9-11 COMMISSION:
A Joke—or a Travesty?
By Marilyn M. Brannan, Assoc. Editor
Unravelling The New World Order

Partisan members of the panel probing the September 11, 2001, attacks have zealously attacked the Bush Administration, the President, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and others in that administration for failing in less than eight months to do a much-needed, top-down overhaul of our intelligence and security structures. Such a radical restructuring, had it even been possible in that short period of time, would not, according to even the most partisan of witnesses, have prevented the attacks of 9-11.

While the attempt to place the lion’s share of the blame for 9-11 squarely on the Bush administration has been patently obvious, there has been a glaringly conspicuous reluctance by the Commission to examine the same type of failures by the Clinton administration that occurred over a period of eight years.

The perception by the public that “the fix is in” has been further heightened by the fact that one of the panel members, Jamie Gorelick, served as the No. 2 official in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration, and is now in the position of judging the causes of pre-9/11 intelligence failure—a matter in which she was a key participant.

The panel is comprised entirely of Washington insiders and elected officials, but Gorelick, a Democrat, is the only one who was actively serving an administration during the time period being investigated. She was appointed to the 9-11 panel by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri.

Had Gorelick not been appointed to serve on the commission, there is no doubt that she would have been subpoenaed to testify after her memorandum came to light during John Ashcroft’s testimony.

The excessive media hype prior to Ashcroft’s appearance before the panel suggested that some of the Democrats on the commission were “loaded for bear,” anticipating their opportunity to nail the Attorney General for 9-11. However, Ashcroft had a bombshell of his own.

During his testimony on April 13, Attorney General John Ashcroft pointed out that a 1995 memo written by Gorelick during her tenure as second in command at the Justice Department was, to a large degree, responsible for the wall of legal obstacles that prevented the FBI from mounting an aggressive pursuit and prosecution of terrorists.

“We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies,” Ashcroft said in his opening remarks. “Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions and starved for basic information technology.”

Gorelick defended her actions, saying, “The wall was a creature of statute. It's existed since the mid-1980s.”

She did not offer a specific defense, however, for her own action while in the Reno Justice Department to further solidify the “creature of statute.” The wall of separation for years prevented intelligence sharing, both inter-agency and intra-agency, in the FBI and CIA. It has been credited by many in law enforcement, intelligence gathering, and criminal/terrorist prosecution as the single greatest obstacle to dealing effectively with crime and terrorism during the years prior to the enactment of the Patriot Act.

Andrew C. McCarthy (a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the terrorism prosecution case resulting from the1993 Trade Center bombing) commented that “she belongs in the witness chair, not on the commissioners' bench. . . .Whenever she asks a question on another subject — even if she does it in good faith — the public is entitled to wonder whether she is trying to shift blame or scrutiny away from herself. The legitimacy of the commission is thus critically undermined” (National Review Online, April 19, 2004).

In a lame attempt to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest, Gorelick recused herself from cross-examining some of the law enforcement and intelligence officials who testified before the commission. In the view of many, that's simply not enough.

Gorelick Should Resign
On April 14, House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) urged Gorelick to resign, calling Gorelick's role in setting Clinton Justice Department policy an “inherent conflict of interest.”

Rep. Sensenbrenner noted, “The public cannot help but ask legitimate questions about her motives. . . . She's investigating herself and there's no way an independent commission can come up with an independent conclusion when you have one of the participants, in what appears to be a significant part of the problem [emphasis added] sitting in the commission meeting and having a vote in the commission.

“I believe the commission's work and independence will be fatally damaged by the continued participation of Ms. Gorelick as a commissioner,” Sensenbrenner wrote in his statement.

Others agree. Rep. John Sweeney, a Republican from New York who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, told Fox News, “The American people want and really expect from this commission more principal, less politics … we don't need to be entertained, we need to be informed.” He added that Gorelick should “absolutely” resign.

Commission Closes Ranks Around Gorelick
Republican commissioner John Lehman, former Navy secretary under President Reagan, told Fox News that he does not agree that Gorelick should resign. “Jamie Gorelick has made a very good contribution and she's one of the really savvy, nonpartisan of the bipartisan members,” Lehman said.

Many who viewed the questioning of Condoleezza Rice might question the “nonpartisan” assessment; Gorelick was most aggressive—one might say relentlessly aggressive—in her questioning of Dr. Rice.

Panel Chairman Thomas Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, defended Gorelick as well, characterizing her as “one of the hardest working members . . . one of the most nonpartisan and bipartisan members of the commission.”

Kean, apparently miffed over complaints about a conflict of interest on the part of Gorelick, opined that “people ought to stay out of our business.”

Democratic commissioner Tim Roemer, another Gorelick defender (and one whom viewers will remember was noticeably partisan and aggressive in his questioning of Dr. Rice), stated his opinion that “nobody has worked harder on this commission than Jamie Gorelick. And nobody has underscored the importance of the commission's work as she has.”

In our opinion, Roemer’s defense of Gorelick is frustratingly obtuse and misses the point entirely. The most partisan, agenda-driven member of the commission would no doubt “work very hard” to promote a desired outcome; and “underscoring the importance of the commission’s work” might easily be said of one whose agenda was to subvert the purposes of the commission entirely.

A member whose very presence on the commission poses a serious conflict of interest raises the question of why she is on the panel in the first place, and what it is that she is actually working hard to achieve.

Andrew McCarthy agrees that the support of Gorelick's fellow commissioners is irrelevant: “[T]hese are the same guys who were screaming for Rice three weeks ago, for no better reason than that Clarke had made allegations Rice was in a position to shed light on. Ashcroft has now made assertions far more central to the salient matter of institutional impediments to information sharing. That those same commissioners are not being consistent, that they are not calling for Gorelick to step down and be sworn as a witness, is inexplicable.”

Gorelick said in a television interview on April 14 that she will not resign.