Honesty Problems With John Kerry and Jamie Gorelick
by John Armor
Friday, April 30, 2004
Pin the Truth on the Donkey
John Kerry, apparent Democrat nominee for president, is the more important person with the less important problem. Jamie Gorelick, member of the 9/11 Commission, is the reverse. So in explaining why each is unfit for the position he seeks and the one she holds, we begin with Kerry. We’ll use a version of a game we all played at an early age, ''Pin the Tail on the Donkey,'' to deal with Kerry and Gorelick.
This week ABC came up with a videotape of Senator Kerry saying the opposite then of what he’s saying now about his ''medals thrown over the fence'' photo op in 1971. After that ABC report, Kerry attacked President Bush as if he had brought the charge, rather than a network just reporting the facts and letting the public sort it all out (now there’s a novel concept for reporting the news).
Charles Gibson on ABC’s ''Good Morning America'' challenged Kerry by saying that he (Gibson) was there and saw him (Kerry) throw his medals over the fence. When Kerry thought the interview was finished, but the camera and his mike were still live, Kerry complained to an associate about Gibson and his whole staff, ''God, they’re acting like the Republican National Committee.''
Anyone dumb enough to think that ABC News or any part of that network is acting for the RNC is too dumb to be out in public without a keeper. He might as well accuse Fox News of acting hand-in-glove for the Democratic National Committee. But if Kerry is challenged over his off-air but on-mike comment, he will either deny he ever said it, or claim he meant the opposite, or both.
These, and many other instances of Kerry on record contradicting Kerry on record, suggest a modified version of the well-known children’s game. It is: Pin the Truth on the Donkey. Participants would be blindfolded, spun around, and then given a change to pin any of the contradictory statements of candidate Kerry on the appropriate part of his anatomy.
Finding out a Kerry policy position in advance is like ordering the soup du jour in a cheap diner. In advance you have no idea what to expect. You ask the tattooed waitress what it is. You may or may not trust what she says. You may or may not like the soup when it comes. But tomorrow, it will be something different.
And as for Kerry’s getting testy with the White House for what ABC did, I don’t think the lines of control run very strongly between those two institutions. If Kerry doesn’t want his patrician comfort disturbed like that in the future, I humbly suggest that he put out a mimeographed list of questions the press should not ask him. Just trying to help out here.
We now turn our attentions to Jamie Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 Commission. She was previously a deputy attorney general under Janet Reno. Remember Janet? She was in all the papers. The hero of Waco, defender of Elian Gonzolez, the goddess of ''no credible evidence.'' But I digress.
A principal issue before the 9/11 Commission is the ''wall'' between the FBI and the CIA. As usual, the American press has been positively lame in doing its homework. Let’s put some history on the table. Congress played a major role in creating this wall, though since the members of the Commission are beholden to Congress, the Commission hasn’t pointed a finger at the honorable Members of the House and Senate.
During World War II, the Department of Defense created the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS). It combined both civilian and military personnel to engage in espionage, and also to engage in special operations. Only now, a half century after the war, are some of the extraordinary efforts of the OSS behind enemy lines being described.
After the war, especially because of events in Germany and in Eastern Europe, it was clear that we were entering what came known as the Cold War with the U.S.S.R. For intelligence purposes, we needed to maintain a wartime level of spying on the other side, even though we were not actually at war.
Therefore, Congress passed a law in 1947 to create the Central Intelligence Agency. And as Congress wrote that law, it was aware of the history of the Gestapo in Nazi Germany which could go anywhere and do anything, overriding all laws and restraints. Congress did not want to create an ''American Gestapo,'' so from the beginning it separated federal law enforcement (which remained with the FBI), and intelligence, which was outside the United States and expected on occasion to use methods that would never be admissible in court in an ordinary criminal trial.
So the truth is that this wall was originally created by Congress, not by accident but deliberately. Fast forward to the Clinton administration and the work of Deputy Attorney General Gorelick. She wrote a memo that defined the limits on contacts the FBI could have with the CIA The FBI, of course, is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice. So any official policy set by Justice, including in the Gorelick memo, was binding on the FBI.
And what did the Gorelick memo do? In its text it states that it ''increases the protections'' of the separations between these two federal agencies. Commissioner Gorelick, in an article in the Washington Post, claimed that her memo made it easier for the agencies to communicate. Both the operation of her memo and its explicit text say the opposite. She also claims that her memo was for the purpose of protecting the civil liberties of Americans. But there is a more nefarious explanation for the Gorelick memo.
Consider what was going on at the time. According to press reports then, Bill Clinton had had a conversation with an Indonesian businessman, James Riady, in Clinton’s limo in Little Rock in 1992. Riady promised Clinton a $1 million contribution to his campaign, which he made good on. The conversation was reported by an employee of Riady, John Huang, who’d been brought into the Commerce Department and later the Democratic National Committee at Bill Clinton’s behest. After Huang was found guilty of violations of federal election laws, he turned state’s evidence.
And where did Riady’s $1 million come from? According to press accounts then, Riady’s Lippo Group and Lippo Bank were both co-owned by government and military officials in communist China. Riady would have needed approval of his partners to take $1 million out of the till and give it to the DNC to buy influence with the American president.
If it were established on clear evidence that a president of the United States accepted $1 million from government officials in China, that president could have been not only impeached by the House, but convicted by the Senate and removed from office. The idea of foreign (and potentially hostile) governments using their money to influence or control American elections have been anathema for centuries. Witness the XYZ Affair during the administration of President John Adams. (If you don’t recall that, look it up in Google, or in your College Outline Series on American History, Volume I, to 1865.)
But there was an information problem for the U.S. government to sort out the evidence of money flowing from the Chinese Communists to the Democratic National Committee as a result of the Clinton-Riady conversation. Attempts by foreign governments to use money and influence to get decisions they wanted from the federal government were under the jurisdiction of the CIA. But questions of criminal law violations, such as felonies under the election laws for illegal campaign contributions, were under the jurisdiction of the FBI.
Anything that made it harder for information gathered by the CIA about Chinese money to get in the hands of the FBI, would make it harder to prove the whole case including where Riady’s money ultimately came from. Enter the Gorelick memo. It made such communication even more difficult than the prior law.
What was the upshot of the Riady investigation? In the last days of the Clinton Administration, Janet (''the Just'') Reno negotiated a deal under which Mr. Riady returned from Indonesia to plead guilty to violating the federal election laws. He received no jail time, but he paid the largest fine ever assessed, $8.6 million dollars. But he never did say where he got that money. Nor did he state under oath that he sent that money to the DNC because of a commitment he made personally to Bill Clinton. It’s possible that the fine itself was paid with Chinese money, because the narrow guilty plea did keep the Chinese skirts clean, at least in court.
In short, it might be true that Jamie Gorelick wrote her ''wall'' memo not to protect the civil rights of all Americans, but to protect the job of just one American--her boss’s boss, Bill Clinton. If so, it was only an unintended byproduct of her memo that it prevented the FBI from opening the computer hard drive in Minnesota that may have unraveled the entire 9/11 plot before it happened.
Should Jamie Gorelick be serving on the 9/11 Commission? More likely, she should be serving time in a different type of federal institution. It is certain that she should be required to testify before the Commission under oath about her memo that contributed to the ''wall'' between intelligence and law enforcement.
What are we to make of Jamie Gorelick continuing as a member of the 9/11 Commission? If Jesse James had been charged with bank robbery, should his brother Frank have served on the jury that sat in judgment? If Clyde Barrow had been charged with murder, should his girlfriend Bonnie Parker have been on the jury? When the president of Enron (eventually) goes on trial for corporate fraud, should his chief accountant serve on the jury?
The dishonesties of John Kerry discussed here about his Vietnam medals are small potatoes in the scheme of things. By themselves, they don’t amount to a hill of beans. They are only relevant to the extent they are part of a lifelong pattern of dishonesty established by self-contradictions, all of them caught on tape.
The dishonesties of Jamie Gorelick discussed here are of a far greater importance. All by themselves and with nothing else, they constitute a dagger stabbed into the heart of American security.
In both cases, however, it is vitally important that we all put ourselves in the role of five-year-olds at a birthday party. It is time to play ''Pin the Truth on the Democrat.'' And the first two Democrats who require that treatment are John Kerry and Jamie Gorelick. But there are other candidates for such treatment as well.
Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democrat National Committee, comes to mind. If all the necessary truths were stuck in his backside, he’d be wearing so many pins he’d look like a porcupine. And Sidney (''Squid'') Blumenthal, who bought his way into the job of Washington bureau chief of the bankrupt Salon.com – don’t get me started. And speaking of target-rich environments, Bill Clinton’s memoirs, such as they are, will come out in June.
Mark Twain said, ''Truth is valuable. Let us economize it.'' Twain was kidding, of course. Let the truth games begin.
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