9/11 commission: Why does Gorelick get a free pass?

[jimnyc]

Bush must testify, as do Clinton, Gore, Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Freeh... Why does Gorelick get a free pass? I thought they claimed from the beginning that they wanted ALL the truth?

Panel refuses to call Gorelick to testify publicly

The September 11 commission rebuffed a request from Republican senators that panelist Jamie S. Gorelick testify publicly about her handling of U.S. counterterrorism efforts as President Clinton's deputy attorney general.

She will not testify because she was not on the original witness list drawn up by the commission and because no other deputy-level officials have been asked to testify, a commission spokesman said.

"We wanted to treat everybody fairly," spokesman Al Felzenberg said late Friday. "She's not going to be singled out."

Commissioners replied in a letter Friday evening to Sen. Christopher S. Bond, Missouri Republican, and the 10 others who had requested that Ms. Gorelick testify in public.

"We welcome their help," said Mr. Felzenberg, who declined to give any details of the commission's letter other than to say Ms. Gorelick won't testify. "We welcome their suggestions."

The decision rankled Republicans who say Ms. Gorelick should testify because she played such an integral role in setting U.S. counterterrorism policy during the Clinton years, especially regarding the "wall" that kept intelligence and law-enforcement agencies from openly working together to thwart terrorism.

"The commission is either interested in the whole truth or it is not," said Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican who signed Thursday's letter to the commission asking that Ms. Gorelick testify in public.

"By refusing to require this key testimony, the commission administers a self-inflicted wound, which further puts its judgment and impartiality in doubt," he said.

Read the rest here:
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040426-120617-3706r.htm

 

[jimnyc]

And here is why she should be testifying:

Gorelick Memo Allegedly Impeded Probe of Clinton Fundraising Scandal

(CNSNews.com) - A senior U.S. government official has told CNSNews.com that the 1995 memo written by former Assistant Attorney General Jamie Gorelick and currently at issue in the 9/11 Commission's investigation of U.S. intelligence failures, also created "a roadblock" to the probe of the 1996 Clinton re-election campaign fundraising scandal.

The memo's relevance in the investigation of the fundraising scandal has received scant attention in the media, but four different sources, including the government official, have explained and corroborated details of the connection for CNSNews.com.

The CNSNews.com sources question whether the guidelines purportedly put in place by Gorelick in 1995 for Justice Department investigations were actually intended to shield President Bill Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and top Democratic campaign fundraisers from the subsequent congressional investigations of the illegal fundraising activities.

However, there appears to be no evidence at this point that the Gorelick memo was written for that express purpose.

Because the memo created a barrier for U.S. intelligence agencies to share information with the FBI, one of its unintended consequences may have been to prevent the FBI from receiving the necessary intelligence to stop the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the worst in American history.

Read the rest here:
http://www.cnsnews.com//ViewSpecialReports.asp?Page=\SpecialReports\archive\200404\SPE20040426a.html

 

[Annie]

Bump Jim's post, most on target for mine. Lots of links:

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/005194.php

August 12, 2005
The Wall, The White Memo, And The DoD

With the 9/11 Commission reeling from the revelation that it deliberately ignored the information regarding the Army's secret Able Danger program and its identification of Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as an al-Qaeda cell, the speculation on their motive for omitting that vital data while blaming the intelligence communities for failing to stop 9/11 has centered on Commissioner Jamie S. Gorelick and her role in building and overstating "the wall", the policy that forbade any hint of cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence operations far beyond the requirements of the FISA statute.

The conflict of interest surrounding Gorelick's appointment as Commissioner rather than witness or target in the 9/11 investigation came up during the public hearings in 2004. Senators Jon Cornyn and Kit Bond openly called for her testimony at the time, as did CQ and a number of other bloggers and pundits who also demanded her resignation. Deborah Orin reminds us of the problem in today's New York Post in her analysis of the deliberate omission of Able Danger:

IT'S starting to look as if the 9/11 Commission turned a blind eye to key questions that could embarrass one of its own members — Clinton-era Justice Department honcho Jamie Gorelick. ...

Gorelick's defenders might argue that hindsight is 20-20. But that excuse doesn't work in this case, because she was warned way back then — when the see-no-evil wall was created.

That warning came right from the front line in the War on Terror — from Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who headed up key terror probes like the prosecutions for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

White — herself a Clinton appointee — wrote directly to Reno that the wall was a big mistake.

White had firsthand knowledge about the critical value of open sharing between law enforcement and intelligence. After all, she provided the first American counterattack against al-Qaeda -- in the law-enforcement model espoused by Democrats to this day. She successfully prosecuted Ramzi Yousef and several others involved in the first WTC bombing in 1993, a prosecution available only through the bumbling of the AQ cell survivors who stupidly tried to recover their security deposit on the rental truck used as the car bomb.

White knew that prevention should take place over prosecution if the US intended on keeping its citizens safe. She wrote her first memo objecting to the political decision to create an almost-insurmountable barrier that far exceeded the requirements of FISA as interpreted by earlier administrations. When that got her nowhere, she wrote a second memo, giving specific and prescient warnings about what would happen as a result:

That memo surfaced during the 9/11 hearings. But The Post has learned that White was so upset that she bitterly protested with another memo — a scathing one — after Reno and Gorelick refused to tear down the wall.

With eerie foresight, White warned that the Reno-Gorelick wall hindered law enforcement and could cost lives, according to sources familiar with the memo — which is still secret.

The 9/11 Commission got that White memo, The Post was told — but omitted any mention of it from its much-publicized report. Nor does the report include the transcript of its staff interview with White.

And here the Commission engages in its second covert act of omission in order to protect those who made it impossible for the intelligence community to act on its findings. What happened to the second White memo? Mary Jo White gets three mentions in their final report, all of them in the footnotes, and none of them refers to her warnings to Gorelick or Janet Reno. Nowhere does the Commission reveal her objections to the wall or her efforts to reverse the Gorelick decision.

The DoJ decision undoubtedly influenced the political appointees serving as the Pentagon's legal counsel. When the Able Danger team asked for permission to approach the FBI with this information, the Defense attorneys reviewed the material and refused them permission -- three times, as the New York Times first reported. Their concern reflected military restrictions known as "intelligence oversight", as CQ reader Debbie K. pointed out in an e-mail. Intelligence Oversight is the military counterpart to FISA that keeps the military from engaging in domestic spying except in specific circumstances. However, in this case the activity had already been performed and a danger appeared to have been identified -- and the political and legal appointees at the DoD refused to pass it along.

Without a doubt, the policy instituted by the holier-than-thou attitude of the Clinton administration contributed mightily to the inability of the security services to protect the US from the 9/11 attack. The developments now before us showing that the Commission deliberately omitted evidence of this from their report strongly suggests that one or more of its members (and their staff) had a vested interest in keeping that as quiet as possible.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty at TKS has a good analysis of the knowns and the known unknowns, as Donald Rumsfeld undoubtedly would say. He also links to some good work going on in the blogosphere analyzing the knowns and known unknowns. Check them all out.

UPDATE II: Captain V has more background on Intelligence Oversight, in a way. (via Tom Maguire)

 

[Annie]

http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_08_14_corner-archive.asp#072959

Links at page

WE MAY OWE THEM A BIG APOLOGY [John Podhoretz]
A day or two ago, I posted a note of caution about the Able Danger scandal, and that note of caution has now turned into a full-fledged symphony -- and some of us on the Right who have been making a big stink about this may have been had.

The 9/11 Commission has put out a very detailed memo defending itself that basically says Rep. Curt Weldon and the unnamed Navy officers who have made a big stink about Able Danger are stretching it bigtime. The basis of their charge is two-fold:

First, that 9/11 staffers met with folks in Afghanistan in 2003 who told them about Able Danger and that Mohammed Atta had been identified by that military-intelligence operation. Here's what the commission says: "As with their other meetings, Commission staff promptly prepared a memorandum for the record. That memorandum, prepared at the time, does not record any mention of Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers, or any suggestion that their identities were known to anyone at DOD before 9/11. Nor do any of the three Commission staffers who participated in the interview, or the executive branch lawyer, recall hearing any such allegation."

What's more, in February 2004, commission staff members read Able Danger documents at the Pentagon: "None of the documents turned over to the Commission mention Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers. Nor do any of the staff notes on documents reviewed in the DOD reading room indicate that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers were mentioned in any of those documents."

That's about as strong a denial as there can be, and it sounds credible to me.

The second part of the charge is that in July 2004, the Commission met with the unnamed Naval officer. Here's its description of what happened: " In early July 2004...the prospective witness was claiming that the project had linked Atta to an al Qaeda cell located in New York in the 1999-2000 time frame. Shortly after receiving this information, the Commission staff’s front office assigned two staff members with knowledge of the 9/11 plot and the ABLE DANGER operation to interview the witness at one of the Commission’s Washington, D.C. offices....

"According to the memorandum for the record on this meeting, prepared the next day..., the officer said that ABLE DANGER included work on 'link analysis,' mapping links among various people involved in terrorist networks. According to this record, the officer recalled seeing the name and photo of Mohamed Atta on an 'analyst notebook chart'....The officer being interviewed said he saw this material only briefly, that the relevant material dated from February through April 2000, and that it showed Mohamed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn."

We now know that there were 60-odd names on that chart. Is it really plausible that this Navy officer specifically recalled the name "Mohammed Atta" and the image of his face? Especially since there is no documentary record to support his charge in Defense Department files, at least not in the files shown to the 9/11 Commission?

I submit there is good reason to believe the Navy officer may have been extrapolating because he was so upset to discover that the "data mining" operation he found out about wasn't being properly shared with domestic law-enforcement agencies. And without more proof than a four-year-old memory that may have been faulty, the Commission was right to be skeptical about the value of this testimony.

As for Curt Weldon, remember that he's trying to sell a book. It's now up to him to put up or shut up. Can he or anyone else supply evidence stronger than the evidence presented to date about this that the Pentagon was in possession of Mohammed Atta's name a year before the attacks? I doubt he can or he would have already.

UPDATE: Over at TKS, filed at almost exactly the same time as my report, the estimable Jim Geraghty comes to almost exactly the same conclusion I have.
Posted at 10:46 AM

 

[Adam's Apple]

Here's another interesting article about Able Danger which gives more information about Atta and his Iraq connection. I'm going to be very disappointed in the Bush Administration if they let this national scandal fall through the cracks.

Able Danger — Now They Tell Us
By Jack Kelly for Jewish World Review
August 15, 2005

The report of the 9/11 Commission, once a best seller and hailed by the news media as the definitive word on the subject, must now be moved to the fiction shelves.

The Commission concluded, you'll recall, that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon couldn't have been prevented, and that if there was negligence, it was as much the fault of the Bush administration (for moving slowly on the recommendations of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke) than of the Clinton administration. Able Danger has changed all of that.

Able Danger was a military intelligence unit set up by Special Operations Command in 1999. A year before the 9/11 attacks, Able Danger identified hijack leader Mohammed Atta and the other members of his cell. But Clinton administration officials stopped them — three times — from sharing this information with the FBI.

for full article:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0805/jkelly.php3

 

[Annie]

Hope this helps, there's numerous links-be sure to note the highlighted!:

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/005232.php

August 16, 2005
The Able Danger Fox Trot

A lot of fancy stepping has occurred in the week since the first revelations of the Able Danger data-mining program at the Pentagon. After Douglas Jehl first broke the story in the mainstream media, the Commission first denied ever hearing about anything that identified Atta as an al-Qaeda operative and the existence of Able Danger. They then acknoweledged hearing about Able Danger but nothing about any identification of Atta, with specific denials coming from co-chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean. Within hours, that changed to recognition of the Atta identification coming up in a July 2004 briefing that occurred as the report was being finalized, giving them little opportunity to check out the data. Finally, the Commission generated a breathtakingly detailed rebuttal for a subject on which they had attempted to deny any foreknowledge only days earlier.

The 9/11 Commission didn't come alone to the dance, either. Curt Weldon, whose speech kicked off this headspinning story, backtracked himself on some key details. That led pundits like John Podhoretz and Jim Geraghty to engage in some highly-understandable walkback, reverse walkback, and re-walkback as the media played ping-pong on which sources suffered the most damage to credibility.

Today the Washington Times adds itself to the dance card, finding another Pentagon source for Able Danger which corroborates Jehl and Weldon on their initial story (via Andy McCarthy at The Corner):

Pentagon lawyers, fearing a public-relations "blow back," blocked a military intelligence unit from sharing information with the FBI that four suspected al Qaeda terrorists were in the country prior to the September 11 attacks, after determining they were here legally, a former Defense Department intelligence official says.

Members of an intelligence unit known as Able Danger were shut out of the September 11 commission investigation and final report, the official said, despite briefing commission staff members on two occasions about the Mohamed Atta-led terrorist cell and telling them of a lockdown of information between the Defense Department and the FBI.

The intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Pentagon lawyers "were afraid of a blow back" -- similar to the public's response to the FBI-led assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which left more than 70 people dead -- and decided to withhold the information from the FBI.

This source also took part in the October 2003 briefing but not the July 2004 attempt by another naval officer attached to the DoD at the time. The source who spoke to Audrey Hudson for this article also attempted to rebrief the Commission in January 2004, according to Hudson, but they refused to meet with him. Staff members told the intelligence agent, "We don't need to meet with you."

McCarthy notes something else interesting about the Times article. Hudson reports that the Pentagon's official response to Able Danger says that they can find no reference in their files to an Atta-led terrorist cell in the US before 9/11 -- other than a few intelligence analyses that mention his name. Really? Which intelligence analyses would those be, and where did they originate and when? Most of all, why aren't they part of the final report from the 9/11 Commission?

This story has not yet run its course, not by a long shot. Something strange has been going on with Able Danger. Either it did a much better job identifying terrorists than anyone wants to acknoweledge, or it uncovered something else that no one wants to release. Either way, Congress needs to start hauling people into the open and start asking for sworn testimony on this program and exactly how much the Commission knew about it.

UPDATE: CQ reader Lauri S. tells me that the Fox Report will feature an interview with an Able Danger officer tonight at 6 pm CT. Catherine Herridge will speak with a Lt. Col. named "Tony", a 22-year veteran. If I get more on this, I'll post it here.

UPDATE II: Laura Rozen reveals that "Tony" is Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer:

He served in a liaison capacity between Able Danger and the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, Florida, and he flew into Afghanistan with special ops in a boots on the ground capacity. ... It's still a bit vague as to what exactly on Atta and the "Brooklyn cell" the Able Danger team came up with, but Shaffer did tell Spencer that the Able Danger team briefed then Special Ops commander, now Army Chief of Staff Pete Schoomaker on their findings. Shaffer also told Spencer that he had met with Pentagon intel czar Stephen Cambone in the E-ring today about the Able Danger issue, so clearly the Pentagon is paying attention.

Weldon's sources are moving into the open on their own. That sounds like a positive development, but we'll know more about it after the interview tonight. (via John Podhoretz, who is no wimp, folks -- just a guy who feels justifiably irritated when sources start waffling.)

 

[Adam's Apple]

Thanks. If it weren't for the digging being done by Fox and the bloggers, we'd have no information on this story at all. I suspect Clinton and Sandy Berger knew one hell of a lot about Able Danger which was why Berger made a trip to the National Archives and "absent mindedly" removed the tell-tell materials.

 

[Annie]

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/51981.htm

August 17, 2005 -- PRESIDENT Bill Clinton's team ignored dire warnings that its approach to terrorism was "very dangerous" and could have "deadly results," according to a blistering memo just obtained by The Post.

Then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wrote the memo as she pleaded in vain with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to tear down the wall between intelligence and prosecutors, a wall that went beyond legal requirements.

Looking back after 9/11, the memo makes for eerie reading — because White's team foresaw, years in advance, that the Clinton-era wall would make it tougher to stop mass murder.

"This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities," wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.

"The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary. Excessive conservatism . . . can have deadly results."

She added: "We must face the reality that the way we are proceeding now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous."

White must have felt like Cassandra, foreseeing dangers that proved all too real while no one at Clinton's Justice Department would listen. Team Clinton put up the "wall" in 1995 and it stayed up until after the 9/11 attacks.

Questions about the "wall" recently arose in regard to possible warnings from Able Danger, a pre-9/11 military-intelligence program, but the White memo makes clear that the issue was far, far broader.

In theory, the "wall" was supposed to avoid legal challenges to terror prosecutions. The problem was, as White and her team noted, only prosecutors familiar with a case or a cast of terror players might see the connections that could led to nabbing a suspect or foiling a plot.

Justice honchos overruled White's plea — even though her team knew better than anyone else in law enforcement what the real risks were. White's team won a host of convictions — including Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who plotted to bomb landmarks like the Statue of Liberty.

Equally troubling is that the 9/11 Commission, charged with tracing the failure to stop 9/11, got White's stunning memo and several related documents — and deep-sixed all of them.

The commission's report skips lightly over the wall in three brief pages (out of 567). It makes no mention at all of White's passionate and prescient warnings. Yet warnings that went ignored are just what the commission was supposed to examine.

So it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the commission ignored White's memo because it was a potential embarrassment to the woman to whom it was addressed: commission member Jamie Gorelick. (White has declined to discuss the matter, and Gorelick didn't immediately respond to requests for comment yesterday.)

White wrote the memo after her earlier pleas against the "wall" were rejected. She enlisted the help of her "Bomb II Team" — prosecutors working on terror bombings like the 1993 Twin Towers attack.

They gave six pages of detailed reasons why it was a mistake to create too much of a wall between intelligence and prosecutions. White forwarded that analysis to Gorelick and added her own notes on the Clinton-era decision "to keep prosecutors in the dark about intelligence investigations."

"What troubles me even more than the known problems we have encountered are the undoubtedly countless instances of unshared and unacted-upon information that reside in some file or other or in some head or other or in some unreviewed or not fully understood tape or other," White wrote. "These can be disasters waiting to happen."

For instance, in August 2001 — a month before the attacks — the FBI learned that two dangerous characters, future hijackers, might have arrived in the United States but didn't connet the dots to see that as a priority.

Also in August 2001, FBI headquarters failed to see the significance of the fact that arrested "20th hijacker" Zaccarias Moussaoui had taken flight lessons — despite desperate bids by field agents to sound the alarm.

Could some of those dots have been connected, absent the wall? There's no way to know — but surely the 9/11 Commission should have examined the issue.

Deborah Orin is The Post's Washington Bureau chief.

 

[Adam's Apple]

There needs to be some thorough investigating into this. Do you remember when Clinton would get on TV following each terrorist attack against American property or Americans during his terms as president and say that the perpetrators would be hunted down and brought to justice and NOTHING ever came of it? Well, now we're beginning to learn why. He built up walls so that nothing could be done, and he wouldn't have to deal with it. How Mary Jo White and her staff could have keep their mouths shut about all this at the time it was going on is beyond me.

 

[Annie]

There needs to be some thorough investigating into this. Do you remember when Clinton would get on TV following each terrorist attack against American property or Americans during his terms as president and say that the perpetrators would be hunted down and brought to justice and NOTHING ever came of it? Well, now we're beginning to learn why. He built up walls so that nothing could be done, and he wouldn't have to deal with it. How Mary Jo White and her staff could have keep their mouths shut about all this at the time it was going on is beyond me.

As I said before, on this thread or another, they didn't keep their mouths shut. I read about the wall. Jimnyc posted on it back in April 2004.

 

[Adam's Apple]

Well, the information did not get out into the general public to the extent that the public was aware that information sharing between the CIA and the FBI had been prevented by the Clinton Administration. I didn't know anything about it until John Ashcroft's testimony before the 9/11 Commission, and I have read several books about the Clinton Administration.

I did not become an internet user to obtain news until about a year and a half ago. I've learned that if you want to know what is going on, you've got to get on the internet.

I still do not know why Mary Jo White and her staff did not take the opportunity opened up by John Ashcroft at the 9/11 Commission to bring this matter again before the public. It would have been most helpful instead of leaving the impression generated by the national media that this was just Ashcroft trying to embarrass Gorelick and cast blame on the Clinton Administration for 9/11.

 

[Annie]

Well, the information did not get out into the general public to the extent that the public was aware that information sharing between the CIA and the FBI had been prevented by the Clinton Administration. I didn't know anything about it until John Ashcroft's testimony before the 9/11 Commission, and I have read several books about the Clinton Administration.

I did not become an internet user to obtain news until about a year and a half ago. I've learned that if you want to know what is going on, you've got to get on the internet.

I still do not know why Mary Jo White and her staff did not take the opportunity opened up by John Ashcroft at the 9/11 Commission to bring this matter again before the public. It would have been most helpful instead of leaving the impression generated by the national media that this was just Ashcroft trying to embarrass Gorelick and cast blame on the Clinton Administration for 9/11.

I can't say I don't agree, but the bottom line is that the media has never been friendly to those that want to know more than the headlines. You have to read, infer, and make good hypothesis, then wait for the next tidbit and hope it fits the schema.