Inside Politics

Blame Gorelick?

September 11 commission member Jamie Gorelick, as deputy attorney general for three years beginning in 1994, “was an architect of the government’s self-imposed procedural wall, intentionally erected to prevent intelligence agents from pooling information with their law-enforcement counterparts,” writes Andrew C. McCarthy, a former chief assistant U.S. attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others.

“That is not partisan carping. That is a matter of objective fact. That wall was not only a deliberate and unnecessary impediment to information sharing; it bred a culture of intelligence dysfunction. It told national security agents in the field that there were other values, higher interests, that transcended connecting the dots and getting it right. It set them up to fail,” Mr. McCarthy said in an opinion piece at National Review Online (www.nationalreview.com).

“To hear Gorelick lecture witnesses about intelligence lapses is breathtaking,” he added.

Monday-morning QB

Laying blame for missed clues that could have signaled the September 11, 2001, attacks is “Monday-morning quarterbacking,” says Rudolph W. Giuliani, who was New York’s mayor at the time.

“For any one thing to jump out, you almost have to know what’s going to happen in the future,” said Mr. Giuliani, who is to testify next month before the government commission investigating the terrorist attacks.

“And now, we do know what happened in the future. So if you see a document that says, ‘al Qaeda anything,’ it’s a lot more important than it was back then. Back then, al Qaeda fit into thousands of other pieces of information.”

Mr. Giuliani told the Associated Press in an interview yesterday he had not seen or heard any intelligence that could have prompted the government to react differently than it did.

Write fast, Bill

Some top Democrats are growing nervous that former President Bill Clinton’s memoirs will arrive in bookstores just in time to overshadow John Kerry’s presidential campaign, the New York Times reports.

“Many Democrats said they wanted the book published as far as possible before the election and, certainly, before the Democratic national convention in late July. They fear that the book will embolden Mr. Clinton’s foes to turn out and vote for President Bush,” reporters Jim Rutenberg and David D. Kirkpatrick said.

“Mr. Clinton, for his part, has increased the nervous speculation about the book in Democratic circles by making a habit of picking up the phone to regale friends with long passages and even chapters of his prose. Mixing boyish enthusiasm with a craving for approval, people who have received the calls said, he has proudly narrated excerpts about everything from college antics with his pals at Georgetown to his 1995 standoff with Republicans that led to a government shutdown.”

Story Continues →