Whether Able Danger is a tremendous scandal or a future trivia question is beyond deciding at this point. We’ll find out eventually: Tomorrow or a year from now scarcely matters. Therefore, I shall wait patiently while others track every twist and turn.
In the meantime, though, Andy McCarthy calls attention to a huge blot on the 9/11 Commission’s copybook, one that is quite independent of Col. Shaffer’s spectacular allegations.
Today’s New York Post carries an article about the objections that Mary Jo White, then U.S. Attorney for Manhattan, raised against the Justice Department’s 1995 decision to tighten the restrictions on communication between intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
White wrote the memo after her earlier pleas against the “wall” were rejected. She enlisted the help of her “Bomb II Team” — prosecutors working on terror bombings like the 1993 Twin Towers attack.
They gave six pages of detailed reasons why it was a mistake to create too much of a wall between intelligence and prosecutions. White forwarded that analysis to [Deputy Attorney General Jamie] Gorelick [later a member of the 9/11 Commission] and added her own notes on the Clinton-era decision “to keep prosecutors in the dark about intelligence investigations.”
“What troubles me even more than the known problems we have encountered are the undoubtedly countless instances of unshared and unacted-upon information that reside in some file or other or in some head or other or in some unreviewed or not fully understood tape or other,” White wrote. “These can be disasters waiting to happen.”
The 9/11 Commission’s report has this to say about the Wall Controversy (quoted from Mr. McCarthy’s post; bracketed inserts and italics are his):
In July 1995, Attorney General Reno issued formal procedures aimed at managing information sharing between Justice Department prosecutors and the FBI. They were developed in a working group led by the Justice Department’s Executive Office of National Security, overseen by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick. [The commission here drops a footnote, which reads as follows:] The group included representatives from the FBI, OIPR [i.e., Justice’s Office of Intelligence & Policy Review, which oversees applications for national security wiretaps], and the Criminal Division. In addition, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York [i.e., Mary Jo White] was given an opportunity to comment on the procedures. The procedures that were eventually issued were agreed to by all involved in the drafting process. As a member of the Commission, Gorelick has recused herself from participation in this aspect of our work. [Final Report at pp. 79 & 473 n.33]
Slick Willie himself could not have been more disingenuous. The footnote implies that Mary Jo White agreed to the procedures rather than vehemently critcizing them. It is worded, however, in a way that makes the fib cleverly deniable, since her submission of comments arguably did not make her “part of the drafting process”.
Color me croggled – and no longer willing to take at face value anything that the Commission says.
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