And he KICKED ASS.
WASHINGTON, April 13 — Attorney General John Ashcroft strongly defended the Bush administration and himself today before the 9/11 commission, laying the blame for intelligence failures prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks squarely on the presidency of Bill Clinton.Mr. Ashcroft said Al Qaeda was able to plan and carry out the attacks that killed some 3,000 people in large part because of policies of the Clinton administration and its deliberate neglect of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's computer technology.
"The simple fact of Sept. 11 is this," Mr. Ashcroft told members of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States in a public hearing. "We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies.
"Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions and starved for basic information technology," the attorney general went on. "The old national intelligence system in place on Sept. 11 was destined to fail."
You don't say. I'm facinated by all of this.
Mr. Ashcroft said that to the contrary, he personally went to the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, on March 7, 2001, and urged her to scuttle what he characterized as an ineffective policy of the Clinton administration specifying that Mr. bin Laden had to be captured, and only in a way that lawyers would approve."Even if they could have penetrated bin Laden's training camp, they would have needed a battery of attorneys to approve the capture," Mr. Ashcroft said sarcastically.
Mr. Ashcroft said that he wanted "decisive, lethal action" and had told Ms. Rice, "We should find and kill bin Laden."
The attorney general sounded almost contemptuous as he spoke of a "legal wall" put into effect in 1995 to separate criminal investigators from intelligence agents in an effort to safeguard individual rights.
Far from protecting individual rights, Mr. Ashcroft asserted, the wall has been an obstacle to protecting the American people.
A wall? That sounds like a really stupid idea. The person who wrote the document constructing this "wall" should be horsewhipped. They should be dragged before the committee and questioned thoroughly. Who is this asshat?
TELL US!
Referring to the 1995 document that constructed the figurative wall, Mr. Ashcroft went on to say, "Full disclosure compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the commission."Mr. Ashcroft was a referring to Jamie Gorelick, a Democratic member of the independent, bipartisan, 10-member commission, who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration.
That's not good. Does that make this a mistrial? Or should I say mis-witch hunt?
I'm sorry I missed out on that. I forgot about it.
ASHINGTON?!?!?
Beautiful. Funny! And tonite, well deserved! Nice to see some facts coming to light in this whole messy, yucky thing.
So, like, Condi and Johnny in '08? John and Con? Hm. One tough ticket.
Oops!
The wall was mentioned by Condi and now Ashcroft.
During the run up to the millenium celebration, it was well-known that those at the top of the CIA, FBI, etc. were meeting on a regular basis and sharing information. And it apparently contributed to the stopping of at least one plot. So the wall was a non-factor there.
Ashcroft is a joke; this administration is a joke; and if anyone think Dr. Rice could EVER be the president of the United States, these hearings clearly showed she cannot.
These attacks happened because terrorists decided to kill innocent Americans. We live in a free society, and with that freedom, we sacrifice a certain amount of safety to ensure that liberty reigns supreme.
Sure, we all wish these attacks had never happened, but NO administration could have prevented something like this without a significant overhaul of a system that's been in place for decades. Fuck anyone that blames Clinton, Bush, Cheney, Rice, the FBI, or the CIA.
We will ultimately prevail over terrorists because I believe our will is stronger and our resolve tougher. Anyone who suggests we back down even one bit is not only a pussy, but a goddamn traitor.
Dear Rosemary,
Got to admit, I suspected typo, but it all fit just too well.
Liked the original better. Just one guy's opinion.
Rick
Ara,
And it apparently contributed to the stopping of at least one plot. So the wall was a non-factor there.
Everyone says that the one plot that was stopped was practically accidental. It had NOTHING to do with raised alerts, CIA and FBI. It was one alert agent. That's it.
Nice try though.
One more thing, they all knew the millenium was coming and something might happen so they worked together for that one purpose, not that it did anything good.
They didn't know 9/11 was going to happen so the wall was a factor.
One more thing, they all knew the millenium was coming ...
Duh.
NObody knew 9/11 was coming. No significance what-so-ever. Y2K was the bogey man that had people stockpiling fresh water, crackers and canned sardines in the basement where the new generator sat in its crate.
Tim,
you may be right that the attacks were the result of living in a free society. Unfortunately, a lot of other people who oppose Bush refuse to admit that.
Isn't why we're talking about these hearings?
maor,
Not really - we're talking about the hearings because the Democrats felt sure that hearings would make the President look bad. They still haven't learned, and they've got a total of ten years experience with George Bush, that President Bush has their number and plays them anyway he chooses.
I'm looking forward to writing a biography of President Bush...not one of those "hot off the presses" sort of things you'd get right after he leaves office - but something twenty years later, after things have gone into a bit of historical perspective. My view is that the estimation of the President will rise vastly as time goes on... and this brings me to:
Janet Reno: Anyone catch her testimony? Was there ever anything more pathetic? She was clearly a person entirely out of her depth - and nothing more starkly illustrated the essential weightlessness of the Clinton Administration than the fact that this nonentity was AG for nearly the full 8 years. In later years, I suspect that we'll stop just short of amending the constitution to decree that Clinton was never President.
Ressam was caught because he acted strange on entering the border. If John Ashcroft acted that way, he would have been striped searched and anally probed.
In the course of questioning, customs agents thought Ressam was a drug smuggler. After running him down, the agents inspected his car and found some powder and liquids in the trunks. They tested the strange brownish liquid for narcotic content. It was negative. Witnesses said that Ressam's eyes went wide and he ducked when the agent shaked what was later discovered to be nitroglycerin.
Lots of luck that day. The wall did not affect that case because Ressam was an idiot. The next attempt was far more competent. Mossauoni (sic) could have been the case that broke everything but the wall prevented his computer from being searched.
I know that Mr. Ashcroft is devoted to fighting America's enemies. The problem is that he believes our enemies are pot, porn, and women who want control of their own bodies.
You're making the all-to-common mistake of assuming that any criticism of the current regime in Washington is blaming them for 9/11. That's simply not true. We on the Left want to catch the sumbitches who blew up the WTC, AND we want to catch the sumbitches who spent our surplus on tax giveaways to the uber-wealthy.
Is it true that Jamie Gorelick, a member of the commission investigating 9/11, was the author of the memo that prevented the FBI from stopping the 9/11 terror event?
How dare she stand up in front of the country with her righteous indignation, grilling hard working civil servants, attempting to place the blame on anyone else--when she herself is responsible?
Will she be apologizing to the family members of 9/11 fatalities? Will she?
It is absolutely true.
Read the memo. It is very straightforward. It in fact directs FBI HQ and the Justice Department to inform criminal investigative elements if any foreign counterintelligence information is developed that indicates that a federal crime has been committed or will be committed. It gets so specific as to direct an assistant U.S. attorney in New York with knowledge of the criminal investigation to monitor the foreign counterintelligence investigation and inform criminal investigators if information is developed that indicates a federal crime may occur. The whole thrust is, stay on top of this.
Gorelick has nothing to apologize for.
Just Plain Lost:
Look. In the real world, how you or I choose to interpret the legal mumbo-jumbo in that memo, or in Janet Reno's subsequent endorsement of it, is not worth a fart in a high wind. The only thing that matters is how Jamie Gorelick's team of lawyers put it into practice. We know that they forbade: (1) Minneapolis FBI to seek a warrant to search Moussaoui's laptop. We thereby found out too late the name, address and telephone of Ramzi bin Al-Shibh, who quarterbacked the whole thing from Hamburg. (2) Phoenix to investigate Arab students in flight training. (3) the FBI intel officer who had learned from CIA that al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were somewhere in the USA to alert FBI field offices. As we found out--again too late--they had been living with Atta who hit the North Tower and al-Shehhi who hit the South Tower. If those four had been found in time, 9/11 might have been aborted.
Regardless of how anyone may read the memo in retrospect, its effect was to prevent the FBI from taking action. The only thing we need to get from the memo is that Gorelick admits in the memo that her action guidelines exceed the requirements of FISA. Reno's follow-up memo stresses that the FBI and CIA must not only avoid infraction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they must avoid any appearance of even bending it. The intel agent in (3) wrote a memo saying that people will die, and that the only protection the Gorelick doctrine provided was to protect Bin Laden. How right he was; how revolting it is to see the official who concocted that memo slandering the working cops that she crippled. She belongs in the witness chair.