Gorelick's conflict
Linda Chavez
April 14, 2004
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Attorney General John Ashcroft came out swinging in testimony before the 9-11 Commission on Tuesday. "In 1995, the Justice Department embraced flawed legal reasoning, imposing a series of restrictions on the FBI that went beyond what the law required," he said. "The 1995 Guidelines and the procedures developed around them imposed draconian barriers to communications between the law enforcement and intelligence communities. The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents. In 1995, the Justice Department designed a system destined to fail."
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But Ashcroft's bombshell wasn't his description of the
Clinton Administration's policies, which have been
discussed by previous witnesses. "Somebody built this
wall," Ashcroft told the commissioners, and then went on
to accuse one of the commission's own.
"The basic architecture for the wall . . . was contained
in a classified memorandum entitled 'Instructions on
Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and
Criminal Investigations,'" said Ashcroft. "Full disclosure
compels me to inform you that its author is a member of
this Commission." Ashcroft was referring to Jamie
Gorelick, who served as Deputy Attorney General in the
Clinton Administration.
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From the beginning, Gorelick's appointment to the 9/11
Commission was problematic. She served not only as
Attorney General Janet Reno's deputy but also as general
counsel at the Department of Defense, jobs which put her
at the heart of the Clinton Administration's anti-
terrorism efforts. Her actions, as well as those of her
superiors, are among the subjects this commission is
tasked to review. How can she be expected to be impartial
when it comes to evaluating her superiors, much less
herself?
The memo Gorelick wrote has now been declassified and offers a window into the role she played in obstructing effective intelligence gathering and sharing during the Clinton Administration. The memo grew out of the Justice Department's prosecution of the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center -- the act that apparently gave Osama bin Laden the idea to try again in 2001.
"During the course of those investigations," wrote Gorelick in 1995, "significant counterintelligence information has been developed related to the activities and plans of agents of foreign powers operating in this country and overseas, including previously unknown connections between separate terrorist groups." But Gorelick wanted to make sure that the left hand didn't know what the right was doing. "(W)e believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will 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 (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."
The problem, of course, is that the inability to share information is precisely what hampered federal agents in tracking down the 9-11 hijackers. As Attorney General Ashcroft testified, this artificial wall impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, who was arrested prior to the 9-11 attack, as well as Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both of whom were identified by the CIA as suspected terrorists possibly in the United States prior to their participation in those terrible attacks. "Because of the wall, FBI Headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al Qaeda attack to join in the hunt for the suspected terrorists," Ashcroft told the commission.
"At the time, a frustrated FBI investigator wrote
Headquarters," said Ashcroft, "quote, 'Whatever has
happened to this -- someday someone will die -- and wall
or not -- the public will not understand why . . .'"
Jamie Gorelick should step down from the commission at
once. If she fails to do so on her own, her fellow
commissioners should ask her to step aside. Her role as
the architect of a policy that hampered the work of
federal agents to track down suspected terrorists makes
her unfit to pass judgment on the alleged failures of
others.
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Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Townhall.com member organization.
©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
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