Anyone remember Jamie Gorelic and her position in the Clinton Adm as Assistant AG? And the "Wall" she helped to become sturdier between the CIA and FBI?
Interesting note from the past, and still applies to the present news...
Klein: No 9-11 If Only Clinton "Had Been Free to Fire Freeh"? ("if I had known")
MRC ^ | Monday June 21, 2004 | BrentBaker
Posted on 06/21/2004 8:39:16 AM PDT by fight_truth_decay
freerepublic.com
9-11 Ken Starr's fault? On NBC's Meet the Press, after endorsing Bill Clinton's disgust for Ken Starr ("He makes a very strong case for Starr's abuse of power") and agreeing with Clinton's view of himself more as victim than perpetrator ("My feeling is, that in the end on all this stuff he's more sinned against than sinner"), Time magazine's Joe Klein gave credibility to Clinton's claim that but for the Lewinsky scandal Clinton would have fired FBI Director Louis Freeh, who had proven incompetent in the battle against terrorism. Klein suggested "we might have had a better shot at rolling up those al-Qaeda cells if Bill Clinton had been free to fire Freeh."
In Time itself, Klein called Clinton's case against Starr "powerful."
On Meet the Press, recalling Time's interview conducted last week with Clinton, upon the release of his lengthy tome, My Life, Klein picked up on a finding of the 9-11 Commission about Freeh's supposed poor job on counter-terrorism and expounded, during a roundtable segment: "One of the other things that Clinton told us was that he would have fired Louis Freeh as FBI Director if it hadn't been for the media and for the fact that we would have associated that firing with the investigation of the Lewinsky scandal. Now, that is incredibly damning because from what I can understand, the FBI was entirely incompetent, not doing anything in terms of counter-terrorism over those years. And so in some ways, you could say that we might have had a better shot at rolling up those al-Qaeda cells if Bill Clinton had been free to fire Freeh."
Of course, there would have been no need to fire Freeh if Clinton hadn't hired him. Clinton nominated Freeh in 1993. And what evidence is there that Clinton had any knowledge of Freeh's supposedly bad management on counter-terrorism?
In fact, though Clinton did make the claim that Klein conveyed, his comment to Time magazine was in the "if I had known" form, so he didn't know and therefore would have had no reason to replace Freeh on counter-terrorism grounds. From the Time magazine interview in the June 28 edition:
On why he never fired FBI Director Louis Freeh
If I had known that when we tripled the counterterrorism funds none of it was put into improving the data processing and interconnecting with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, if I had known that the Executive Order I signed fairly early in my Administration ordering the CIA and the FBI to exchange high-level people and cooperate more hadn't been done, I might have done so.
But since the FBI chief gets a presumptive 10-year term, I didn't feel what I thought was outrageous treatment of us, particularly by him personally, was worth replacing him, because all of you [in the media] would have said, Well, he's doing it because he's got something to hide, and I didn't have anything to hide. I knew there was nothing to Whitewater, I knew there was nothing to the Paula Jones case -- Ken Starr could have as many FBI agents as he wanted doing whatever they wanted to do.
END of Excerpt
For the Time interview in full, available only to subscribers: time.com |
