Online commentators are taking aim at the 9/11 commission for its failure to include in its report that intelligence officials reportedly ID'd hijack ringleader Mohamed Atta as part of an al-Qaida cell in the U.S. over a year before the September 11 tragedy, saying the panel was acting politically instead of factually.
One commentator specifically points his finger at former Clinton staffer Jamie Gorelick, a member of the panel who has been accused in the past of acting to protect her ex-boss from any political fallout of the commission's work.
Let’s not forget Sandy Berger, another Clinton connection, shoving classified documents down his pants. Here is more on the Gorelick’s apparent conflict of interest:
"… [W]hy did [the commission] ignore the Able Danger operation in their deliberations?" asked Captain's Quarters blogger Ed Morrissey, as highlighted by columnist Michelle Malkin. "It would emphasize that the problem was not primarily operational, as the commission made it seem, but primarily political – and that the biggest problem was the enforced separation between law enforcement and intelligence operations upon which the Clinton Department of Justice insisted. The hatchet person for that policy sat on the Commission itself: Jamie S. Gorelick."
It was Gorelick who, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, established the wall of silence between intel and law enforcement.
"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 in 1995. "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 rejected calls for her resignation from the commission last year when conflict-of-interest charges were raised.
Read the whole thing.
