Hillary Appointee Tied to 9/11 Blunder
With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
For the story behind the story...
Saturday, June 11, 2005
Press reports on Friday about a government report that offers new evidence on how the CIA failed to warn the FBI when two of the 9/11 hijackers entered the U.S. made no mention of the role played in the disastrous bungle by Hillary Clinton's Justice Department protege Jamie Gorelick.
Typical was coverage in the Los Angeles Times, which chronicled the efforts of a frustrated CIA agent who desperately tried to warn the FBI that Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar had migrated to San Diego after attending an al-Qaida planning session in Malaysia 20 months before the 9/11 attacks.
But instead of delivering the alert that could have helped foil the 9/11 plot, the CIA agent was told to cease and desist by superiors.
Noted the Times:
"A chilling new detail of U.S. intelligence failures emerged Thursday, when the Justice Department disclosed that about 20 months before the Sept. 11 attacks, a CIA official had blocked a memo intended to alert the FBI that two known Al Qaeda operatives had entered the country.
"The two men were among the 19 hijackers who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania."
As recounted by the Times, in January 2000, a CIA employee began drafting a memo addressed to the FBI's Bin Laden unit chief at bureau headquarters and to its New York field office. The memo contained virtually all of the details known to the agency about two of the soon-to-be 9/11 hijackers.
"But at 4 p.m. that day," the Times said, another CIA Bin Laden desk officer "added a note to the memo: 'pls hold off on [memo] for now per [the CIA deputy chief of Bin Laden unit].'"
Eight days later, in mid-January, the first agent inquired about his warning on Alhazmi and Almihdhar.
The FBI's 9/11 report reached no conclusion as to why the critical CIA intelligence wasn't shared with the bureau.
But for anyone who watched the 9/11 Commission hearings, the answer is clear.
The FBI and CIA were hamstrung by the "Wall," a set of Justice Department directives issued by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick that made it illegal for the two agencies to cooperate with each other in terrorism probes.
Testifying before the 9/11 Commission last year, former Attorney General John Ashcroft contended that "the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents"
"[Gorelick] built that wall" said Ashcroft, "through a March 1995 memo."
Gorelick's now notorious wall memo instructed prosecutors in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case:
"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 [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."
According to now retired New York Times columnist William Safire, Gorelick was tapped for her post by Hillary ally Webster Hubbell after he resigned from the Justice Department in 1994 to face charges of overbilling his legal clients.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Gorelick fulfilled much the same role as Hubbell had, acting as Hillary's "eyes and ears at the Justice Department."
While news of the CIA's scuttled 9/11 warning was a top story throughout the day on Friday - with nearly two dozen mainstream press reports, including a front page story in the New York Times - none of the reports so much as mentioned Gorelick's name, let alone her connection to Mrs. Clinton.
The former first lady will almost undoubtedly seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination based in part on what the media descibe as her strong national security credentials.
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