Quote:
Originally posted by Not Me
You have got to be kidding.
[A big steaming load of crap from the National Review, of which this is one paragraph:]
More importantly, the hyper-technical 1995 guidelines were so byzantine as to be inscrutable for non-lawyer agents in the field, who found it far easier to assume they weren't allowed to communicate with one another than to venture into Gorelick's labyrinth without benefit of Ariadne's golden cord. That is why, for example, the FBI's criminal division declined to assist its intelligence division in August 2001, when an astute agent was frantically trying to find Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the eventual suicide hijackers who steered Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Whether or not the wall procedures dictated that decision, the culture of dysfunction the procedures had fostered was by then firmly entrenched.
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I asked, "What reason is there to believe that "the wall" had much to do the the FBI's failure to do its job pre-9/11?" In Not Me's response, there is exactly one paragraph -- quoted above -- that has anything to do with this.*
The author of this garbage announces that the FBI stopped trying share information because Gorelick's guidelines were so byzantine that it was too much work. Never mind that Gorelick's memo "codified" pre-existing practices relating to a law that had been in effect for 17 years -- now we are to believe this deficiency on the FBI's part is all her fault. But not even this authors tries to pretend that anything relating to 9/11 had anything to do with "the wall" -- instead, the article says "hor not the wall procedures dictated that decision" -- hack-speak for 'it didn't dictate that decision.' It is true that the FBI was characterized by a culture of dysfunction, but it is absurd and yet predictable that the National Review would try to blame an Clinton DOJ official for this. It's classic FBI CYA to blame the failure to support the agent on "the wall" -- it takes it to a new level to blame Gorelick specifically for this.
* Not Me complained that I quoted lengthy blog posts without identifying the relevant material. Presumably this is her revenge.
