Ashcroft’s underhanded play against the 9/11 commission

2004.04.19 — Government | War | by Derek Jensen

Former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick (Górelick) has begun receiving death threats and hate mail since current Attorney General John Ashcroft pointed a finger at her during his testimony in front of the 9/11 commission. But Ashcroft's attempt to malign Gorelick personally is transparently false and mean-spirited.

Gorelick has been accused of having a conflict of interest as a member of the commission because she had had some oversight of the FBI and CIA in the years before the 9/11 attacks.

I've said before that I don't think the 9/11 commission's work has much real significance. If it produces some working recommendations for fixing our domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering capabilities, I'll be happy. But it's not going to produce some miraculous answer to the question of "What went wrong?" Everyone involved did a pretty good job of trying to stop terrorism; some could have done a better job if they hadn't been preoccupied with other things, but there's no outrageous scandal to be found here.

But again and again the Bush administration has overreacted to the commission's probes and to the negative press generated by the testimony of people like Richard Clarke. Ashcroft's attempt to reassign blame—and perhaps force Gorelick to remove herself from the commission—are just another example.

To be specific, the attorney general said that Gorelick's memo during her tenure at the Department of Justice made it harder for the FBI and CIA to exchange information. His words were:

This memorandum laid the foundations for a wall separating the criminal and intelligence investigations.

The problem is, Ashcroft's office affirmed the conclusions of Gorelick's memo just one month before the attacks. But the damage was done. Gorelick was swamped with complaints and threats. The complaint raised by conservatives for weeks now, that she was too close to the bureaucracy that allowed the 9/11 attacks to come off undetected, was suddenly and officially highlighted by the man who replaced her boss.

But Gorelick left the Justice Department in 1997, four years before the attacks. She may have been part of the problem that allowed the 9/11 attacks to slip past the FBI, but she couldn't have been directly at fault. Gorelick defends her memo. By the guidelines in it, she says she was actually opening up better communication while laying down guidelines to avoid accusations that the FBI and CIA were colluding to convict US residents of terrorism (the kind of accusations that Ashcroft is now, not ironically, fighting in the cases of Jose Pedilla and James Yee).

What Ashcroft has done (or, more likely, the White House has done for him) is dig up an old memorandum that he can color as having hamstrung the FBI in uncovering terrorists. That gives people like House Majority Leader Tom Delay (R-TX) the opportunity to say that Gorelick should step down, presumably a win for the administration because it would cast the commission's motives and conclusion in doubt.

In his testimony, Ashcroft cited a "National Security Council plan to disrupt the al Qaeda network in the US" produced 17 months before the attacks and blamed the previous administration for not acting on it. But Ashcroft was in charge for almost half that time, and the outgoing administration was clear in its advice that al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden had recently been linked to acts of terror and represented the biggest threat to American security. In fact, Ashcroft claims that terrorism was his number one priority all along; he just didn't know about any specific threats. But the evidence shows that he's fudging his numbers and fuzzing his memory.

So Ashcroft is being disingenuous when he blames Gorelick and praises the PATRIOT Act for tearing down the wall. He says that he never saw the NSC's plan before September 11, but he doesn't blame Janet Reno. Instead, he blames Gorelick and her 1995 memo.

There's enough blame to go around, but Ashcroft should be shouldering his fair share, not shunting it to those who went before him, especially when that means underhandedly dredging up barely-relevant memos written by those who happen to sit on the commission. If you buy a house with a bad roof, and the previous owners tell you about it, it's your job to fix it... and your fault if you don't.

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