Gorelick - 9/11

After months of defending the Bush administration's decision to go to war in Iraq, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is accusing the White House of "stonewalling" the independent commission set up to examine why America was vulnerable to the 9/11 attacks.

"While I don't want to believe such a basic lack of cooperation was intentional, it nonetheless creates the appearance of bureaucratic stonewalling," the influential Republican told the commission, in comments reported Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal.

"Excessive administration secrecy on issues related to the Sept. 11 attacks feeds conspiracy theories and reduces the public's confidence in government," he added.

The criticism from McCain, who was a main sponsor for the bill that created the independent probe, has Democrats piling on, with commission member Max Cleland, the former senator from Georgia, complaining that the White House is "cherry picking" the documents it wants to turn over for review.

"It's obvious they're sifting the information to the 9/11 commission now," he told the Journal. "The picture is not encouraging."

For its part the White House says it has nothing to hide.

"The president believes the commission should carefully investigate the evidence and follow all the facts wherever they should lead," White House Communications Director Dan Bartlett told the paper. "What the investigation would show is that we took terrorism very seriously."

Still, administration critics complain that access to key documents has to be routed through the Justice Department and that subpoena power will be restricted under rules required by the White House.

The Bush administration insisted that the 10-member panel be evenly spilt between Democrats and Republicans, requiring at least one Republican to go along before any witness is subpoenaed.

A controversy is also brewing over claims from former Clinton administration officials that their warnings about Osama bin Laden went unheeded by Bush officials.

"I know that during the transition between the Clinton and Bush administrations that the outgoing administration told the incoming one that they would spend more time on terrorism and bin Laden than anything else," Sen. Hillary Clinton complained earlier this year, adding, "That wasn't their priority. Their priorities were different."

Though commission members include sharp-eyed partisan Democrats like ex-Whitewater damage controller Richard Ben Veniste and former Janet Reno deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, Republicans on the committee seem just as flat-footed as ever.

In a move that signals that the White House is committed to staying on the defensive, neither administration officials nor their ham-handed allies in Congress have expressed any interest in ex-President Clinton's confession last year that he turned down a deal to extradite Osama bin Laden to the U.S. in 1996.

Despite the GOP's investigative lethargy, the ex-president seems to be taking no chances. While Mr. Bartlett told the Journal that President Bush was open to being interviewed by 9/11 probers, a Clinton spokesman declined to say whether his boss would also agree to be grilled.

Clintonites Deny Undeniable
By Richard Miniter
Washington Times | September 25, 2003

Denial is more than a river in Egypt. It runs through the Clinton administration's Sudan policy.

As the media attention on my book Losing bin Laden grows and it climbs the New York Times bestseller list, some former Clinton officials have emerged to deny the undeniable. They deny that Sudan ever offered to arrest bin Laden and turn him over to American justice, they deny that Sudan ever offered to share its intelligence files on bin Laden's terror network, and they offer excuses for President Clinton's failure to retaliate following bin Laden's attack on the USS Cole (which killed 17 sailors). Since the facts and the on-the-record accounts of senior Clinton officials are against them, they are reduced to parsing words and obfuscatory statements. That's unfortunate. The point of examining Mr. Clinton's flawed war on terror is not to condemn the former president, but to learn from his successes and his setbacks and apply those lessons to the current phase of America's war on terror.

In that spirit, let's examine the record and see how well those denials hold up.

Arresting bin Laden. They write nearby that "no offer was ever conveyed to any senior official in Washington." Does Sandy Berger, the former National Security Advisor, count as a senior official in Washington? Here is what Mr. Berger told the Washington Post's Barton Gellman: "The FBI did not believe we had enough evidence to indict bin Laden at that time and therefore opposed bringing him to the United States." If there was no offer, just what offer was the FBI evaluating and opposing? Or is Mr. Berger telling tall tales? Other senior Clinton officials are on the record debating the merits of taking bin Laden into custody from Sudan. Susan Rice, an assistant secretary of state under Mr. Clinton, told the Village Voice: "They [the Sudanese] calculated that we didn't have the means to successfully prosecute bin Laden. That's why I question the sincerity of the offer." You can't doubt the sincerity of an offer that doesn't exist. Perhaps the Clinton administration overlooked that Sudan had handed over the infamous terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, to the French. He now sits in a French prison, while bin Laden is free. As Ambassador Timothy Carney argued in 1996, even if the offer wasn't serious, why not call Sudan's bluff? If Sudan failed to deliver, then the skeptics are proven right. If Sudan did hand bin Laden over, then Mr. Clinton would strike a blow against international terrorism. And, of course, Sudan did make good on its word to expel bin Laden from that country in May 1996 — at the Clinton administration's request. If Sudan could expel bin Laden, why couldn't it arrest him?
Sudan's intelligence files. Some Clinton administration officials deny that Sudan offered to provide its intelligence files on bin Laden. In my research, I've uncovered letters by senior Sudanese officials, including one from that nation's president, addressed to President Clinton, top Clinton officials and senior members of Congress expressly offering those files. Besides, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced in September 1997, that she was sending a team to Sudan to re-engage Sudan on terrorism issues. They planned to examine those files. That promising initiative was overturned by the White House six days later. Whose fault was that?
The USS Cole. They admit that "al-Qaeda was a prime suspect," but say more investigation was needed to prove bin Laden guilty. They ignore that the CIA had traced phone calls from the attackers to a house in Yemen and from that house to bin Laden's satellite phone, and traced $5,000 sent to the terrorists from bin Laden. Yes, the investigation was ongoing, but that should have been enough. They forget that America's enemies are not in a court of law, but are waging war on us. And, even if they weren't sure that bin Laden was behind the attack, there was blood on his hands. Bin Laden's network killed 59 Americans in the Clinton years. The retaliation plan developed by the Clinton administration would have smashed all of his terrorist infrastructure in Afghanistan — less than a year before September 11.

After September 11, some Clinton officials admitted their mistakes. Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, told the Boston Globe: "Clearly, not enough was done. We should have caught this. Why this happened, I don't know . . . We should have prevented this." Nancy Soderberg, a member of Clinton's National Security Council, added: "In hindsight, it wasn't enough, and anyone involved in policy would have to admit that."

Madeleine Albright recently told Bill O'Reilly, "do you think we're so stupid that, if somebody had offered us Osama bin Laden, we would haven't taken it?"

Madam Secretary, that is now for the American people to judge.

9-11 Commission stonewalls TWA 800 author

Posted: March 16, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Dear Chairman Kean,

Al Salzenberg of the 9-11 staff suggested I write you a letter to express my dissatisfaction with the progress of the 9-11 Commission.

On or about Feb. 20, I talked to Mr. Salzenberg at some length about one very specific concern I had with the commission. I was impressed with the time he gave me and the fact that he seemed, at least, to take my information seriously.

My concern was with the presence of former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick on the commission. Immediately after the crash of TWA Flight 800 in July 1996, Justice Department attorney Valerie Caproni fully ignored existing statutes and gave the FBI power over the National Transportation Safety Board in the management of the investigation.

In a stroke, as I explained to Mr. Salzenberg, the Clinton Justice Department hermetically sealed the investigation and silenced the independent voices of the NTSB. Ms. Caproni could not have acted on her own authority. As the "political officer" equivalent in the Justice Department, Ms. Gorelick likely orchestrated this takeover – one that all parties now acknowledge to have been illegal.

On Aug. 22, 1996, just a few days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, Ms. Gorelick oversaw a critical Justice Department meeting with the FBI. Immediately after this meeting, as it happened, all serious inquiry into the fate of TWA 800 came to an end.

On the next day, for instance, the FAA began to inquire whether any dog-training exercises had ever taken place on the plane that would become TWA 800. On the same day, as CNN reported, the FBI now claimed publicly for the first time that the explosive residue found along the right wing "could have been brought on the plane by a passenger and was not part of a bomb." Likewise, after the meeting, the FBI would do no more eyewitness interviews, at least not for the next two months. The Bureau only did a handful after that – and all of those for the wrong reasons.

The search was now on for a rationale to explain away both the explosive residue and the stunningly specific testimony of 270 eyewitnesses. This fully misdirected inquiry would result in the two most egregious corruptions of the investigation.

The first was the FBI's claim that a dog-training exercise in St. Louis six weeks before the crash resulted in the spilling of the explosive residue found on the plane. The second was the CIA's claim that a 3,200-foot climb by a nose-less TWA 800 fooled the eyewitnesses into thinking they had seen a missile.

The CIA based its theory on an eyewitness interview that never took place. This can be easily proved. The FBI based its theory on a dog-training exercise that never took place. This, too, can be easily proved. Both fabrications were conscious.

As I explained to Mr. Salzenberg, mine was not a crank call. I had written a book on TWA Flight 800. I had just the day before undergone a smart three-hour interview by the History Channel on the subject. I understand the political dynamics of the investigation better than anyone who was not actively complicit. As I explained, too, there is excellent reason to believe that Gorelick's dubious role in the TWA 800 investigation contributed to New York's vulnerability in the days leading up to Sept. 11.

I suggested that Gorelick may have been appointed to the panel to discourage any connections from being made between July 1996 and September 2001. I could see no other reason why she would leave her cushy gig as vice chairman of Fannie Mae to serve as one of only five Democrats on the commission.

Mr. Salzenberg promised that he would look into the Gorelick issue and get back to me. Three weeks later, on March 10, I called him. I explained again who I was and what my concern was.

"I have talked to 400 people since then," he said gruffly. He did not remember the call. I explained in more detail.

"Oh, you're that freelancer," he added dismissively.

"If it matters," I said, "I'm the executive editor of a respectable Midwest business magazine, and I've written a book on the subject at hand."

Mr. Salzenberg asked me what I wanted. It struck me that he did not even take notes on the last call or any call. I told him I wanted to share my information with the panel, and if need be, I would be happy to testify.

"Lots of people like to testify," he groused. "We can't handle them all."

"I know this subject better than anyone," I responded.

"If you want to make charges," he said, "you are free to use the public air waves or write books or letters to the editor."

"I'm trying to do my good citizen thing," I said. "I am trying to go through established channels."

"Well, we are trying to wrap up and get out our report," he said curtly, implying there would be no time, regardless of the quality of my information.

"Do I have any other official recourse?" I asked.

"Write a letter to the chairman," he snapped.

And so Chairman Kean, I write this letter. As a Garden State native myself, and the son of a Newark cop, I appeal to your sense of justice. If you refuse to even look at the fate of TWA Flight 800, you will have done your country a disservice. You will have justified the cynicism that now plagues the nation – and especially the aviation community. And you will have lost your own shot at greatness.

It is not too late. If you're game, I'll buy my own plane ticket.

Sincerely,

Jack Cashill

Sins of Commission
Behind the effort to blame Bush for September 11.
Wall Street Journal
Monday, March 22, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

It was always a terrible idea for the September 11 commission to drop its report in the middle of a Presidential election campaign, and we are now seeing why. That body is turning into a fiasco of partisanship and political score-settling.

To be precise, Democrats are using the commission as a platform to assail the Bush Administration for fumbling the war on terror, implicitly blaming it even for 9/11. That's the clear message of the testimony to be offered this week to the commission by former Clinton officials, who conveniently leaked their opinions to the New York Times in advance. Conveniently, too, former anti-terror aide Richard Clarke has chosen this week to begin the media tour for his new book pushing the same anti-Bush theme. He's also scheduled to meet the commission this week.

If you believe this is all a coincidence, you probably also believe that a reflective, nonpartisan look at the mindset that allowed 9/11 to happen is possible in today's Washington. It would be nice if it were. Democracies are notoriously bad at anticipating crises, and it would help future policy makers to have a thoughtful look at how and why we missed the al Qaeda threat as it was massing in the 1990s. In order to take such a detached view, the Pearl Harbor inquiry waited until after World War II to publish its findings.

The 9/11 Commission has instead been driven from the start by meaner political calculations: To appease the demands of those (few) victims' families looking for someone to blame, and to provide a vehicle to embarrass the Bush Administration. That's the real reason Henry Kissinger and George Mitchell--two men who have acted in the past as statesmen--were hounded out as the original commission leaders on trivial conflict-of-interest grounds.

Their replacements are the junior varsity and have been unable to lift the commission above narrow partisan scheming. Republican chairman Tom Kean, a former governor little schooled in defense and foreign affairs, is apparently oblivious to the political hardball being played around him. Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton, an ex-member of Congress well-versed in national security, is a better choice.

But Mr. Hamilton has to contend with his fellow Democrats, who include hyper-partisans Richard Ben-Veniste, Jamie Gorelick and Tim Roemer. These three caucus weekly, reporting back regularly to Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle for political fine-tuning.

Ms. Gorelick has her own clear conflict of interest: As Janet Reno's deputy attorney general, she had a major law enforcement role in combatting the terror threat. Her Administration's decision to handle the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 as a mere "law-enforcement" problem ought to be central to the commission's probe. She and Mr. Ben-Veniste also wouldn't mind being Attorney General in a Kerry Administration.

Inside the commission, these Members have been pushing the argument that Clinton officials warned the Bush Administration about al Qaeda, only to be ignored by men and women who were too preoccupied with Iraq and missile defense to care. So having failed to contain al Qaeda during its formative decade, and having made almost no mention of this grave threat in the 2000 campaign, these officials now want us to believe that in their final hours they urgently begged the Bushies to act with force and dispatch. Sure.

As for Mr. Clarke, he is now flacking his book by blaming the Bush Administration for failing to capture Osama bin Laden while offering the novel sociological insight (in last week's Time magazine) that "maybe we should be asking why the terrorists hate us." We'd take Mr. Clarke's words more seriously if, as America's lead anti-terror official from 1998 through Mr. Bush's first two years, he had warned someone that al Qaeda might have a strategy to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings. He already knew that an Egyptian had flown one plane into the drink and that al Qaeda was interested in flight training. Why didn't Mr. Clarke connect those dots?

The author is also highly critical of both the Afghan and Iraq campaigns. But inside the Clinton and Bush Administrations, his main pre-9/11 counsel was to energize the proxy war in Afghanistan through the Northern Alliance to make life more difficult for the Taliban. This certainly would have helped in the mid-1990s when al Qaeda was massing in that country. But by 2001 it would have done nothing to break up the al Qaeda cells that were already operating in Florida and Germany and that carried out the 9/11 hijackings.

As for Iraq, he and other Bush critics want to claim that the U.S. invasion has only created more terrorists--as if there weren't any before March 2003. And as if those terrorists are only striking at Americans and our allies in Iraq, not also at Turks, and Indonesians, French and Saudis.

Mr. Clarke lambastes the White House for seeking links between Iraq and 9/11, even as he himself asserts that he knew in the immediate aftermatch that there were no such links. How could he have known that? Mr. Clarke fails to mention that Abdul Rahman Yasin, the one conspirator from the 1993 WTC bombing still at large, had fled to Iraq and was harbored by Saddam Hussein for years. In our view, a U.S. President who failed to ask questions about Iraq and other state sponsors of terrorism in the wake of 9/11 would have been irresponsible.

There is a profound contradiction at the heart of this 20-20 hindsight. On the one hand, the critics want to blame the Bush Administration for failing to prevent 9/11, but on the other they assail it for acting "pre-emptively" on a needless war in Iraq. Well, which do they really believe?

We'd guess it is the latter because when these same critics held the reins of government they failed to do much against al Qaeda beyond fire cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away. Their boast that after 9/11 they would have toppled the Taliban, as well as increased pressure on Saddam Hussein, is impossible to credit. Their criticism now, in books and especially through the 9/11 Commission, is a case of blaming the Bush Administration in order to absolve themselves of any and all responsibility.

If the 9/11 Commission members really wanted to make a public contribution, they would shut down and resume their probe after the elections. Their final report is now due on July 26, two months after its original deadline and the same day that the Democratic Party convention begins in Boston. We doubt that's a coincidence either.

How Richard Clarke concocted the TWA 800 'exit strategy' ... and why

Posted: April 5, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Editor's note: James Sanders co-authored this commentary. Also, the price has been slashed on "First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America"! The latest book by Jack Cashill and James Sanders explains how a determined corps of ordinary citizens worked to reveal the compromise and corruption that tainted the federal investigation.

Richard Clarke takes no credit for what is likely an act of criminal obstruction of justice

On July 17, 1996 – Liberation Day in Saddam's Iraq and two days before the Atlanta Olympics – TWA Flight 800 blew up in the sky off the south coast of Long Island. The reader need not endorse a particular theory as to the nature of that crash to appreciate the role that Richard Clarke played in devising the one theory that prevailed.

Clarke's so-called "exit strategy" was ingeniously conceived, ruthlessly executed and dishonest in its every detail. Whether Clarke was motivated by patriotism or political opportunism only he can tell, but his strategy did spare America an unwelcome war with Iran and assured Bill Clinton's re-election. Unfortunately, it also led the nation blindly to Sept. 11.

In his new book "Against All Enemies," Clarke offers the first published inside account of the demise of TWA Flight 800, much of it transparently false, but all of it entirely revealing. At that time, Clarke served as chairman of the Coordinating Security Group on terrorism. Within 30 minutes of the plane's crash, Clarke tells us, he had convened a meeting of the CSG in the White House Situation Room.

"The FAA," Clarke reports, "was at a total loss for an explanation. The flight path and the cockpit communications were normal. The aircraft had climbed to 17,000 feet, then there was no aircraft." In fact, the Federal Aviation Administration did have an explanation. Its radar operators in New York had seen on their screens an unknown object "merging" with TWA 800 in the seconds before the crash and rushed the radar data to Washington. Indeed, when Ron Schleede of the National Transportation Safety Board first saw the data, he exclaimed, "Holy Christ, this looks bad." He added later, "It showed this track that suggested something fast made the turn and took the airplane."

An NTSB document obtained by the authors reveals that the FAA had picked up the telephone and alerted the "White House" immediately. Clarke is the man at the White House to whom this message would have been relayed. The FAA radar almost certainly prompted this emergency CSG meeting. There was no comparable meeting after the ValuJet crash two months earlier.

Clarke also deceives the reader about the altitude of TWA 800. The last altitude the FAA actually recorded was about 13,800 feet. This is easily verified and beyond debate. There is a reason here for Clarke's dissembling. He needs to lift the aircraft – even if just in the retelling – above the reach of a shoulder-fired missile.

Within weeks of the crash, the FBI would interview more than 700 eyewitnesses – 270 of whom saw lights streaking upwards towards the plane. Although they were not allowed near the best witnesses, Defense Department analysts also debriefed some of these witnesses. These analysts told the FBI that 34 of those interviewed described events "consistent with the characteristics of the flight of [anti-aircraft] missiles." There were also scores of witness drawings, some so accurate and vivid they could chill the blood.

About four weeks after the crash, Clarke reportedly met with the late FBI terrorist expert, John O'Neill, who told Clarke that the eyewitness interviews "were pointing to a missile attack, a Stinger." For the record, no eyewitness ever mentioned a "Stinger." No credible independent theorist insisted on a Stinger, nor did the Defense Department. Clarke sets up the relatively small, shoulder-fired Stinger missile as a straw man to discredit all terrorist or missile-related theories. In his book, he takes credit for doing the same.

"[TWA 800] was at 15,000 feet," he reportedly told O'Neill – who died at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 and can no longer correct the record. "No Stinger or any other missile like it can go that high." One would think that on so sensitive and contentious a point, Clarke would have made an effort to get the altitude of TWA 800 right or even consistently wrong. He does neither. The real altitude is not 15,000 feet or 17,000 feet, but 13,800 feet – an altitude at which the Stinger could be effective. In a book of this importance, such mistakes and omissions shock the knowing reader.

It should be noted too that no credible analyst – at least one not tasked with creating factually false propaganda – would limit the type of missile seen by so many excellent witnesses. All credible analysis would begin with short, medium and long-range anti-aircraft missiles. Existing evidence would be used to narrow the possibilities. Such simple, reasonable analysis was missing from the TWA 800 investigation.

Likewise missing from the investigation or from Clarke's book is any mention of satellite data. On Oct. 4, 2001, Defense Department satellites equipped with infrared sensors captured a Ukrainian missile striking a Russian airliner 30,000 feet above the Black Sea. Our government informed Russia within five minutes. In "Against All Enemies," no one even inquires about the possibility of such data.

In reading Clarke's book, one can see how thoroughly seduced he was by the Clintons and his proximity to power. He portrays himself as the ultimate insider, flying to JFK Airport with Clinton a week after the crash, briefing him on the new safety regulations that the president would be sharing with the victims' families. At this point, Clarke tells us that the president is still convinced that terrorists had destroyed the plane. This much is likely true.

About the performance of the Clintons among the victims' families, Clarke positively gushes. Here is the president "praying with them, hugging them, taking pictures with them." Here is "Mrs. Clinton" alone in a makeshift chapel, praying, "on her knees." Clarke, of course, makes no mention of how the administration would soon abandon his strict new safety guidelines for the sake of campaign cash, nor the role Clarke himself played in making that solicitation politically possible.

About four weeks after the crash, based on his own rough timeline, Clarke visited the site of the investigation on Long Island. There he casually stopped to talk to a technician. Their presumed conversation is so utterly disingenuous it needs to be repeated in full:

"So this is where the bomb exploded?" I asked. "Where on the plane was it?"

"The explosion was just forward of the middle, below the floor of the passenger compartment, below row 23. But it wasn't a bomb," he added. "See the pitting pattern and the tear. It was a slow, gaseous eruption, from inside."

"What's below row 23?" I asked, slowly sensing that this was not what I thought it was.

"The center line fuel tank. It was only half full, might have heated up on the runway and caused a gas cloud inside. Then if a spark, a short circuit ..." He indicated an explosion with his hands.

The technician goes on to tell Clarke that these "old 747s" have an "electrical pump inside the center line fuel tank" and lays the blame on the pump. In fact, almost everything about the conversation is wrong, including the technician calling the center wing tank a "center line fuel tank." The tank was not half full but virtually empty. The evening was a cool 71 degrees. The plane's pumps were all recovered and found blameless, and the fuel pump wiring is not even inside the tank. The NTSB admittedly never did find the alleged ignition source.

But pride goeth before the fall. In this one chance encounter, Clarke manages to sum up the essence of the exit strategy months, if not years, before the NTSB does, and he takes all credit for it. That same day, Clarke tells us he returned to Washington and shared his exploding-fuel-tank theory with Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and National Security Agency Director Tony Lake, even sketching the 747 design.

"Does the NTSB agree with you," Lake reportedly asked Clarke. Clarke's purported response speaks to the priority politics would take over truth in this investigation – "Not yet."

Clarke adds the telling comment, "We were all cautiously encouraged." They were "encouraged" because the political people did not want to face the consequences of terrorism. At this same time in the investigation, however, the FBI was ignoring the politics. Its agents were telling the New York Times that explosive residue had been found along the right wing of the plane right around row 23.

Moreover, the FBI's Washington lab had identified the residue as PETN, a component of either missiles or bombs. According to a Times article on Aug. 14 – four weeks after the crash – investigators "concluded that the center fuel tank caught fire as many as 24 seconds after the initial blast that split apart the plane, a finding that deals a serious blow to the already remote possibility that a mechanical accident caused the crash."

Something had to give, and it was the FBI. On Aug. 22, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick summoned the FBI's Jim Kallstrom to Washington for a come to Jesus meeting. (Although Kallstrom dominated the investigation, Clarke never mentions him by name.) Kallstrom had been a good soldier the past five weeks. He had kept all talk of eyewitnesses and satellites and radar and missiles out of the news. But the evidence had inevitably led him to a terrorist scenario of some sort, and there was no easy way to turn back.

To be sure, no account of the meeting provides any more than routine detail, but behaviors begin to change immediately afterward, especially after the New York Times broke a headline story the next day, top right, above the fold – "Prime Evidence Found That Device Exploded in Cabin of Flight 800." This article stole the thunder from Clinton's election-driven approval of welfare reform in that same day's paper and threatened to undermine the peace and prosperity message of next week's Democratic convention.

From that day forward, the administration would spend all its energies making Clarke's exploding-fuel-tank theory stick. When, under coercion, the FBI changed its story, so did the New York Times – to which the FBI had been speaking almost exclusively. When the Times fell, so did the rest of the major media. They would soon enough brand all honest dissent "conspiracy theory." As to Kallstrom, he was never the same. "We need to stop the hypocrisy," he confessed to Dan Rather in a troubled, honest moment on Sept. 11, but he would not explain what that hypocrisy was.

With Kallstrom reluctantly on board, the administration could advance the fuel-tank theory by losing or corrupting the physical evidence. In our book, "First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America," we document in detail how this was done. No fewer than four serious professionals within the investigation made specific and unprecedented allegations of evidence theft or tampering: Linda Kunz and Terrel Stacey of TWA, Jim Speer of TWA and the Air Line Pilots Association, and Hank Hughes of the NTSB. Their allegations were taken seriously. Kunz and Speer were suspended from the investigation – Kunz permanently. Stacey was arrested. And Hughes was denounced by the FBI's Kallstrom for his participation in a "kangaroo court of malcontents," namely a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing. Stacey's reporting partner, James Sanders, and his wife Elizabeth, a TWA trainer, were also arrested and convicted of conspiracy.

The one block of evidence that proved tamperproof, however, was the eyewitness testimony. Here, Clarke proved his ingenuity again.

Clarke, as has become apparent, has the habit of changing stories. In the book, it is he who persuades the FBI's John O'Neill that a Stinger could not have taken down TWA Flight 800. In an earlier New Yorker article, however, Clarke reports that it was O'Neill who insisted that TWA 800 was out of range of the Stinger. And it was O'Neill, who believed that the "ascending flare" must have been something else, like "the ignition of leaking fuel from the aircraft." Never mind that the center wing tank was empty at the time of the explosion.

In the New Yorker piece, Clarke gives the already deceased O'Neill credit for persuading the CIA to create an animation of the "ascending flare" theory. Students of this crash have long been troubled by how the CIA got involved and who bridged the deep territorial divide between the FBI and the CIA. That person had to be Richard Clarke. All evidence points to him. Only he had the respect of the agencies and the confidence of the Clintons. In the book, he blandly describes the CIA animation:

A simulation of the crash would later indicate that what witnesses saw as a streak of a missile going up towards the aircraft was actually a column of jet fuel from the initial explosion and rupture, falling and then catching fire.

Clarke's description of what the witnesses saw does not begin to square with what the witnesses actually did see. Here, for instance, is the FBI "302" for Mike Wire, a Philadelphia millwright taking a break on a Westhampton bridge:

Wire saw a white light that was traveling skyward from the ground at approximately a 40-degree angle. Wire described the white light as a light that sparkled and thought it was some type of fireworks. Wire stated that the white light "zig zagged" [sic] as it traveled upwards, and at the apex of its travel the white light "arched over" and disappeared from Wire's view ... Wire stated the white light traveled outwards from the beach in a south-southeasterly direction.

Later, the NTSB would allege that no witness observed the telltale zigzag of a missile as it attempted to acquire its target. But Mike Wire did indeed observe that key signature of an anti-aircraft missile at work, as did many others. And like them, Wire told the FBI that this streak culminated in a huge "fireball."

Unknown to Wire, the CIA chose to build its case squarely on his testimony. Among these Hamptons-area eyewitnesses, Wire was the rare working-class guy. He was not in a position to notice or protest. In the CIA video, the narrator claims that "FBI investigators determined precisely where the eyewitness was standing" while the video shows the explosion from Wire's perspective on Beach Lane Bridge. The narration continues, "The white light the eyewitness saw was very likely the aircraft very briefly ascending and arching over after it exploded rather than a missile attacking the aircraft."

The CIA animation converts Wire's "40-degree" climb to one of roughly 70 or 80 degrees. It reduces the smoke trail from three dimensions, south and east "outward from the beach," to a small, two dimensional blip far off shore. Worse, it fully ignores Wire's claim that the object ascended "skyward from the ground," and places his first sighting 20 degrees above the horizon, exactly where Flight 800 would have been.

Curiously, however, the CIA narrator repeats Wire's claim that the projectile "zigzagged." The CIA's studied indifference to facts helps answer the larger question of how the agency could recreate events at such obvious odds with Wire's original and detailed 302. Here is what CIA Analyst 1 finally reported to the NTSB in a 1999 interview:

[Wire] was an important eyewitness to us. And we asked the FBI to talk to him again, and they did. In his original description, he thought he had seen a firework and that perhaps that firework had originated on the beach behind the house. We went to that location and realized that if he was only seeing the airplane [TWA 800], that he would not see a light appear from behind the rooftop of that house.

The light would actually appear in the sky. It's high enough in the sky that that would have to happen. When he was reinterviewed, he said that is indeed what happened. The light did appear in the sky. Now, when the FBI told us that, we got even more comfortable with our theory.

This may be the single most egregious and conscious bit of dissembling in the entire investigation. Here's why: The FBI never contacted Mike Wire after July 1996. He has never changed his account, and there is no new 302 in his file. Someone made up this new interview out of whole cloth. That the CIA and FBI cooperated in its fabrication strongly suggests Clarke's involvement. To be sure, Clarke takes no credit for what is likely an act of criminal obstruction of justice.

As to the motive for devising an exit strategy, Clarke provides this as well. He tells us that while driving to the White House to convene the post-crash meeting, "I dreaded what I thought was about to happen. The Eisenhower option." After the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three weeks earlier, Clinton had told Clark and his colleagues that "he wanted a massive attack" against Iran. Had Iran been behind the downing of TWA Flight 800 – or Iraq for that matter or al-Qaida – the president would have had to respond. In fact, Clarke labels this chapter of his book, "The Almost War, 1996."

As the terrorism czar, Clarke was indeed in the loop. He knew an act of war had brought down TWA Flight 800. The question that had to be answered before retaliating, however, was who was responsible. Although Iran was the chief suspect, U.S. intelligence could not narrow the field to one believable culprit. This is critical, because a suspect had to be identified with sufficient specificity to convince the United Nations to sanction a war without whose approval Clinton would not move.

So the American public and the world could not be told the truth. The United States had suspects, but not enough compelling intelligence to name the nation or entity responsible. Such confessions equal bad politics – the kind that lose elections. The nation would demand retribution, which Clinton could not deliver. Clinton was the consummate politician. Declaring the loss of TWA Flight 800 to be the result of an exploding fuel tank was simply good politics.

At the Washington meeting of Aug. 22, it is likely that Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, also a trusted Clinton insider, told the FBI's Jim Kallstrom something close to the truth, that a public revelation of terrorism would push America into a possibly inappropriate war. The fact that such a revelation would also have jeopardized Clinton's re-election might have influenced Gorelick and Clarke, but it would not have stopped Kallstrom. Up until this point, he had a serious career. One has to suspect that Gorleick was placed on the 9-11 Commission to keep the TWA 800 story under wraps.

Unfortunately, actions have consequences. In this case a brilliant political decision deprived the nation of an opportunity to focus on the problem of terrorism and prepare to foil the next attack on America – one that would surely come, this time, once again, to New York and through the air.

Jack Cashill

Newsmax – April 12, 2004

Gorelick Ignored Terror Warnings, Ex-FBI Chief Says

In her first year as deputy U.S. attorney general in the Clinton administration, Sept. 11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick was warned that lax U.S. immigration policies made the U.S. a tempting target for terrorists, former FBI Director Louis Freeh revealed on Monday, suggesting that Gorelick did little to remedy the situation.

"Protecting our homeland from attacks by foreign terrorists had long been the FBI's priority," said Freeh in a lengthy Wall Street Journal op-ed piece.

"Back in September 1994, I recommended to Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick that the DoJ strengthen investigative powers against suspected 'undesirable aliens,' accelerating deportation appeal proceedings and limiting U.S. participation in a visa waiver pilot program under which 9.5 million foreigners entered the U.S. in 1994."

Freeh said he also recommended "that we include provisions for the detention and removal of undesirable aliens, under a special, closed-court procedure."

"I also criticized alien deportation appeal procedures which often took years to conclude. Finally, I recommended legislation to provide the FBI with roving wiretap authority to investigate terrorist activities in the U.S."

But if Gorelick took Freeh's warnings seriously, she didn't make much headway with her superiors.

By 1996, under the Clinton administration's Citizenship USA program, thousands of criminal suspects were rushed through the naturalization process without proper background checks in order to get them on the voting roles on time for that year's presidential election.

According to former Justice Department investigator David Schippers, under the accelerated procedures, the U.S. was swarming with:

• More than 75,000 new citizens who had arrest records when they applied.

• An additional 115,000 citizens whose fingerprints were unclassifiable for various technical reasons and were never resubmitted.

• Another 61,000 people who were given citizenship with no fingerprints submitted at all.

At least one new citizen was already in jail by the time he was naturalized under the Clinton administration's program.

According to Schippers' 1999 book, "Sell Out," Jamie Gorelick was tasked with expediting the new rules under which criminal background checks were suspended for new immigrants.

Clinton's Policies Invited 9/11

By Ann Coulter
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 15, 2004

Last week, 9-11 commissioner John Lehman revealed that "it was the policy (before 9-11) and I believe remains the policy today to fine airlines if they have more than two young Arab males in secondary questioning because that's discriminatory." Hmmm ... Is 19 more than two? Why, yes, I believe it is. So if two Jordanian cab drivers are searched before boarding a flight out of Newark, Osama bin Laden could then board that plane without being questioned. I'm no security expert, but I'm pretty sure this gives terrorists an opening for an attack.

In a sane world, Lehman's statement would have made headlines across the country the next day. But not one newspaper, magazine or TV show has mentioned that it is official government policy to prohibit searching more than two Arabs per flight.

Meanwhile, another 9-11 commissioner, the greasy Richard Ben-Veniste, claimed to be outraged that the CIA did not immediately give intelligence on 9-11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar to the FBI. As we now know – or rather, I alone know because I'm the only person in America watching the 9-11 hearings – Ben-Veniste should have asked his fellow commissioner Jamie Gorelick about that.

In his testimony this week, John Ashcroft explained that the FBI wasn't even told Almihdhar and Alhazmi were in the country until weeks before the 9-11 attack – because of Justice Department guidelines put into place in 1995. The FBI wasn't allowed to put al-Qaida specialists on the hunt for Almihdhar and Alhazmi – because of Justice Department guidelines put into place in 1995. Indeed, the FBI couldn't get a warrant to search Zacarias Moussaoui's computer – because of Justice Department guidelines put into place in 1995.

The famed 1995 guidelines were set forth in a classified memorandum written by the then-deputy attorney general titled "Instructions for Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations," which imposed a "draconian" wall between counterintelligence and criminal investigations.

What Ashcroft said next was breathtaking. Prohibited from mounting a serious search for Almihdhar and Alhazmi, an irritated FBI investigator wrote to FBI headquarters, warning that someone would die because of these policies – "since the biggest threat to us, OBL (Osama bin Laden), is getting the most protection."

FBI headquarters responded: "We're all frustrated with this issue. These are the rules. NSLU (National Security Law Unit) does not make them up. But somebody did make these rules. Somebody built this wall."

The person who built that wall described in the infamous 1995 memo, Ashcroft said, "is a member of the commission." If this were an episode of "Matlock," the camera would slowly pan away from Ashcroft's face at this point and then quickly jump to an extreme close-up of Jamie Gorelick's horrified expression. Armed marshals would then escort the kicking, screaming Gorelick away in leg irons as the closing credits rolled. Gorelick was the deputy attorney general in 1995.

The 9-11 commission has finally uncovered the proverbial "smoking gun"! But it was fired by one of the 9-11 commissioners. Maybe between happy reminiscences about the good old days of Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Elian Gonzales raid, Ben-Veniste could ask Gorelick about those guidelines. Democrats think it's a conflict of interest for Justice Scalia to have his name in the same phonebook as Dick Cheney. But there is no conflict of interest having Gorelick sit on a commission that should be investigating her.

Bill O'Reilly's entire summary of Ashcroft's testimony was to accuse Ashcroft of throwing sheets over naked statues rather than fighting terrorism. No mention of the damning Gorelick memo. No one knows about the FAA's No-Searching-Arabs counterterrorism policy. Predictions that conservatives have finally broken through the wall of sound coming from the mainstream media may have been premature.

When Democrats make an accusation against Republicans, newspaper headlines repeat the accusation as a fact: "U.S. Law Chief 'Failed to Heed Terror Warnings,'" "Bush Was Told of Qaida Steps Pre-9-11; Secret Memo Released," "Bush White House Said to Have Failed to Make al-Qaida an Early Priority."

But when Republicans make accusations against Democrats – even accusations backed up by the hard fact of a declassified Jamie Gorelick memo – the headlines note only that Republicans are making accusations: "Ashcroft Lays Blame at Clinton's Feet," "Ashcroft: Blame Bubba for 9-11," "Ashcroft Faults Clinton in 9-11 Failures."

It's amazing how consistent it is. A classic of the genre was the Chicago Tribune headline, which managed to use both constructs in a single headline: "Ashcroft Ignored Terrorism, Panel Told; Attorney General Denies Charges, Blames Clinton." Why not: "Reno Ignored Terrorism, Panel Told; Former Deputy Attorney General Denies Charges, Blames Bush"?

Democrats actively created policies that were designed to hamstring terrorism investigations. The only rap against the Bush administration is that it failed to unravel the entire 9-11 terrorism plot based on a memo titled: "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

I have news for liberals: Bin Laden is still determined to attack inside the United States! Could they please tell us when and where the next attack will be? Because unless we know that, it's going to be difficult to stop it if we can't search Arabs.

The Other August 6th Memo

By Michael P. Tremoglie
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 19, 2004

After President Bush’s National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice testified before the 9/11 Commission on April 8, the administration’s critics said much about a memo written on August 6, 2001. This memo known as a Presidential Daily Briefing (PDB) was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

Commissioner and partisan Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste attempted to use this memo to prove the Bush administration did nothing to prevent terrorism. However, Rice replied, “The fact is that this August 6th PDB was in response to the president's questions about whether or not something might happen or something might be planned by al-Qaeda inside the United States…He asked because all of the threat reporting or the threat reporting that was actionable was about the threats abroad, not about the United States.”

The memo contained a “discussion” on whether al-Qaeda might use hijacking to try to free a prisoner in the United States. The PDB concluded that “the FBI had full field investigations under way,” Rice said. “Commissioner, this was not a warning.”

Yet that has not prevented the liberal media, partisan Commissioners, or the “ 9/11 Families” (actually the politically motivated families of twelve of the victims) from carping that Bush knew of the hijackings in advance and did nothing, or that Dr. Rice was “lying” under oath. Now that the memo has been declassified, Democrats are still attempting to make a mountain from this molehill – despite reports published in Human Events that Democratic senator Bob Graham of the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed what Condoleeza Rice said. This was not a warning.

However, there was another memo written that same day, August 6, 2001, that neither Ben-Veniste nor the other commissioner nor the so-called “9/11 Families” ever bothered to examine – although they should. This memo, written by Larry Thompson, Deputy Attorney General, addressed the issue of the rules that prevented the sharing and collection of intelligence data. This memo is every bit as pertinent as the Presidential Daily Briefing memo of August 6, 2001, (if not more so), the one Democrats are attempting to exploit for political purposes.

This memo concerned collection of intelligence and the lack of integration of resources with the departments responsible for counterterrorism. Speaking to the “National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States” on December 8, 2003, Thompson said, “before the horrific terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I witnessed firsthand as Deputy Attorney General of the United States grave deficiencies in the ability of intelligence officials and law enforcement officials to share information with each other, which hampered the Department of Justice's ability to take action to defend the nation against terrorist attacks.” He continued:

Before the attacks of September 11th, many provisions of federal law had been interpreted to limit sharply the ability of intelligence investigators to communicate with federal law enforcement officials as well as the ability of federal law-enforcement officers to share terrorism-related information with members of the intelligence community. This metaphorical "wall" between intelligence officials and law enforcement officials often inhibited vital information sharing and coordination and was a personal source of frustration for me…On August 6, 2001, in fact, this frustration led me to write a memorandum to officials in the FBI as well as the Department of Justice's Criminal Division and Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. In this memorandum, I noted that the Attorney General's Procedures for Contacts Between the FBI and the Criminal Division Concerning Foreign Intelligence and Foreign Counterintelligence Investigations required the FBI to notify the criminal division when ‘facts or circumstances are developed’ in a foreign intelligence or counterintelligence investigation ‘that reasonably indicate that a significant federal crime has been, is being, or may be committed’…the ‘9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry Report’ (then) observed that our ability to ‘connect the dots’ about the plans and activities of al-Qaeda before the attacks of September 11th was substantially inhibited by the lack of communication and collaboration between intelligence agencies and law-enforcement agencies.[1][1] (Emphasis added.)

The metaphorical “wall” Thompson referred to was the set of procedures developed in 1995 by Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno. She had devised and implemented criteria to be used as to when the Department of Justice’s Criminal and Counterintelligence divisions could share information to ensure that intelligence investigations could be conducted lawfully. Commissioner Jamie Gorelick, in her capacity as Deputy Attorney General, helped implement this intelligence-destroying “wall.” Now she grills Bush administration officials about why they didn’t do more to overcome her errors.

The problems with these procedures were also noted by a July 16, 2001, GAO report to Tennessee Republican Senator Fred Thompson, the ranking minority member of the Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs. The report said, “According to the Attorney General’s Review Team’s report, almost immediately following the implementation of the Attorney General’s 1995 procedures, coordination problems arose... According to Criminal Division officials, coordination of foreign counterintelligence investigations dropped off significantly following the implementation of the 1995 procedures...An FBI official acknowledged that soon after the implementation of the Attorney General’s 1995 procedures, coordination concerns surfaced.” [1][2] (Emphasis added.)

It would seem that the 9/11 Commission should devote more of their resources investigating the August 6, 2001, memo written by Deputy Attorney General Thompson. This memo illustrates the bureaucratic and political policies and procedures that had a deleterious effect regarding counterintelligence. This memo is more relevant to the issue of solving the problems that caused 9/11. Unfortunately it seems they are more concerned about making short-term political hay than about keeping their fellow citizens safe.

We should have known

Posted: April 26, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Editor's note: Michael Ackley's columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.

Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the so-called 9-11 Commission, must bear some responsibility for Attorney General John Ashcroft's terrorist bombing of commissioner Jamie Gorelick. After all, Kean knew Ashcroft's proclivities, and he should have seen the attack coming.

If you had any doubts about Gorelick's conflict of interest, they should have been cleared up when the Washington Post gave her space to plead her case, which goes something like this: "That memo of mine that Ashcroft produced as evidence that I helped erect a 'wall' between intelligence agencies and law enforcement merely reflected existing law, even if it did say it went 'beyond what is legally required.'"

Archaeologists in Mexico have unearthed a 16th-century Aztec stele with an inscription reading, in part: "Moctezum should have known Cortez was up to no good and should have taken steps to propitiate Tlaloc and head off the attack."

File likewise under "Should Have Known": San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who opposes capital punishment, seemed taken off guard by the hot response of the police department and community after she declined to seek the death penalty for a cop killer. It seems San Francisco's finest don't buy her "matter of principal" argument.

Assemblywoman Loni Hancock of Berkeley has introduced a bill that would prohibit the mass mailing of CDs or DVDs to many households "without the consent of a persons in the household" or unless the mailer provides a postage-paid return envelope "or similar return mechanism." This certainly would cut down on annoying junk mail, but it also would delay your plans to re-shingle your house with the shiny plastic discs ... Archivists at the Library of Congress have discovered a letter in which Salmon P. Chase accuses President Lincoln of failing to head off the rebel bombardment of Fort Sumter.

Speaking of Berkeley: The city has discovered, to its chagrin, that neighboring Oakland allows "medicinal marijuana" users to grow more pot plants than it does. It is moving quickly to modify its ordinances to allow "medicinal" users to grow up to 72 plants at home, up from the current, overly restrictive 10. When that hangnail hurts, man, you want enough cannabis on hand to ease the pain ... Scientists have unearthed a tomb south of Cairo with hieroglyphics that say in part, "Pharaoh could have headed off the plagues had he paid more attention to the Hebrews' 'chatter' about Moses."

So the Japanese have made mice without males, which gives a whole new meaning to Aesop's fable in which the mountains labored "and brought forth a mouse."

This also brings to mind Ambrose Bierce's couplet on his observation that "dice" is the plural of "die":

A cube of cheese no larger than a die
May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.

Blowin' in the wind: Draft talk is gusting through Washington again, and to paraphrase the 9-11 Commission, we should have seen it coming ... The California-based Sierra Club has headed off an attempt by an anti-illegal immigrant faction to take over the board, while other environmentalist groups are fighting a court battle to bar Mexican trucks from U.S. highways – to protect the environment. Thus we will have this scene in the near future:

Texas trooper to Mexican truck driver: What are you carrying?

Truck driver: Illegal aliens.

Trooper: Is your smog certificate up to date?

Truck driver: Seguro, jefe!

Trooper: Off you go then! Michael P. Ackley

Bush Rebukes DOJ for Releasing Papers That Embarrass Gorelick

NewsMax.com Wires
Friday, April 30, 2004

More: Senator Stabs Bush in the Back After Endorsement

WASHINGTON – In his meeting Thursday with the Sept. 11 commission, President Bush expressed strong disapproval of his Department of Justice for releasing documents that Republicans are using to criticize a Democrat on the commission.

On Wednesday, some congressional Republicans declared that newly released material posted on the Justice Department Web site showed that panel member Jamie Gorelick was involved in action that might have weakened the nation's defenses against terrorism. Gorelick was the No. 2 official at the Justice Department during the Clinton administration.

"The president was disappointed" over the release of the documents on the department Web site and "we were not involved in that," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

Bush's disapproval was relayed to the department, and "the president does not believe we ought to be pointing fingers. ... We ought to be working together to help the commission complete its work," McClellan said.

Department spokesman Mark Corallo declined to comment.

Some congressional Republicans who requested the documents say Gorelick helped develop 1995 guidelines that made it difficult for FBI counterintelligence agents to share information with prosecutors and criminal investigators.

Former New York U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, a Democrat who prosecuted several high-profile terrorism cases, wrote former Attorney General Janet Reno that "it is hard to be totally comfortable" with the legal guidelines because "the most effective way to combat terrorism is with as few labels and walls as possible."

While the White House first weighed in on the Justice Department's dispute with Gorelick on Thursday, Attorney General John Ashcroft kicked off the criticism two weeks ago by releasing a 1995 Gorelick memo that he said laid the groundwork for the wall separating criminal and intelligence investigations.

After Ashcroft released the first memo two weeks ago, House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., called on Gorelick to resign from the commission, saying that the document presented a conflict of interest with her current duties.

Republican members of Congress, who requested the documents, have been calling for Gorelick herself to testify before the commission about the wall, which has been blamed for delays and communication breakdowns before the Sept. 11 attacks. Gorelick has refused to testify and has minimized the impact of the legal guidelines on information sharing.

The Justice Department began erecting the legal wall during the 1980s, interpreting a 1978 statute governing clandestine wiretaps.

Sensenbrenner says Gorelick's memo put in place a "heightened wall" prohibiting information sharing.

How Chinagate Led to 9/11

By Jean Pearce
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 25, 2004

As the 9/11 Commission tries to uncover what kept intelligence agencies from preventing September 11, it has overlooked two vital factors: Jamie Gorelick and Bill Clinton. Gorelick, who has browbeaten the current administration, helped erect the walls between the FBI, CIA and local investigators that made 9/11 inevitable. However, she was merely expanding the policy Bill Clinton established with Presidential Decision Directive 24. What has been little underreported is why the policy came about: to thwart investigations into the Chinese funding of Clinton’s re-election campaign, and the favors he bestowed on them in return.

In April, CNSNews.com staff writer Scott Wheeler reported that a senior U.S. government official and three other sources claimed that the 1995 memo written by Jamie Gorelick, who served as the Clinton Justice Department’s deputy attorney general from 1994 to 1997, created "a roadblock" to the investigation of illegal Chinese donations to the Democratic National Committee. But the picture is much bigger than that. The Gorelick memo, which blocked intelligence agents from sharing information that could have halted the September 11 hijacking plot, was only the mortar in a much larger maze of bureaucratic walls whose creation Gorelick personally oversaw.

It’s a story the 9/11 Commission may not want to hear, and one that Gorelick – now incredibly a member of that commission – has so far refused to tell. But it is perhaps the most crucial one to understanding the intentional breakdown of intelligence that led to the September 11 disaster.

Nearly from the moment Gorelick took office in the Clinton Justice Department, she began acting as the point woman for a large-scale bureaucratic reorganization of intelligence agencies that ultimately placed the gathering of intelligence, and decisions about what – if anything – would be done with it. This entire operation was under near-direct control of the White House. In the process, more than a dozen CIA and FBI investigations underway at the time got caught beneath the heel of the presidential boot, investigations that would ultimately reveal massive Chinese espionage as millions in illegal Chinese donations filled Democratic Party campaign coffers.

When Gorelick took office in 1994, the CIA was reeling from the news that a Russian spy had been found in CIA ranks, and Congress was hungry for a quick fix. A month after Gorelick was sworn in, Bill Clinton issued Presidential Decision Directive 24. PDD 24 put intelligence gathering under the direct control of the president’s National Security Council, and ultimately the White House, through a four-level, top-down chain of command set up to govern (that is, stifle) intelligence sharing and cooperation between intelligence agencies. From the moment the directive was implemented, intelligence sharing became a bureaucratic nightmare that required negotiating a befuddling bureaucracy that stopped directly at the President’s office.

First, the directive effectively neutered the CIA by creating a National Counterintelligence Center (NCI) to oversee the Agency. NCI was staffed by an FBI agent appointed by the Clinton administration. It also brought multiple international investigations underway at the time under direct administrative control. The job of the NCI was to “implement counterintelligence activities,” which meant that virtually everything the CIA did, from a foreign intelligence agent’s report to polygraph test results, now passed through the intelligence center that PDD 24 created.

NCI reported to an administration-appointed National Counterintelligence Operations Board (NCOB) charged with “discussing counterintelligence matters.” The NCOB in turn reported to a National Intelligence Policy Board, which coordinated activities between intelligence agencies attempting to work together. The policy board reported “directly” to the president through the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.

The result was a massive bureaucratic roadblock for the CIA – which at the time had a vast lead on the FBI in foreign intelligence – and for the FBI itself, which was also forced to report to the NCOB. This hampered cooperation between the two entities. All this occurred at a time when both agencies were working separate ends of investigations that would eventually implicate China in technology transfers and the Democratic Party in a Chinese campaign cash grab.

And the woman charged with selling this plan to Congress, convince the media and ultimately implement much of it? Jamie Gorelick.

Many in Congress, including some Democrats, found the changes PDD 24 put in place baffling: they seemed to do nothing to insulate the CIA from infiltration while devastating the agency’s ability to collect information. At the time, Democrat House Intelligence Chairman Dan Glickman referred to the plan as “regulatory gobbledygook." Others questioned how FBI control of CIA intelligence would foster greater communication between the lower levels of the CIA and FBI, now that all information would have to be run through a multi-tier bureaucratic maze that only went upward.

Despite their doubts, Gorelick helped the administration sell the plan on Capitol Hill. The Directive stood.

But that wasn’t good enough for the Clinton administration, which wanted control over every criminal and intelligence investigation, domestic and foreign, for reasons that would become apparent in a few years. For the first time in Justice Department history, a political appointee, Richard Scruggs – an old crony or Attorney General Janet Reno’s from Florida – was put in charge of the Office of Intelligence and Policy Review (OIPR). OIPR is the Justice Department agency in charge of requesting wiretap and surveillance authority for criminal and intelligence investigations on behalf of investigative agencies from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The court’s activities are kept secret from the public.

A year after PDD 24, with the new bureaucratic structure loaded with administration appointees, Gorelick drafted the 1995 memo Attorney General John Ashcroft mentioned while testifying before the 9/11 Commission. The Gorelick memo, and other supporting memos released in recent weeks, not only created walls within the intelligence agencies that prevented information sharing among their own agents, but effectively walled these agencies off from each other and from outside contact with the U.S. prosecutors instrumental in helping them gather the evidence needed to make the case for criminal charges.

The only place left to go with intelligence information – particularly for efforts to share intelligence information or obtain search warrants – was straight up Clinton and Gorelick’s multi-tiered chain of command. Instead, information lethal to the Democratic Party languished inside the Justice Department, trapped behind Gorelick’s walls.

The implications were enormous. In her letter of protest to Attorney General Reno over Gorelick’s memo, United States Attorney Mary Jo White spelled them out: “These instructions leave entirely to OIPR and the (Justice Department) Criminal Division when, if ever, to contact affected U.S. attorneys on investigations including terrorism and espionage,” White wrote. (Like OIPR, the Criminal Division is also part of the Justice Department.)

Without an enforcer, the walls Gorelick’s memo put in place might not have held. But Scruggs acted as that enforcer, and he excelled at it. Scruggs maintained Gorelick’s walls between the FBI and Justice's Criminal Division by threatening to automatically reject any FBI request for a wiretap or search warrant if the Bureau contacted the Justice Department's Criminal Division without permission. This deprived the FBI, and ultimately the CIA, of gathering advice and assistance from the Criminal Division that was critical in espionage and terrorist cases.

It is no coincidence that this occurred at the same time both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese and ultimately the Clinton administration itself. Between 1994 and the 1996 election, as Chinese dollars poured into Democratic coffers, Clinton struggled to reopen high-tech trade to China. Had agents confirmed Chinese theft of weapons technology or its transfer of weapons technology to nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria, Clinton would have been forced by law and international treaty to react.

Gorelick’s appointment to the job at Justice in 1994 occurred during a period in which the FBI had begun to systematically investigate technology theft by foreign powers. For the first time, these investigations singled out the U.S. chemical, telecommunications, aircraft and aerospace industries for intelligence collection.

By the time Gorelick wrote the March 1995 memo that sealed off American intelligence agencies from each other and the outside world, all of the most critical Chinagate investigations by American intelligence agencies were already underway. Some of their findings were damning:

In an investigation originally instigated by the CIA, the FBI was beginning its search for the source of the leak of W-88 nuclear warhead technology to China among the more than 1,000 people who had access to the secrets. Despite Justice Department stonewalling and the Department’s refusal to seek wiretap authority in 1997, the investigation eventually led to Wen Ho Lee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The FBI first collected Extensive evidence in 1995 linking illegal Democratic Party donations to China, according to the Congressional Record. But Congress and the Director of the CIA didn’t find out about the Justice Department’s failure to act upon that evidence until 1997, safely after the 1996 election.
According to classified CIA documents leaked to the Washington Times, between 1994 and 1997, the CIA learned that China sold Iran missile technology, a nuclear fission reactor, advanced air-defense radar and chemical agents. The Chinese also provided 5,000 ring magnets to Pakistan, used in producing weapons-grade uranium. The Chinese also provided uranium fuel for India's reactors.

In many cases the CIA resorting to leaking classified information to the media, in an effort to bypass the administration’s blackout.

Gorelick knew these facts well. While Clinton may have refused to meet with top CIA officials, Gorelick didn’t. According to a 1996 report by the legal news service American Lawyer Media, Gorelick and then-Deputy Director of the CIA George Tenet met every other week to discuss intelligence and intelligence sharing.

But those in the Clinton administration weren’t the only ones to gain from the secrecy. In 1994, the McDonnell Douglas Corporation transferred military-use machine tools to the China National Aero-Technology Import and Export Corporation that ended up in the hands of the Chinese army. The sale occurred despite Defense Department objections. McDonnell Douglas was a client of the Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, L.L.P. (now called Baker Botts), the Washington, D.C., law firm where Gorelick worked for 17 years and was a partner. Ray Larroca, another partner in the firm, represented McDonnell in the Justice Department’s investigation of the technology transfer.

In 1995, General Electric, a former client of Gorelick’s, also had much to lose if the damaging information the CIA and the FBI had reached Congress. At the time, GE was publicly lobbying for a lucrative permit to assist the Chinese in replacing coal-fired power stations with nuclear plants. A 1990 law required that the president certify to Congress that China was not aiding in nuclear proliferation before U.S. companies could execute the business agreement.

Moreover, in 1995, Michael Armstrong, then the CEO of Hughes Electronics – a division of General Electric and another client of Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin – was publicly lobbying Clinton to switch satellite export controls from the State Department to the Commerce Department. After the controls were lifted, Hughes and another company gave sensitive data to the Chinese, equipment a Pentagon study later concluded would allow China to develop intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles aimed at American targets. Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin partner Randall Turk represented Hughes in the Congressional, State Department, and Justice Department investigations that resulted.

The Cox Report, which detailed Chinese espionage for Congress during the period, revealed that FBI surveillance caught Chinese officials frantically trying to keep Democratic donor Johnny Chung from divulging any information that would be damaging to Hughes Electronics. Chung funneled $300,000 in illegal contributions from the Chinese military to the DNC between 1994 and 1996.

It was this web of investigations that led Gorelick and Bill Clinton to erect the wall between intelligence agencies that resulted in the toppling of the Twin Towers. The connections go on and on, but they all lead back to Gorelick, the one person who could best explain how the Clinton administration neutered the American intelligence agencies that could have stopped the September 11 plot. Yet another high crime will have been committed if the September 11 Commission doesn’t demand testimony from her.

9/11 Commission Hacks Demean 9/11's Heroes

By Michael Reagan
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 25, 2004

It took a junket to the Big Apple for the members of the commission allegedly investigating 9/11 to get themselves back on TV cameras and into the headlines they appear to crave. They did it by tearing into Rudolph Giuliani, fondly known as "America’s Mayor" since his heroic handling of the nation’s worst crisis since Pearl Harbor.

Along the way this sorry collection of has-beens also attacked the men who headed the police and fire departments on that terrible day, men who earned the nation’s undying gratitude for their heroic behavior and that of their men and women as they went about the perilous work saving the lives of thousands trapped in the infernos and in which 346 of their own number died.

As Giuliani told the commission, "Maybe 8,000 more, maybe 9,000 more than anyone could rightfully expect" were taken safely out of the two towers before they collapsed, he recalled, noting that about 25,000 people were evacuated from the World Trade Center.

How did the commission members memorialize them during their televised New York extravaganza?

•       On Tuesday, commission member John Lehman said the failure of city agencies to communicate effectively on 9/11 was a scandal "not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city." Former fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen shot back that Lehman's comments were "despicable," which they were.

•       As Von Essen, former police commissioner Bernard Kerik and Giuliani were testifying, commission chairman Thomas Keen allowed disorderly members of the audience to jeer and attack and shout and drown out the witnesses, when he should have cleared the room and ejected the protesters.

•       Democrat Commissioner Jamie Gorelick -- who should be a witness explaining how she, as Attorney General Janet Reno’s deputy, had helped cripple the intelligence community instead --whined that she was "disappointed in us in a way that I haven't been in the past." This disappointment occurred because her colleagues weren’t tough enough in questioning Giuliani, a man with whom she isn’t fit to be in the same room.

This whole charade is sickening. Don’t these grandstanding has-beens know that on 9/11 between 30,000 and 50,000 body bags were ordered because that’s what they thought the death toll would be? They needed fewer than 3,000 thanks to Von Essen and Kerik’s courageous men and women. And 346 of the body bags were for their people who died saving others.

Not only did the terrorists fail that day to kill as many as 50,000 innocent people, but the fire and police departments did such a fine job that fewer than 3,000 people lost their lives. For the commission members to sit there and blabber about problems with radio communications and use this side issue to attack the witnesses is typical of their behavior. President Bush made a mistake in agreeing to the establishment of a posse the Democrats wanted so they could find a way to pin the blame on Mr. Bush for what 19 crazed hijackers did on 9/11.

From the very beginning the commission has pandered to a handful of relatives of some of the 9/11 victims who have been allowed to rudely disrupt the hearings in New York as well as in Washington, and are less interested in the facts than they are in assigning blame to such certified American heroes as Rudy Giuliani, Bernard Kerik, and Thomas Von Essen.

When you look back at that horrific day, with a disaster unimaginable and of a magnitude never before seen in New York or any other American city -- with mass confusion and utter chaos, with the 911 hotline and other communications overloaded, scant knowledge of what was happening in the towers or that that they could come crashing down, with the appalling vision of people leaping to their deaths to avoid being burned alive -- the fact that anybody survived borders on the miraculous. And it is largely due to those men who sat before the commission and were forced to tolerate their abuse and that of their jeering peanut gallery in the audience.

It’s time to shut this farce down and send its members back into their well-earned obscurity.

What Gorelick Wants

By Jonathan M. Stein
FrontPageMagazine.com | June 2, 2004

Jamie Gorelick wants to be Attorney General – badly. That is why she agreed to be on the 9/11 Commission, and it seems she will do anything to get the job. And with the potential for a new Democratic administration in less than a year, she can almost taste it.

Make no mistake – this is an opportunity Gorelick has been savoring since December of 1996, when Bill Clinton decided to keep Janet Reno on as Attorney General in his second term. Soon after that decision, she departed from her number two slot at Justice, biding her time in FNMA and private practice. Clinton needed Reno’s apparent veneer of impartiality to wade through his myriad scandals.

As an interesting side note, Gorelick also had designs on being the CIA Director; Clinton passed upon her candidacy for that position as well, though it had been reported that she was being considered, along with Sandy Berger. Aside from a brief stint as the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Defense, her qualifications for the head spot at the CIA remain a mystery. Her judgment on matters of intelligence – e.g. the now-famous information "wall" between the CIA and FBI – has been, at best questionable; at worst, it should properly be the subject of the very investigation she is involved in as a 9/11 Commissioner.

This sort of glaring conflict of interest is nothing new for Gorelick.

Consider the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal – which, it should be noted, was "handled" by Senator John Kerry and his Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Gorelick had represented Clark Clifford and Robert Altman when they tried to get their former employer, First American Bank (a BCCI property), to pay their legal fees, though the Justice Department was involved in the prosecution of BCCI. During the Whitewater and Vince Foster scandals, former Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann had been abruptly fired by the Clinton White House when he objected to the manner in which the White House was handling the Foster investigation – and he was almost immediately replaced by close Clinton ally Gorelick.

During the Travelgate investigation, yet another Clinton scandal, Gorelick’s Associate Deputy Attorney General, David Margolis, apparently attempted to interfere with the prosecution of Billy Dale and Gary Wright by improperly divulging information disclosed at a grand jury proceeding to Democrat John Conyers – at the time, Conyers was Chairman of the House Government Operations Committee. Despite this glaring, egregious breach of the rules of criminal procedure by Margolis – which would benefit the Clinton White House – Gorelick took no action against Margolis and kept him on. Gorelick is an unabashed political operative to the end.

Jamie Gorelick has been described as an iron-fisted and politically dexterous deputy attorney general. It was well-known that she handled the day-to-day operations at Justice, whereas Reno functioned as more of a figurehead who lost her compass when she lost Gorelick in early 1997. However, Gorelick’s added value was her political acumen. For example, when the Republicans began to attack Clinton’s judicial appointments as soft on crime – prior to the 1996 election – Gorelick set up a "war room" similar to the Clinton "war room" of the 1992 election. Her entire purpose was to control the news cycle and bolster the images of the liberal judges and lawyers in Clinton’s roster. In many ways, Gorelick is every bit as slick as her boss.

Gorelick’s seemingly inappropriate functions outraged some commentators, such as Mark Levin of the Landmark Legal Foundation. Levin pondered "[p]recisely what . . . the lawyers assigned to the Justice ‘war room’ [were] doing, and with whom [were] they at ‘war’?" At the same time, Levin also noted that "Mrs. Gorelick's former law firm -Miller, Cassidy, Larroca and Lewin – [was] representing Craig Livingstone, the man at the center of the [Clinton] Filegate scandal [being investigated by the Justice Department]." Not surprisingly, Gorelick, who was effectively running Justice at the time, did not recuse herself.

Jamie Gorelick wants to finally emerge from the shadow of Janet Reno, not merely as the de facto Attorney General, but as the actual attorney general of the United States. Her outrageous conflict of interest as a Commissioner of the 9/11 panel is just par for the course, and her keen political skills will enable her to deflect criticism and keep her position – despite the strong evidence that she should, in fact, step down as a Commissioner and be sworn-in as a witness. A former Democrat staffer recently stated that Gorelick is on the commission for one reason – and it isn’t for her legal mind. Gorelick is on the Commission "to make sure Bush and his team look as bad as possible and to protect the Clintons and Reno."

Her reward for doing her job well. . . the powerful position she has coveted for seven years.

The Bad Old Days

By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.
FrontPageMagazine.com | July 22, 2004

Democratic partisans, notably Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, are howling about the timing of the revelation that Clinton National Security Advisor Samuel “Sandy” Berger is under criminal investigation. They contend the sensational allegation that he was observed by National Archives personnel stuffing highly classified documents into his clothing, and then "accidentally disposing” of some of them, is coming out now for a cynical political reason: In order to divert attention from the criticisms of the Bush Administration expected in the 9/11 Commission report due to be released today.

In fact, far from distracting the public from the factors that contributed to the deadly attacks that cost nearly 3,000 American lives that day in September 2001, the disclosure of Sandy Burger’s misconduct would be the perfect introduction to a theme that surely will be a central theme of its report: The considerable contribution made to the worst attacks on this country in its history by the lax attitude towards national security secrets that pervaded the executive branch during the eight years that preceded the Bush presidency. Surely, that is, if the presence as one of the Commissioners of a top Clinton policy-maker, former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, has not precluded an objective and unstinting analysis of the facts.

Consider a few examples of this insidious and predictably dangerous attitude:

o Sandy Berger was not the first senior Clinton official to have been investigated for serious breaches in the classified information. Former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch was forced to resign and ultimately received a presidential pardon after he was found to have exposed very sensitive information to compromise by putting it on a home computer used for accessing notoriously insecure pornographic web sites. Interestingly, Berger and Deutch formed a consulting firm in 2001 called "Stonebridge International." Former Assistant Secretary Tobi Gati, who headed the Clinton State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), was also investigated for a number of security violations.

o During John Deutch’s tenure at the CIA, the hiring for its Directorate of Operations – the clandestine operational side of the house – was cut dramatically and morale in the organization plummeted, resulting in a significant number of resignations among “human intelligence” professionals.

o Staff reports prepared for the 9/11 Commission have established serious failures with respect to the timely sharing of relevant information between U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies. We now know that this impediment to “connecting the dots” was due, in part, to the insistence of the then-Number 2 person in the Justice Department, none other than Ms. Gorelick, that “the wall” between such agencies be maintained in an even more exacting way than was otherwise required.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence established that a contributor to the problems with America’s understanding of the true state of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction programs was a similar the failure of various intelligence agencies to share such information as they had.

These institutional problems are all the more remarkable given the insistence that senior members of the Clinton Administration’s national security team – notably, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger and his predecessor, Anthony Lake, and UN Ambassador-turned Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and her INR chief, Secretary Gati – that highly classified American intelligence be routinely shared with foreign governments and multilateral institutions. This practice continued even in the face of evidence that such sharing was compromising U.S. intelligence sources and methods.

o The Clinton team’s lax attitude towards sensitive information was also evident in its determination to engage in the wholesale declassification of previous administrations’ documents, with scant concern for – or even careful review of – the continued sensitivity of the information they contained. Nuclear weapons-relevant documents that could still be dangerous in the wrong hands were among those declassified wholesale.

o On the Clinton team’s watch and with its acquiescence, the job of recruiting human agents in critical target areas and organizations became infinitely more difficult. At the instigation of a close Clinton associate, then-Senator Bob Torricelli, the CIA was barred from using spies who had unsavory records. Since just about anybody who had access to the likes of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong-Il and their secrets would have such a record, the negative impacts of other Clinton policies and practices on human intelligence were greatly exacerbated.

o Even physical security was a nightmare during the Clinton years. In 1999, a Russian spy planted eavesdropping devices in the Albright State Department. We still don’t know who gained access to and stole top secret documents from her office in Foggy Bottom. Nor is the identity yet known of the person who made off in January 2000 with a laptop computer kept in a conference room used by INR – a computer whose hard-drive contained a wealth of top secret intelligence.

o As with fish, the rot started at the top. President Clinton virtually refused to see his CIA Director and almost never read the Presidential Daily Briefing prepared to ensure he was aware of emerging threats and other priority intelligence developments.

o For his part, Vice President Gore famously abused intelligence professionals and capabilities. He scrawled “bull....” on a classified assessment that reported his favorite Russian interlocutor, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, was corrupt – a response that had a chilling effect on analysts’ readiness to convey information that would be seen as “politically incorrect” or otherwise inconvenient. Some analysts who failed to self-censor were subjected to retaliation.Isn’t it curious that Mr. Gore has been so ready to take his successor and others in the Bush Administration to task for manipulating or pressuring the Intelligence Community to lie about Iraq?

Vice President Gore also insisted that intelligence assets be diverted to serve his pet environmental interests. Spy satellites and anti-submarine sensors were used to monitor sea-life. Millions of dollars were spent by the CIA on a "DCI environmental center." Intelligence assessments were tasked concerning volcanic eruptions and global warming. The Veep’s environmental preoccupation even resulted in an annual "Earth Day" edition of the PDB being produced for his attention.

o Those who claim the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq was the product of political pressure – despite the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unanimous finding to the contrary – have chosen to forget a truly egregious example of Clinton politicization of intelligence. An NIE was generated and delivered to the Senate in September 1996, just in time to influence a vote on missile defense adamantly opposed by administration ideologues. It arrived at the astounding conclusion that there would be no threat of ballistic missile attack against the United States for at least fifteen years.

To arrive at this preposterous finding, of course, the CIA had to come up with three remarkable assumptions: For the purpose of the analysis, 1) Russian and Chinese missiles didn’t count; 2) no one with long-range ballistic missile technology would help others who didn’t have it yet to get such equipment and know-how; and 3) Alaska and Hawaii wouldn’t be considered part of the United States, since they were likely very shortly to be within striking distance of North Korean medium-range missiles.

o The CIA diverted millions of dollars to a "Balkans Taskforce" which in the 1990s consumed much of agency’s analytic talent and a considerable amount of money. Meanwhile, during this period, the DCI Counterterrorism Center was sorely neglected. Assignment to it was viewed by intelligence professionals as a bad career move.

In short, Sandy Berger’s alleged theft of classified documents from the National Archives is no more a diversion from the 9/11 Commission’s subject than it is an anomaly. Rather, it bespeaks an indifference to, if not actual hostility towards, the fundamentals of sensitive national security policy-related information and tradecraft that should feature prominently in the Commission post-mortem on the September 11^th attacks. Assuming, that is, such a focus was not too embarrassing for Jamie Gorelick – or too inconvenient for the Clinton-Kerry team that hopes the American people will not be reminded of the “bad old days,” and invite a reprise by returning that team to high office.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is President of the Center for Security Policy in Washington. He formerly held senior positions in the Reagan Defense

What did Sandy Berger fear?

Posted: July 23, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

In our book "First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America," James Sanders and I argue that on the night of July 17, 1996, U.S. Navy missiles struck a small terrorist airplane filled with explosives in close proximity to TWA Flight 800, causing the instant and catastrophic demise of both planes.

We have no quarrel with those who believe that missiles were involved, but who dissent from our final scenario. For all their cumulative value, the eyewitness observations are too sketchy and imperfect to allow for complete certitude on the details. Our mutual quarrel should be with those who knew exactly what happened that night and who have withheld the full range of evidence.

We refer to the Clinton White House, specifically the man of the hour, Sandy Berger, and his boss, Bill Clinton. The president himself was aware of the "flying bomb" scenario in the summer of 1996. This information comes from the entirely credible account of Retired Lt. Col. Robert Patterson (USAF) in his compelling book, "Dereliction of Duty."

Patterson carried the "nuclear football" for the president during that fateful summer and, as such, had almost total access. One morning that Patterson identifies only as "late-summer" 1996, he was returning a daily intelligence update to the NSC when he noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka." As Patterson relates, "I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons." As a pilot, he had a keen interest in the same.

In the way of omen, Islamic terrorist Ramzi Yousef was on trial in New York on the day of July 17, 1996, for his role in Bojinka (Serbo-Croatian for "loud bang"). The publicly known part of this plot was Yousef's plan to blow up 11 American airliners over the Pacific.

A lesser-known element of Bojinka, the one Patterson stumbled upon, was the plan to use planes loaded with explosives as flying bombs. The following excerpt comes from a classified Phillippines intelligence report that was based on information stored in Yousef's seized computer and turned over to the FBI in early 1995.

The document [from Yousef's computer] specifically cited the charter service of a commercial type aircraft loaded with powerful bombs to be dive-crashed by SAEED AKMAN. This is apparently intended to demonstrate to the whole world that a Muslim martyr is ready and determined to die for the glorification of Islam.

Patterson was not in position to connect Bojinka and TWA Flight 800. The knowledge of what happened the night of July 17, 1996, had been kept remarkably tight. What Patterson does learn from seeing the president's hand-annotated response to this intelligence report is that Clinton had read it carefully.

"I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community," Patterson writes, "and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it." That Clinton was reviewing this information in the immediate aftermath of TWA Flight 800's demise suggests more than mere coincidence – the FBI had received these documents from the Philippine police 18 months earlier.

This scenario makes sense of at least three other variables. One is the insistence by FBI honcho James Kallstrom that a "bomb" destroyed TWA Flight 800. The second is John Kerry's two TV references in September 2001 to TWA Flight 800 as a "terrorist" act. The third is George Stephanopoulos' on-air comment to Peter Jennings on that fateful Sept. 11 in which he talked about the "situation room" in the White House.

"In my time at the White House," Stephanopoulos told Jennings, "it was used in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, in the aftermath of the TWA Flight 800 bombing, and that would be the way they would stay in contact through the afternoon."

Although the situation room was a busy place on the night of July 17, 1996, the president himself was elsewhere. Col. Patterson, in my conversation with him, confirmed that Clinton holed up in "the residence," the White House family quarters. Patterson is in a position to know. He carried the nuclear football for the president and that night was in the White House, though clearly out of the loop.

Patterson was not sure who was in the residence with Clinton that night. The one person he tentatively cited was Sandy Berger. If correct, this confirms our belief that the decisions being made that night were largely political. Sandy Berger was a political person. He first met Clinton in 1972 working on Sen. George McGovern's presidential campaign. Fifteen years later, Berger urged his friend to run for president. Clinton rewarded Berger with a position as deputy assistant to the president for national security, a position for which Berger had little useful background other than his experience as an attorney focused on international trade.

Tony Lake, by contrast, had 30 years of high-level foreign service experience when Clinton appointed him national security adviser. What is curious is that on the night of July 17, 1996, Lake, who obviously outranked Berger, was not in the residence. He was downstairs in his own office. Not being an insider, Lake had been known to remove himself from meetings when they turned political. A few months after the destruction of TWA Flight 800, Lake was to be kicked sideways to the CIA, but he withdrew his nomination under Senate criticism. Berger was given Lake's job, a position that did not require congressional confirmation.

Fast forward eight years. At the very beginning of her interview before the 9-11 Commission, Chairman Thomas Kean asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice the most important question of the day:

I've got a question now I'd like to ask you. It was given to me by a number of members of the families. Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?

"To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman," Rice replied, "this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us." Rice was almost assuredly telling the truth. Republican Kean would have not asked this question – the second of the whole session – to catch her in a lie. What is more, no Democrat member of the panel challenged her.

In fact, Richard Clarke had acknowledged as much during his earlier testimony before the panel. In response to a question by Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste, Clarke admitted that the "knowledge about al-Qaida having thought of using aircraft as weapons" was relatively old, "five years, six years old." He asked that intelligence analysts "be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it."

As we have documented before, Clarke chaired the emergency meeting of the anti-terrorist task force in the White House situation room on the evening of July 17. It is likely that he did not learn the true cause of the plane's demise until his chummy trip with the Clintons to Long Island a week later.

We accept Richard Clarke at his boastful word that he consequently played the key role in devising the "exit strategy" from this "Almost War." In "Against All Enemies," Clarke claims to have discovered the TWA 800 "exploding fuel tank" theory even before the National Transportation Safety Board did and while the FBI was still insisting on terrorism.

As we have also documented beyond doubt, it was the 9-11 Commission's Jamie Gorelick who, as deputy attorney general, summoned the FBI to Washington on Aug. 22, 1996, a few days before the Democratic Convention, and warned them off the pursuit of a terrorist explanation.

This is the only kind of information – especially Clinton's annotated "planes as bombs" notes – that justifies the risks Berger ran. It is clear, too, that he would not have run these risks without urging.

How 9-11 commission covered up mass murder

Posted: November 10, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Editor's note: In his extraordinary new DVD documentary, "Mega Fix," Emmy-award-winning filmmaker Jack Cashill traces the roots of Sept. 11 to the political exploitation of terror investigations by the Clinton White House in the desperate 1995-1996 election cycle. This eight part series, which began in Oklahoma City, culminates at the 9-11 commission hearings. To arrange a showing in your city, contact Jack Cashill.

The "Mega Fix" DVD is available now at WorldNetDaily's online store.

At the 9-11 commission hearings in the spring of 2004, one could be pardoned for thinking that justice was about to be served. At the very beginning of the grilling of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, commission Chairman Thomas Kean asks the most important question of the hearing:

Did you ever see or hear from the FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and 9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?

"To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman," Rice replies, "this kind of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never briefed to us." Rice is almost assuredly telling the truth. No Democrat member of the panel challenges her.

In fact, Richard Clarke has acknowledged as much during his earlier testimony before the panel. In response to a question by Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste, Clarke has admitted that the "knowledge about al-Qaida having thought of using aircraft as weapons" was relatively old – "5-years, 6-years old." He asks that intelligence analysts "be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it."

Be forgiven? Just like that? Consider the al-Qaida-explosives-aircraft thread that Clarke has had to overlook in the eight years of the Clinton administration, particularly in the two-year election cycle of 1995-1996:

The vow of Ramzi Yousef, "Rashid the Iraqi," to finish the job he started on Feb. 26, 1993, the second anniversary of the liberation of Kuwait, when he failed to destroy the World Trade Center.
The return of Yousef's accomplice, Abdul Rahman Yasin, to Baghdad where he would live for the next 10 years with Saddam's protection.
The simultaneous arrival of Yousef and Terry Nichols in the Philippines in November 1994, and the possibility – which Clarke himself entertains – that Yousef instructed Nichols in the art of bomb-making.
Yousef's plans to use aircraft as bombs – either hijacked commercial airliners or small planes filled with high explosives – and the training of the pilots in American flight schools. These plans reach Washington by early 1995.
The well-documented assistance that McVeigh received in Oklahoma City from "Middle Eastern-looking men," almost assuredly Iraqi nationals. The FBI cites these eyewitness sightings in its request before a federal judge to hold McVeigh over for trial.
First the identification and then the inexplicable dismissal of the short, swarthy John Doe No. 2 in the Oklahoma City bombing case.
The Clintons' willingness to suppress both investigations – Air Force and Armed Force Institute of Pathology – into the crash of Ron Brown's plane in Croatia.
Clarke's own open warning during security planning for the Atlanta Olympics that Islamic terrorists might hijack a 747 and fly it into Olympic stadium.
The Clintons' reluctance to seek the truth in the Khobar Towers bombing in June 1996.
The overwhelming evidence that points to a terrorist attack on TWA Flight 800 on July 17, 1996, "national liberation day" in Saddam's Iraq.
The likely use of a terrorist plane filled with high explosives in the attack on TWA Flight 800 (see "First Strike for details.)
President Clinton's review of Yousef's "planes as bombs" plans after the destruction of TWA Flight 800 as witnessed by Col. Buzz Patterson.
The FBI's interception of Yousef's jail messages in the summer of 1996, in which Yousef plotted to blow up a 747, as documented in Peter Lance's "Cover Up."
Yousef's communications that same summer with 9-11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Yousef's uncle.
The administration's scapegoating of Richard Jewell in the Olympic Park bombing, and its failure to investigate any Islamic terror trails.
The inexplicable involvement of the CIA in creating an animation to discredit the 270 FBI eyewitnesses who saw objects ascending in the direction of TWA Flight 800.

There are only two reasons why Clarke might not have shared any of this information with the incoming administration. One is incompetence. The other is complicity in the most serious political fix in American history – the Mega Fix. The evidence points strongly to the latter.

In "Against All Enemies," Clarke takes credit for discovering the transparently false TWA Flight 800 exploding fuel tank scenario, and he was almost assuredly involved in the CIA fraud that discredited the eyewitnesses. If he tells the incoming administration or the 9-11 commission what he knows about the potential use of planes as bombs, he opens the door on a stunning deception in which he himself is a key figure. He also exposes the potential Iraqi thread that he has more recently built his literary career on denying.

Clarke had help keeping this all under wraps. Former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick was likely placed on the 9-11 commission for no other reason. It was she who convened the Aug. 22, 1996, meeting at which the FBI was compelled to abandon the TWA Flight 800 terrorist inquiry. She was in a position to give the same order at Oklahoma City.

And then there is Sandy Berger, the one person identified as being in the family quarters with the president on the night of July 17, 1996. Berger was a political agent. His boss at the time, NSA Adviser Tony Lake, remained in his own office on the night of July 17. In his pilfering from the national archives, Berger may well have been looking for Clinton's hand-annotated review from the summer of 1996 on Yousef's "planes as bombs" plan, a legacy-killing document if ever made public.

John Kerry knows something as well. A member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1996, Kerry infers both on the "Larry King Show" on Sept. 11, 2001, and on "Hardball" on Sept. 24, 2001, that TWA Flight 800 has been destroyed by terrorists.

On Sept. 20, 2001, one major newspaper in the country breaks the story of how Al Gore has sold out the post-TWA Flight 800 airline safety and security commission for the sake of campaign cash – the Kerry-friendly Boston Globe. This is almost assuredly not a coincidence. At the time, Gore is the one person standing in the way of Kerry's run for the Democratic nomination, but Kerry knows Gore's Achilles' heel, and he seems to have gone for it.

Kerry and Gore both understood something that even Clarke and Gorelick might not have. The Mega Fix has little to do with national security and a whole lot to do with politics. Like just about everything else the Clinton White House did, the Mega Fix appears to be improvised, ill-organized and ad hoc. It has proven effective, thanks largely to the witless complicity of the American media, particularly the New York Times.

And as late as Sept. 10, 2001, its conspirators probably felt pretty dang good about it.

Jack Cashill

Democrats' Dangerous Game of Indifference

Christopher G. Adamo
Monday, May 9, 2005

Throughout the 1990s, an ominous series of incidents unfolded which ought to have sent a message to America's leaders. The growing threat of an increasingly brazen and aggressive Islamic militancy should have forewarned America that a major confrontation was becoming unavoidable. Yet little was done to properly prepare for the conflict.

Worse yet, a significant pattern of inaction, and even counterproductive actions, spotlighted the ineptitude of America's response. Thus its enemies were emboldened to pursue their plot. Insofar as officials at the highest levels of American government should have been watchful and responsive to the impending danger, but were otherwise preoccupied with their own political agendas, they bear culpability for allowing the disaster to ensue.

Nevertheless, were those in power during that critical time to have since recognized the extent to which their self-serving actions had left the nation vulnerable, they could be forgiven. And had they refocused their energies on the betterment of the nation instead of remaining fixed in their historical pattern of self-aggrandizement, some good might have resulted from catastrophe. Yet on all fronts, this is inarguably proving not to be the case.

Consider, for a prime example, the similar manner in which Democrats in Washington are playing games with Social Security. Each successive day in which no decisive action is taken to correct the problems threatening the future viability of Social Security is one less day that will be available for Americans to plan and invest for their futures, in order to avert financial disaster.

The unilateral Democrat reaction to President Bush's proposals to fix the problems with Social Security, before they become unfixable, has been to deny the inevitability of those impending problems while fanning the flames of fear and hysteria, particularly among the nation's elderly.

But Democrats are not merely engaging in such behavior because they are devoid of their own ideas. Rather, they are committed to a policy of inaction, whereby they have taken up a deliberate posture of offering only criticism.

Their efforts are fixated only on the possibilities of political gain, with no interest whatsoever in addressing the issues at hand. Once again, they bask in a false belief that they have the luxury of indifference, with no regard for the harm they will inflict on the American people.

Thus they continue to stoke the fears of gullible constituents, misrepresenting Republican attempts at finding real solutions to fuel their fire. So far, this scenario has provided a "win-win" for them, with the only real losers being those people who will someday find themselves the recipients of an unnecessarily meager Social Security check.

This contemptible strategy is the result of a cold, purely political calculation. The reform of Social Security, and the avoidance of its financial meltdown, would indeed reflect positively on Democrats, were they to support the institution of meaningful reforms. However, public discourse will eventually shift to other matters.

On the other hand, incessant demagoguing of this issue holds the potential for ongoing advantages for them, at least until the general public figures out which political operatives are intent on keeping them scared, vulnerable and dependent.

Democrats clamored throughout last year for the creation of the 9/11 Commission, ostensibly in an effort to determine the nature of security lapses that left the nation vulnerable to attack. Yet once the commission commenced its work, the partisan politics that ultimately governed it became disgracefully apparent.

Jamie Gorelick, a commission member, proved to be untouchable, though she had obviously played a key role in the bureaucratic bungling that unraveled America's security network. And few people honestly doubt that Sandy Berger's purpose for pilfering and destroying documents from the National Archives was to hide evidence of Clinton administration lapses that seriously degraded national security.

Other examples abound. Whether in regards to education, national security, or the rule of law, it is no exaggeration to conclude that the modern Democrat party has become an obsessively self-serving political animal.

Its refusal to take any action, other than issuing incessant demands for more money, proves that it holds an ultimate loyalty to special interests at expense of those supposedly intended to be beneficiaries.

Democrats are indeed playing games of fraud and deceit when discussing the future of Social Security. During the last decade, they played such games with the nation's security apparatus, smug in their presumptions of immunity from any consequences. But reality hit home on September 11, 2001. The clock is ticking on Social Security.

Christopher G. Adamo is a freelance writer whose weekly columns have appeared on AIM.org, GOPUSA.com and CNSnews.com. He has been involved in grassroots politics for many years, and has served on the Wyoming Republican Party Central Committee. His archives can be found at chrisadamo.com.

FBI blunder on 9-11?

Posted: June 13, 2005
1:00 a.m. Eastern
By Joseph Farah

My colleagues in the news media are dutifully reporting a breakdown in the FBI that led directly to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist hijacking disaster.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm no fan of the FBI. And I have no doubts incompetence, bad judgment and bureaucratic snafus plagued the FBI leading up to the al-Qaida attack that killed 3,000 Americans.

But neither the Justice Department inspector general's report, nor the press coverage of it, are connecting some very obvious dots that point the finger directly at political decisions by political appointees in the Clinton White House.

Here are the facts as laid out by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine in a report written over a year ago and released publicly last week at the urging of Senate Democrats: The FBI missed at least five chances to detect the presence of the suicide hijackers in the country. In his 371-page report, Fine also criticized the CIA, which knew the hijackers were in California 20 months before the 9-11 attacks, but never told the FBI. One CIA agent tried desperately to alert the FBI, but was told to stop by his superiors.

This facet of the report raises an obvious and glaring question – one not addressed in the Fine report, the FBI reports nor the 9-11 commission report: Why did top-level CIA officials decline to alert the FBI of the potential for terrorism by these suspects?

There is an obvious and glaring answer to this question – one ignored by all of the press coverage of the Fine report: The CIA had been ordered not to share information with the FBI and vice versa.

The FBI and CIA were blocked from this kind of cooperation by the "wall" erected between them through a set of Justice Department directives issued by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. In effect, the Clinton Justice Department had made it illegal for that kind of sharing of information between the agencies.

"We believe it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations," Gorelick wrote. "These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."

Gorelick wasn't some flunky in the Justice Department. She had been selected for the job by Hillary Clinton and had assumed the role held by Webster Hubbell before he was forced from his position to face Whitewater-related charges that landed him in prison. Gorelick, like Hubbell before her, essentially ran the Justice Department because of the gross incompetence of Attorney General Janet Reno.

It seems the Fine report is yet another effort to whitewash the role of Gorelick and the Clinton administration in the 9-11 debacle.

And that should surprise no one given the fact that Fine, too, was appointed by Bill Clinton.

Ironic that Gorelick herself was Johnny-on-the-spot to comment on the Fine report – and quickly dump on the FBI.

"I think they [the FBI] believe they have made significant progress, but there is still quite a bit of work to be done," she said.

Gorelick, as a member of the 9-11 commission, was caught in an obvious conflict of interest – in the position of reviewing her own shoddy work as the top deputy in the Clinton Justice Department. Now Fine, another Clinton appointee, has taken the cover-up a step further.

This is the real story of the report we all heard about last week. It's a case of the politicians pointing fingers at the FBI – an FBI whose own well-documented shortcomings in the 9-11 affairs were largely the result of its own politicization under the Clinton administration.

Joseph Farah

MORE DEMOCRATIC FANTASYLAND ON 9/11

Cynthia McKinney has returned to her old tricks in Congress. Working through her new organization, 9/11 Citizens Watch, she plans on hosting a full-day "Congressional" briefing for Representatives and their staffs on the supposed lack of progress in investigating the 9/11 attacks. Much like the John Conyers "impeachment" panel based on the Downing Street Memos, McKinney and a couple of cohorts plan on offering their wild conspiracy theories in the guise of a sober, official hearing:

On July 22, 2005, Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) will host a full-day briefing, co-sponsored by Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), and other sponsors, for Members of Congress and their staffs in the Caucus Room, Cannon House Office Building, Room 345, Independence Ave. & First Street SE, from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. One year after the release of the 9/11 Commission Final Report many questions about what transpired on September 11, 2001 and who should be held accountable still remain unanswered. Serious flaws and omissions in the Report have been addressed by whistleblowers and academics. Well known researchers and authors have put the events of that day into historical perspective, and have suggested possible alternatives to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission regarding intelligence reform, domestic and foreign policy. The hard evidence has yet to be properly evaluated, and points to the need for full transparency, release of information, and continued probative investigations to have an effective, democratic response to the crisis that confronts all of us.

It's quite a stretch to claim that the "hard evidence has yet to be properly evaluated"; the evidence at hand has been pored over thoroughly by experts, the media, and pundits. However, it's vague enough that McKinney can present an elastic definition of what qualifies as "properly". She gets a bit more specific after that:

Family members of the victims of 9/11 will present a “Report Card” to address their still unanswered questions about the events of 9/11 and the lack of accountability for the security and intelligence failures that may have allowed these events to happen. Other experts will speak to the flaws in the 9/11 Commission’s process, including conflicts of interest, lack of transparency, investigative rigor and public input, and the many whistleblowers ignored by the Commission.

I have criticized the 9/11 Commission's composition too, mainly in their inclusion of Jamie Gorelick when she should have instead been questioned on her role in keeping intelligence and law-enforcement operations from sharing information. That alone could have helped the government connect the dots, although it's still questionable whether enough intelligence had actually been received to piece together that particular attack ahead of time. I don't recall that the Commission ignored many whistleblowers, though. In fact, I thought they had a lot of people testifying in public who had little to add in that venue except political grandstanding, especially Richard Clarke.

In the next paragraph, McKinney gets closer to the point (emphases mine):

One panel of experts will explore the omissions and errors in the Commission’s Final Report, including the timeline of NORAD/FAA and P-56 defense responses that day, the suspects and plot, the background of Al Qaeda and bin Laden, the involvement of other countries, the obstruction of investigations by the FBI and CIA, and foreknowledge and forewarnings prior to the attacks. Another panel will place 9/11 into historical perspective and look at the flawed assumptions that misled the Commission’s work, including the politics of illegal drugs, oil investments, covert operations and terrorism, as well as past covert operations like Contragate and the rise of the neo-conservatives and their agenda.

Ah, now we get it. McKinney has returned to her nutty conspiracy theories that got her booted from Congress for one term. In 2002, she floated the notion that 9/11 was a conspiracy to benefit corporations close to the GOP, since the attacks resulted in increased defense spending. Now she apparently intends on expanding her paranoid vision to include oil cartels, the Colombian drug trade, and the Nicaraguan freedom fighters.

If anyone can figure out a coherent rationale for 9/11 that encompasses all of those elements, please be sure to forward it to McKinney's psychiatrist.

The last topic reveals much about McKinney. The "rise of the neo-conservatives" sounds ominous, and in McKinney's world, that has stood for a Jewish cabal that secretly controls the American government. McKinney's father, Georgia politician Bill McKinney, has had plenty to say about the Jews while working on his daughter's campaigns:

That is McKinney's explanation for her 2002 primary defeat, and she is sticking to it. But there are other explanations. Her father, Georgia state legislator Billy McKinney, shared his version with an Atlanta television reporter on August 19, 2002, the night before she lost. The reporter had asked Billy McKinney about his daughter's use of a years-old, moth-balled endorsement from former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young. Such endorsements were worthless, the elder McKinney replied, because "Jews have bought everybody. Jews." In case the reporter didn't understand, he spelled the word: "J-E-W-S."

Just as at Conyers' impeachment hearings, expect this debate to draw out the anti-Semitic lunatics with their flyers charging that the Bush administration serves only Ariel Sharon's interests. Her investigation into neocons will attract them like flies. And like Conyers' gathering, it will provide moments of both political hilarity and sheer embarrassment for the Democrats. (h/t: Pirates Cove) Saturday, July 16, 2005

Friday, Aug. 12, 2005 9:47 a.m. EDT

9/11 Commission Covered Up Gorelick Warning

A 1995 memo from a top terrorism prosecutor warning that a directive by Clinton administration Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick "could cost lives" is being concealed by the 9/11 Commission.

Compounding the cover-up, Gorelick herself was a prominent member of the Commission and refused to recuse herself from parts of the 9/11 investigation that covered the now notorious "wall" she erected that prevented intelligence and law enforcement agencies from cooperating in the war on terror.

In June 1995, U.S. Attorney for New York's Southern District Mary Jo White warned the Justice Department that Gorelick's prohibition against intelligence sharing would hamper U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

"It is hard to be totally comfortable with instructions to the FBI prohibiting contact with the United States Attorney's Offices when such prohibitions are not legally required," White wrote on June 13, 1995, in a memo reported Friday by the New York Post's Deborah Orin.

"The most effective way to combat terrorism is with as few labels and walls as possible so that wherever permissible, the right and left hands are communicating," advised White, who was then in the midst of prosecuting the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.

According to Orin, however, "White was so upset that she bitterly protested with another memo - a scathing one" - blasting Gorelick's wall of separation.

While the former Clinton official and her fellow 9/11 commissioners have so far declined to make the second memo public, the Post reports that White used it to warn that Gorelick's wall "hindered law enforcement and could cost lives."

The 9/11 Commission omitted any mention of White's scathing second warning to Gorelick from its final report.

"Nor does the report include the transcript of its staff interview with White," the Post said.

The revelation that the 9/11 Commission covered up White's full account comes on the heels of news that Gorelick's wall may have prevented the FBI from learning that lead 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi had entered the U.S. and had been identified by military intelligence as terrorist threats a year before the attacks.

On Wednesday, Rep. Curt Weldon, who uncovered the Atta-al-Shehhi revelation, complained: "There was no reason not to share this information with the FBI, except that the firewalls that existed back then were so severe that they wouldn't let these agencies talk to one another."

Friday, Aug. 12, 2005 11:14 a.m. EDT

Clinton Lawyers: Mohamed Atta Off-Limits

A year before the 9/11 attacks, Clinton administration lawyers told a group of military intelligence officers that information they had developed on 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta could not be shared with the FBI, saying of Atta himself: "You can't even touch him - it doesn't matter what information you have."

Rep. Curt Weldon, who helped develop the military intelligence group code-named "Able Danger," delivered the bombshell revelation in an interview Thursday with WABC Radio host Sean Hannity.

WELDON: In September of 2000 we tried on three occasions to take the information we had developed and pass it along to the FBI so they could follow up and take action against this [al-Qaida] cell and perhaps bring in Atta and question him and do whatever else was necessary.

Three times we were turned down by lawyers in the administration.

HANNITY: We're talking about lawyers in the Clinton administration?

WELDON: Yes, it was the Clinton administration. Lawyers said there were two reasons why you can't do that. And they even put stickies over the face of Mohamed Atta on this chart they had. They said: "He's here legally. He's either got a green card or he's got a visa. So you can't even touch him - it doesn't matter what information you have." [END OF EXCERPT]

Moments later, Weldon said he was determined to find out who it was who ultimately gave the order to protect the lead 9/11 hijacker.

WELDON: The American people need to have answers. They need to have answers about who made the decision to stop our military intelligence from sharing information with the FBI, and how high up the ladder that went.

Did it stop at DoD? Or was the Justice Department involved in that decision? Or was the White House involved in that decision? [END OF EXCERPT]