. Clarke's words more seriously if,
as America's lead anti-terror official from 1998 through Mr. Bush's
first two years, he had warned someone that al Qaeda might have a
strategy to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. He already
knew that an Egyptian had flown one plane into the drink and that al
Qaeda was interested in flight training. Why didn't Mr. Clarke connect
those dots?
The author is also highly critical
of both the Afghan and Iraq campaigns. But inside the Clinton and Bush
Administrations, his main pre-9/11 counsel was to energize the proxy
war in Afghanistan through the Northern Alliance to make life more
difficult for the Taliban. This certainly would have helped in the
mid-1990s when al Qaeda was massing in that country. But by 2001 it
would have done nothing to break up the al Qaeda cells that were
already operating in Florida and Germany and that carried out the 9/11
hijackings.
As for Iraq, he and other Bush
critics want to claim that the U.S. invasion has only created more
terrorists -- as if there weren't any before March 2003. And as if
those terrorists are only striking at Americans and our allies in
Iraq, not also at Turks, and Indonesians, French and Saudis.
Mr. Clarke lambastes the White
House for seeking links between Iraq and 9/11, even as he himself
asserts that he knew in the immediate aftermath that there were no
such links. How could he have known that? Mr. Clarke fails to mention
that Abdul Rahman Yasin, the one conspirator from the 1993 WTC bombing
still at large, had fled to Iraq and was harbored by Saddam Hussein
for years. In our view, a U.S. President who failed to ask questions
about Iraq and other state sponsors of terrorism in the wake of 9/11
would have been irresponsible.
* * *
There is a profound contradiction
at the heart of this 20-20 hindsight. On the one hand, the critics
want to blame the Bush Administration for failing to prevent 9/11, but
on the other they assail it for acting "pre-emptively" on a needless
war in Iraq. Well, which do they really believe?
We'd guess it is the latter because
when these same critics held the reins of government they failed to do
much against al Qaeda beyond fire cruise missiles from hundreds of
miles away. Their boast that after 9/11 they would have toppled the
Taliban, as well as increased pressure on Saddam Hussein, is
impossible to credit. Their criticism now, in books and especially
through the 9/11 Commission, is a case of blaming the Bush
Administration in order to absolve themselves of any and all
responsibility.
If the 9/11 Commission members
really wanted to make a public contribution, they would shut down and
resume their probe after the elections. Their final report is now due
on July 26, two months after its original deadline and the same day
that the Democratic Party convention begins in Boston. We doubt that's
a coincidence either.
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![[Jamie Gorelick]](images/Gorelick_Jamie-CU15904142004210409.gif)
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.
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.
