The Right's Strange New Retreat
Who called the blogs off on 'Able Danger'?
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2005, at 6:41 PM PT
Dog-Whistle Reversed: The NYT has now published an interview with Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, one of the previously-anonymous Able Danger sources. Over on the right, John Podhoretz has reversed his headlong retreat into groveling apology and is back on the offensive. ... P.S.: Podhoretz focuses his ire on the "wall" that allegedly prohibited the Pentagon from sharing the Able Danger info with the F.B.I., and he blames then deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick.
But my impression is that the "wall" codified in Gorelick's famous 1995 memo didn't apply to the Pentagon, only to the FBI. That doesn't mean there wasn't a mistaken culture of caution and compartmentalization of which Gorelick's "wall" and the Pentagon's "wall" and 85% of the best-resumed lawyers who graduated from Harvard and Yale weren't a part. Still, it seems deceptive to target only Gorelick, and extremely foolish to assume that all the screw-ups the 9/11 Commission may have made are attributable to some insidious desire to protect her (as opposed to, say, protecting John Kerry, or Bill Clinton, or the Pentagon, or George H.W. Bush, or the Commission's already-written story line--or to sheer negligence, lack of manpower, or excusable bad luck). Disclosure: Gorelick's an old friend of mine from college. [She's got you protecting her. Why not the Commission too?--ed They have more friends than I do. I can certainly see them subconsciously protecting all the respectable people like Gorelick who erected, amended, and defended the various walls over the years.]
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