Politics: J'accuse!

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Not Me

one helluva big conflict

Did someone say Scalia?

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
Did someone say Scalia?

Glad you brought up Scalia. Remember how the Reps on this board expressed their unhappiness with his actions? Now compare that to the partisan support of Gorelick by the Dems.

I don't dispute that some separation of the FBI and CIA was in force prior to Gorelick's memo/guidelines. However, a central issue before the Commission is the wall. That alone conflicts her out.

Let the Commission investigate this issue. If she stays on the Commission, though, they will be inhibited in their investigation. At a minimum, she needs to testify under oath about her actions on this topic.

[Not Me]

http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsA...toryID=4871148

• WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Who knew what, and when did they know it?
  
  U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, Saudi ambassador to Washington Prince Bandar bin Sultan and journalist Bob Woodward argued on Monday over whether Bandar was told of the U.S. decision to go to war in Iraq two days before Powell was.
  
  Woodward sparked the controversy in his book "Plan of Attack" which said Powell was out of the loop when President George W. Bush made the decision to invade.
  
  The Washington Post journalist said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice-President Dick Cheney told Bandar of the decision in a meeting on Jan. 11, 2003, using phrases such as "you can take it to the bank" and "He (Saddam) is toast".
  
  "That's silly because I participated in the development of the plan," Powell responded on Monday on the Sean Hannity radio show.
  
  "I commented on the plan when it was being developed, and I knew when Vice President Cheney and Mr. Rumsfeld and General (Richard) Myers were going to go brief Prince Bandar on a plan, a plan that I was intimately familiar with," Powell said.
  
  But Woodward said on the CNN program "Larry King Live" that while Powell might have known of the plan, he was not told of the decision to implement it until after the Jan. 11 meeting with Bandar.
  
  Bandar himself called the CNN program to take issue with Woodward, saying Cheney and Rumsfeld had told him only that war was possible.
  
  "What he (Woodward) said is accurate. However there was one sentence that was left out," Bandar said. "Most of it was accurate except that I was informed that the president had not made a decision yet."
  
  After Bandar's phone call, Woodward commented: "Going back to Nixon, I've heard all of them... This goes in the hall of fame of dodges and fishy explanations, I think it should get an academy award ... Congratulations, Bandar."
  
  Powell, in his radio comments, also said he knew he would support a war if he failed to find a diplomatic solution at the United Nations.
  
  "I knew that it might happen, and I knew that when he (Bush) took that second road, I'd be with him for the whole way. I don't quit on long patrols," Powell said
  
  "I believe it was the right decision at the time (to go to war), and I believe it is the right decision now," he added.
  
  The book has fueled election-year claims of rifts in the administration and that Bush was eager to invade Iraq despite warnings over an occupation that has turned out to be far more deadly for U.S. troops than the war.

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Come on Bilmore, you're too smart and too honest to believe your implication.

S_A_M

Must be, wrong and wrong, 'cuz I believe it.

Look at Ty's post, to someone raising good points - she's trollish, and he won't respond, because it's all partisanship? Weak.

Point is, this women should be testifying, not judging. Her op-ed was just that - testimony - she was contradicting Ashcroft's testimony, she played a major part in the solidification and inflation of the dichotomization of our info, and, in a proceeding designed to find out why we didn't find out, this is crucial stuff.

Partisanship? I"d say the only partisanship comes from those who now want to impede, minimize, and walk away from the investigation. My guess is, the focus has drifted from what they wanted to present to the electorate, and now they want it to go away, or at least let it fade with the memory of Clarke only. I suspect Rice, and the public reaction to her, were not what they expected or wanted, and the Gorelick thing, if untreated, is going to render any conclusion suspect, null, and useless. Failing their expected strong critique of Bush, they don't want the rest to stick in the public's mind, because "the rest" is simply going to be, we should have been more vigilant, and tougher, and that ain't a ringing call for a Kerry presidency. A sputtering end to this, with half the country ignoring it because of Gorelick's presence, will be the best the Dems can get now, and they're going to go for it. The fight to keep her now is simply the captain blowing the hold open to keep the ship from the enemy.

(ETA - if this is the sticking point, replace her with another Clinton appointee. That's not the important issue here. The important issue is, she has information that the commission ought to be considering as it tries to discern what stopped us from learning what was going on. FBI'ers have already said the "wall" was going to have a bad effect, and it appears that it did.)

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
Must be, wrong and wrong, 'cuz I believe it.

Look at Ty's post, to someone raising good points - she's trollish, and he won't respond, because it's all partisanship? Weak.

What good points? I post something new, and she just refers to her past posts.

Point is, this women should be testifying, not judging. Her op-ed was just that - testimony - she was contradicting Ashcroft's testimony, she played a major part in the solidification and inflation of the dichotomization of our info, and, in a proceeding designed to find out why we didn't find out, this is crucial stuff.

I believe she did give testimony. Note that Ashcroft was "testifying", as you put it, on subjects that he didn't have percipient knowledge about. And why do you think this is a significant focus of the investigation? 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 -- as opposed, say, to the national office's failure to authorize subpoenas, and the limits of Rule 6(e)?

Partisanship? I"d say the only partisanship comes from those who now want to impede, minimize, and walk away from the investigation.

In other words, Republican leadership.

My guess is, the focus has drifted from what they wanted to present to the electorate, and now they want it to go away, or at least let it fade with the memory of Clarke only. I suspect Rice, and the public reaction to her, were not what they expected or wanted, and the Gorelick thing, if untreated, is going to render any conclusion suspect, null, and useless.

Here, tellingly, you assume the "conclusion" will be for public consumption, not (e.g.) for the legislature or executive branch to act on.

Failing their expected strong critique of Bush, they don't want the rest to stick in the public's mind, because "the rest" is simply going to be, we should have been more vigilant, and tougher, and that ain't a ringing call for a Kerry presidency.

I suspect you'll see a lot of recommendations that have more to do with the organization of the FBI and the CIA than what Bush did. And you seem to be forgetting that half the commission is composed of Republicans. If they're criticizing the President, maybe there's something to it.

Oops, sorry, I forgot the bilmore syllogism: Criticism is a function of party loyalty. Therefore, if you criticize the President, you are acting of partisan interest, and your criticism can be ignored. Any Republicans on the commission who criticize the President can be ignored as Democrats in disguise.

A sputtering end to this, with half the country ignoring it because of Gorelick's presence, will be the best the Dems can get now, and they're going to go for it. The fight to keep her now is simply the captain blowing the hold open to keep the ship from the enemy.

You wish half the country had heard of Gorelick. Because you care more about the political damage that the commission might do to your party's nominee than you do about how they might help us fight this war on terror.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
And why do you think this is a significant focus of the investigation? 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

You have got to be kidding.

http://www.nationalreview.com/mccart...0404190849.asp

• The grandstanding Richard Clarke having made apologies all the rage, one should expect that President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice will be getting one in the next day or two. Something like this:
  
  Dear Mr. President and Dr. Rice:
  Very sorry about all that high dudgeon a couple of weeks ago. You remember, when we couldn't pass a microphone, a pencil, or a camera without perorations about the vital need to have the President waive executive privilege and ignore scads of history so Dr. Rice could be permitted to testify under oath and publicly (and improve our Nielson numbers) to address provocative allegations by another commission fave — er, witness — Richard Clarke. Turns out we should have mentioned that if Condi had just zipped an op-ed over to the Washington Post that would have done the trick. We regret any inconvenience to you, your staff, or the Constitution.
  Respectfully, the 9/11 Commissioners.
  
  If that note is not forthcoming, then someone's got some explaining to do about "The Truth About 'the Wall,'" Jamie Gorelick's remarkable Washington Post op-ed from Sunday, which purports to put to rest the nettlesome squawking about her untenable position as a commissioner judging the causes of pre-9/11 intelligence failure, a matter in which she was a key participant. Leaving aside, for a moment, how off-the-wall her account of the wall is, the fact that she well knows she needed to say something is the clearest indication yet that she belongs in the witness chair, not on the commissioners' bench.
  
  Gorelick's op-ed intentionally raises five different points in her purported defense. Around them are sandwiched two others — opening and closing salvos that she can't resist mentioning but avoids identifying as argument points because she is too smart not to know that they scream out for her recusal. I'll take them in the order in which she makes them.
  
  1. Ashcroft is wrong. Gorelick starts by asserting that Attorney General John Ashcroft gave testimony that was "simply not true" when he claimed both that "the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents[,]" and that Gorelick "built that wall through a March 1995 memo." In fact, Ashcroft's testimony was entirely true: The wall was a policy that virtually guaranteed intelligence failure, and the March 1995 memo was its first building block, a harbinger of the further institutionalizing of the wall that would come, from Gorelick, only a few months later. That, however, is beside the point.
  
  When witnesses give differing accounts, it is left to an impartial arbiter — not one of the witnesses — to sort it out. Moreover, the commission's standard, announced to maximum preening effect only three weeks ago after Clarke's testimony spawned demands for Rice's testimony, is that essential witnesses, and particularly those who are in a position to clarify or refute the testimony of prior essential witnesses (i.e., the position Rice was in vis-à-vis Clarke), must testify under oath and in public. Not surprisingly, while brazenly accusing the attorney general of the United States of giving false testimony, Gorelick elides mention of the Clarke/Rice dust-up. But it did happen, and Gorelick was gleefully in the thick of it. Why is what's sauce for the goose not sauce for the commissioner?
  
  2. "I did not invent the "wall," which is not a wall but a set of procedures implementing a 1978 statute (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA) and federal court decisions interpreting it." Gorelick did invent the wall. The wall was not a set of procedures implementing FISA as construed by federal decisional law. To quote Gorelick's 1995 memorandum (something she carefully avoids doing), the procedures her memorandum put in place "go beyond what is legally required...[to] prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation." (Emphasis added.) As this rather straightforward English sentence illuminates, the wall exceeded the requirements of FISA and then-existing federal case law.
  
  What the wall implemented was not the FISA statute as construed by the courts but rather Gorelick's overheated view of what would be useful to avoid being accused of misusing FISA. To be sure, it is often prudent for the government to hamstring itself beyond legal requirements; going-the-extra-mile improves the (already good) chances that courts will reject motions by defendants to suppress damaging evidence (like incriminating recorded conversations). It is, however, irresponsible for the government to hamstring itself when that means national security will be imperiled — which is what happens when agents are forbidden from communicating with one another.
  
  3. The prohibition on prosecutors directing intelligence investigations was in effect long before the 1995 guidelines issued by the Reno Justice Department. This is transparent misdirection. The government usually collects evidence of ordinary crimes under the criminal law, not FISA; but there is nothing inherently wrong with collecting evidence of ordinary crimes under FISA. The error that was made during the 1980s was FISA's certification requirement (which merely called for a representation that the government was seeking FISA-interception authority for the purpose of collecting national-security intelligence) was read as if it limited the government's ability to use FISA-derived evidence in ordinary criminal cases. The federal courts compounded this error by fashioning a "primary purpose" test which required the government, before it could use FISA evidence in a criminal case, to prove that it had been motivated to use FISA by national-security concerns — i.e., that it hadn't used FISA as a pretext to conduct what was really a criminal investigation.
  
  This was the state of play in 1995, when the Reno Justice Department — with Gorelick pulling the laboring oar — instituted the wall. Gorelick may be correct — we'd have to hear her testify subject to cross-examination to be sure — when she declares that "[t]he point [of the Reno guidelines] was to preserve the ability of prosecutors to use information collected by intelligence agents." (My own sense, for what little it may be worth, is that the point was to mollify civil-liberties activists and conspiracy theorists who trumped up baseless fears that the government would dishonestly use FISA authority to investigate people who were not national-security risks — but I am not the person who wrote the guidelines, and we should probably give her the benefit of the doubt regarding her intentions. But good intentions hardly mean the actions they spawn will be sound.)
  
  The wall generally forbidding intelligence agents from communicating with their criminal counterparts was a suicidally excessive way to ensure that what little information intelligence agents were permitted to pass would be admissible in court. This is the product of a mindset that insists, beyond all reason and common sense, that terrorism is just a law-enforcement problem. The object of a rational counterterrorism approach is to prevent mass murder from happening in the first place, not to improve your litigating posture for the indictment you return after thousands of people have been slaughtered.
  
  4. The Ashcroft Justice Department failed to dismantle the wall prior to the 9/11 attacks. Yes, that's true. And it was dumb, which was why Ashcroft got grilled over it by Gorelick's fellow commissioners. But Gorelick's argument actually makes my point. If it was relevant, probative and highly material for the commission to probe why Ashcroft did not eradicate the wall when he had the chance in the months before 9/11, it is doubly relevant, probative, and highly material to probe why on earth Gorelick erected the wall in the first place.
  
  5. Gorelick's March 1995 memo concerned only two cases and permitted "freer coordination between intelligence and criminal investigators than was subsequently permitted by the 1995 guidelines" and the Ashcroft Justice Department. So what? The fact is that Gorelick's 1995 memo was excessively prohibitive. Who cares if it was somewhat less excessively prohibitive than the July 1995 guidelines — especially given that Gorelick was responsible for the 1995 guidelines (that were reaffirmed in 2001). If Gorelick is looking for a medal because she was, at least as she sees it, marginally less irresponsible in March 1995 than she was in July 1995, she should not hold her breath.
  
  And her hyperventilating about acting to protect the two cases (including mine) from the threat of having convictions reversed is specious. By the time she penned her March 1995 memo, the first World Trade Center bombing prosecution had been over for a year and my case was in its third month of trial. The only conceivable threat to eventual convictions would have been (a) if the prosecutors and agents in my case had learned information about defense strategy by virtue of the government's continuing investigation of some of our indicted defendants for possible new crimes; or (b) if the continuing investigation had turned up exculpatory information about the defendants in my case and I had not been told about it so I could disclose it. Far from being unique to national-security matters, that situation is a commonplace when the government deals with violent organizations (which tend to obstruct justice and routinely plot to kill or influence witnesses, prosecutors, and/or jurors, thus requiring continuing investigations even as already indicted cases proceed).
  
  To avoid constitutional problems in such a situation, the government regularly assigns a prosecutor and agent who are not involved in the already indicted case to vet information from the continuing investigation before it is permitted to be communicated to agents and prosecutors on the indicted case. This way, the team on the indicted case learns only what it is allowed to know (viz., evidence of new crimes the defendants have committed), but not what it should not know (viz., defense strategy information and incriminating admissions about the indicted case made without the consent of counsel); and the government maintains the ability to reveal any exculpatory information (as federal law requires). As Gorelick's 1995 memorandum recounts, the U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York had already made sure that was done in my case long before Gorelick's memo. There was no need for Gorelick to do more; what she did served only to place additional, unnecessary barriers to information sharing which — her memo, again, acknowledges — were not required by existing law.
  
  6. The July 1995 guidelines — the wall — did not really prevent information sharing and merely implemented court decisions. The guidelines did prevent information sharing — that was their purpose. They literally permitted some information to be passed over the wall if intelligence agents realized that evidence they'd developed might prove the commission of a serious crime. Intelligence agents, however, were hardly in a position to come to such a realization with any confidence because the wall generally forbade them from coordinating with criminal agents. Thus, they were ill equipped to recognize the significance of information to which they were privy.
  
  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.
  
  7. The relevant history regarding the wall is well known, Gorelick has recused herself from consideration of her own actions and those of the Justice Department while she was there, and her fellow commissioners have spoken up in her defense. This is offered as Gorelick's wind-up. If it is adopted as the new standard, the commission should stop wasting everyone's time and money right now. First, the relevant history of many aspects of the 9/11 investigation is extensively well documented; yet, the commission has insisted on calling witnesses — despite the fact that our nation is at war and many of the witnesses have been taken away from their wartime responsibilities for hours (and sometimes days) to comply with commission requests for information and testimony. To this point, no witness has been permitted to get away with a curt "you don't need me — you've already got enough information."
  
  Second, Gorelick's conflict is not so tidy as to be solved by avoiding inquiry into her time in the Justice Department. If that were the case, John Ashcroft could have been a commissioner — and just imagine the howling if someone had proposed that. Gorelick's conflict, central to the matter of intelligence lapse, goes to the heart of the commission's investigation. 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.
  
  Finally, the support of Gorelick's fellow commissioners is irrelevant. Again, these 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. I'm sure they have all bonded; I'm quite certain they admire and respect Gorelick's powerful mind and exemplary work ethic — they'd be foolish not to. But imagine for a moment that Gorelick had not been appointed to serve on the commission. Is there anyone on the planet who doesn't think she'd have been subpoenaed to testify after her memorandum came to light during last week's proceedings? Is there anyone who thinks she could have avoided testifying under such circumstances by writing an op-ed?
  
  Gorelick's "defense" merely underscores how inappropriate it is for her to sit in judgment as a commissioner. Obviously, she's hell-bent on staying. And so we watch as the commission slowly mutates from a potentially useful exercise, to a politicized teledrama, to a hopelessly suspect irrelevancy.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

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.

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.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
You wish half the country had heard of Gorelick.

Perhaps not half, but at least one person has:

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1842206

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
The author of this garbage

The author is Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others;.

You can read what else he has to say on Gorelick's Wall here.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Not Me
The author is Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others;.

You can read what else he has to say on Gorelick's Wall here.

It's a steaming load of crap. Anyone who wants to see that can read it carefully, line by line. I am tempted to "fisk" it, to use bilmore's lingo, but it's late and it's not worth it.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
but it is absurd and yet predictable that the National Review would try to blame an Clinton DOJ official for this.

Ty, don't you get it? This shouldn't be something that is determined by point-counter-point editorials in the WaPo and the NR. Gorelick needs to testify under oath as to her role in all this. Just like Clinton did, and Rice did, and Ashcrofit did, and Reno did, and Bush and Cheney will be doing.

See, hun, that is the problem. Gorelick is making her case on an editorial page instead of before the Commission, where she should be making her case.

Now do you get the conflict of interest?

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
I believe she did give testimony.

So do I. I wish it had been sworn, and I wish she wasn't sitting on the commission. I think there is much more that she could and should be speaking of, along with Reno. And, no, not so that we can point fingers at Reno, or Clinton, or anyone - because this is the stuff that really gets to the heart of why our intelligence functions failed so badly for so many years. We need to understand where our attempts at balancing rights and security could be fine-tuned to plug holes.

And why do you think this is a significant focus of the investigation? 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 -- as opposed, say, to the national office's failure to authorize subpoenas, and the limits of Rule 6(e)?

Lord. Now who's being trollish? Okay, why do I believe this? Well, first, I don't know that I do or not - I would like the chance to have the full testimony on this. I would like the testimony, and the questioning, to be free of the "fellow commision member" taint.

My quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Partisanship? I"d say the only partisanship comes from those who now want to impede, minimize, and walk away from the investigation.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In other words, Republican leadership.

Wrong again. I think that, naturally because of the subject and the timing, the more rabid Dems were just about pre-orgasmic at the chance to run these public hearings so soon before the elections, thinking they were going to be a huge coup. I don't think they've worked out that way so far - they have been surprisingly mellow and purposeful, in spite of the sporadic rabid attempts from both sides. I've been more impressed with that than I thought I would have been. But, the people who thought these hearings were going to be one long demolition of Bush are disappointed, and what they do NOT want is a set of conclusions that call for someone defense-oriented, vigilant, and . . . well, certainly not Kerry. That's what's going to happen, though, and so the next best outcome is to fight this Gorelick thing tooth and nail, and leave the whole set of conclusions tainted with the "THEY ruined it" brush (for both sides.) Honestly, that's the only reason I can see that anyone with half a lick of legal training would not recognize that she should not be sitting on the commission. (To be fair, there are a few others who should be gone, too.)

Here, tellingly, you assume the "conclusion" will be for public consumption, not (e.g.) for the legislature or executive branch to act on.

I did to begin, but, as I said above, I have been more impressed that I expected to be with the direction this was taking.

I suspect you'll see a lot of recommendations that have more to do with the organization of the FBI and the CIA than what Bush did. And you seem to be forgetting that half the commission is composed of Republicans. If they're criticizing the President, maybe there's something to it.

Everyone is criticizing everyone, fairly equally, which is, I think, the right summary conclusion. I would like for the more specific conclusions to be a bit more in-depth, though, and I think the important witnesses should not be sitting there deciding things.

Oops, sorry, I forgot the bilmore syllogism: Criticism is a function of party loyalty. Therefore, if you criticize the President, you are acting of partisan interest, and your criticism can be ignored. Any Republicans on the commission who criticize the President can be ignored as Democrats in disguise.

You need a new tune. This is what you always fall back on when you can't make your points.

You wish half the country had heard of Gorelick. Because you care more about the political damage that the commission might do to your party's nominee than you do about how they might help us fight this war on terror.

You know, I read your line here, and I misread it at first, but the misreading was the most proper reading, I think. You are fighting the war on terror. Sort of like fighting forest fires. Anything to help your side. What you accuse me of constantly, but what I see as your constant focus.

I don't think anyone is going to come out of this process damaged. I think that the public conclusion is going to be, the system didn't protect us, because the system was protecting other things that, pre-9/11, were more on our minds.

Why do you want her on there so badly? Is it the balance? Would it make a difference if she was replaced by a pro-Clintonite?

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Tyrone_Slothrop
It's a steaming load of crap. Anyone who wants to see that can read it carefully, line by line. I am tempted to "fisk" it, to use bilmore's lingo, but it's late and it's not worth it.

Ty, Ty, Ty, Ty, hun. Don't you get it? If the 9/11 Commission's mission is something that is important to the future security of this country, should this important issue regarding the disconnect between the CIA and the FBI be left to dueling editorials in the WaPo and the NR? Or should this be something that the 9/11 Commission investigates? Does "investigate" translate into "read Gorelick's op-ed in the WaPo" to you? If so, you are beyond help.

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Not Me
Perhaps not half, but at least one person has:

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1842206

Finally, a source without the profit motive. I look forward to your future links to and support of, npr (Hi RT!).

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Not Me
Ty, don't you get it? This shouldn't be something that is determined by point-counter-point editorials in the WaPo and the NR. Gorelick needs to testify under oath as to her role in all this. Just like Clinton did, and Rice did, and Ashcrofit did, and Reno did, and Bush and Cheney will be doing.

See, hun, that is the problem. Gorelick is making her case on an editorial page instead of before the Commission, where she should be making her case.

Now do you get the conflict of interest?

They can take a statement from her, like they did with Zelikow. That doesn't seem to bother you. And she can recuse herself from dealing with, e.g., her memo. I've said this before.

According to you, the reason this is insufficient is that the significance of "the wall" is so massive that it looms over the pre-9/11 world like Harold Bloom and Shakespearean criticism. So far, you've posted nothing that supports this conjecture. It's a load of crap. It's CYA on the FBI's part, pointing fingers to avoid responsibility for failing to do their job. Check on the Sacred Terror book, written long before Ashcroft and Sensenbrenner and the National Review appropriated this issue to their own partisan ends: It goes on for pages and pages about the FBI's failures pre-9/11, and there is not a word about "the wall." Lots of words about other reasons for the FBI's insularity and lack of accountability, but zippo about "the wall." Which sets aside the fact that -- by all accounts -- Gorelick simply codified prior practice.

The logic of the piece you quoted is, Ashcroft said outrageous things, Gorelick bitch-slapped him, so they disagree and ergo there is a conflict of interest. This is exactly the game Ashcroft was playing when he started this, and it's a sorry-ass attempt to defuse the criticism of him that's coming. They're going to ream him for all sorts of things, basically because he couldn't have cared less about counterterrorism before 9/11 and got caught with his pants down, and he's going to whine that it's partisan and that it's all Gorelick's fault. And people who are too stupid to follow the details may think there's something to it.