For those of us who were in the trenches of the struggle against militant Islam beginning in the early 1990s, it is jarring to hear, of all people, Jamie Gorelick ? now a member of the 9/11 Commission ? hectoring government officials about their asserted failure to perceive how essential it is that the right pieces of intelligence get into the right hands. Equally bracing is to read the account of Gorelick's star witness, former counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke ? that hero of the last 15 minutes ? who bemoans how, even though he "had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree" during the summer 2001, the FBI and CIA nonetheless failed to stitch together disconnected bits of information about al Qaeda operatives and flight schools.
No one in his right mind could say that intelligence breakdowns related to 9/11 are not worth exploring. At issue, though, is the proper explorer. One would have hoped the appearance of objectivity, never mind the reality, would be the 9/11 Commission's guiding compass. Instead, the panel is beset by a gargantuan conflict of interest ? and it's starting to show.
THE ARCHITECT AS JUDGE
Commissioner Gorelick, as deputy attorney general ? the number two official in the Department of Justice ? for three years beginning in 1994, was an architect of the government's self-imposed procedural wall, intentionally erected to prevent intelligence agents from pooling information with their law-enforcement counterparts. That is not partisan carping. That is a matter of objective fact. That wall was not only a deliberate and unnecessary impediment to information sharing; it bred a culture of intelligence dysfunction. It told national-security agents in the field that there were other values, higher interests, that transcended connecting the dots and getting it right. It set them up to fail. To hear Gorelick lecture witnesses about intelligence lapses is breathtaking.
Jamie Gorelick also served as Asst. attorney General under Janet Reno which explains alot, she sits on this panel and not once has mentioned she authored the memo that put a wall up between the FBI and CIA to share info, should she not have recused herself from the 911 panel ? I think so, shit what a conflict of intrest.