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<p>Attorney General John Ashcroft came out swinging in testimony before the September 11 Commission on Tuesday. "In 1995, the Justice Department embraced flawed legal reasoning, imposing a series of restrictions on the FBI that went beyond what the law required," he said.</p>

Attorney General John Ashcroft came out swinging in testimony before the 9-11 Commission on Tuesday. "In 1995, the Justice Department embraced flawed legal reasoning, imposing a series of restrictions on the FBI that went beyond what the law required," he said. "The 1995 Guidelines and the procedures developed around them imposed draconian barriers to communications between the law enforcement and intelligence communities. The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents. In 1995, the Justice Department designed a system destined to fail." But Ashcroft's bombshell wasn't his description of the Clinton Administration's policies, which have been...

His testimony is likely to be overshadowed by the president's news conference, but Attorney General John Ashcroft served notice yesterday that he is one administration player not afraid at all to go on offense against the Democratic louts on the so-called 9/11 commission. The full effect of the bombshell he dropped yesterday afternoon will take some time to settle. "The single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents," he said in his stirring and air-clearing opening remarks. "Government erected this wall. Government buttressed this wall. And before September 11, government was...

In his public testimony before the 9/11 Commission the other day, Attorney General John Ashcroft exposed Commissioner Jamie Gorelick's role in undermining the nation's security capabilities by issuing a directive insisting that the FBI and federal prosecutors ignore information gathered through intelligence investigations. But Ashcroft pointed to another document that also has potentially explosive revelations about the Clinton administration's security failures. Ashcroft stated, in part: ... [T]he Commission should study carefully the National Security Council plan to disrupt the al Qaeda network in the U.S. that our government failed to implement fully seventeen months before September 11. The NSC's Millennium...

<p>April 15, 2004 -- House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner has demanded the resignation of Jamie Gorelick as a member of the federal 9/11 Commission. Frankly, given her blatant conflicts of interest, she should never have been appointed in the first place.</p>

We predicted Democrats would use the 9/11 Commission for partisan purposes, and that much of the press would oblige. But color us astonished that barely anyone appreciates the significance of the bombshell Attorney General John Ashcroft dropped on the hearings Tuesday. If Jamie Gorelick were a Republican, you can be sure our colleagues in the Fourth Estate would be leading the chorus of complaint that the Commission's objectivity has been fatally compromised by a member who was also one of the key personalities behind the failed antiterror policy that the Commission has under scrutiny. Where's the outrage? At issue is...

WASHINGTON D.C.—Attorney General John Ashcroft yesterday opened a direct partisan attack on the 9-11 Commission, charging that one of its members is the author of a heretofore secret memo written in the Clinton years that prevented the government from conducting the type of investigations that might have thwarted events like the WTC attack. Questioned about why he changed from commercial to government jets in summer of 2001, Ashcroft said the decision was taken on advice of his personal security team and "related to maintenance of arms," among other things. It was not related to any terrorist threat, he said. In...

Confused by the strange questioning from the 9/11 Commission about Attorney General John Ashcroft and the use of private airplanes prior to 9/11 (the "families" want to know, you see), I conducted a search and came up with the following: Dan Rather, Rumor-Monger 05/27/2002 Dan Rather's behavior of late would cause most reasonable folks to guess that he's gone off his medication. Long considered the Great Satan of media bias, he still managed to touch our hearts and rally our spirits with his declaration of patriotic love of our country and support for our president in the difficult time after...

LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) - Contradicting her successor, former Attorney General Janet Reno said Wednesday that nothing prevented the sharing of FBI intelligence with criminal investigators working on counterterrorism. Reno, speaking Wednesday at the University of Kentucky, took issue with Attorney General John Ashcroft's statement Tuesday that a legal restriction referred to as "the wall" prevented the FBI from sharing information with investigators. "I know of nothing that would have prohibited, based on what I've seen, proper follow-up" in cases Ashcroft referred to, Reno said. Reno and Ashcroft testified before the Sept. 11 Commission Tuesday in Washington. Ashcroft blamed Reno for...

In a dramatic moment of his testimony before the 9/11 commission this afternoon, Attorney General John Ashcroft released a previously classified memo from 1995 that instructed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys around the country to ensure they had "walled off" overseas intelligence information from domestic crime-fighters. The separation between overseas intelligence gathering and domestic criminal prosecution has been widely criticized by both Democrats and Republicans on the committee for having helped make the 9/11 attacks possible. "[T]he simple fact of Sept. 11 is this," Ashcroft testified: "We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our...

WASHINGTON, April 13 — On Tuesday, witnesses and commissioners pondered the role of "the wall" in the Sept. 11 attacks. Attorney General John Ashcroft told the 9/11 commission that "the wall," a legal barrier in the government preventing intelligence investigators from sharing information with criminal investigators, was the most important structural impediment to preventing the attacks. The wall, which has since been demolished by a special appeals court ruling, was part of a body of law that was little known to the public. It involved secret testimony and decisions by a special federal court that ruled on the requests of...

Attorney General John Ashcroft's statement prepared for the Sept. 11 commission, provided by the commission: It is with great sorrow that I join this commission today in reflection on Sept. 11, 2001. Even today, 31 months after the attacks, I struggle to learn the lessons of that day without being overwhelmed by the losses of that day. I feel sorrow for the loss of life, sorrow for the loss of promise, sorrow for the lost innocence of a nation forever scarred. My sorrow for the victims of Sept. 11 is equaled only by my rage at their killer. Osama bin...

If there is one man the Bush-haters hate more than Bush, it's John Ashcroft. To the left, he might as well be the devil himself. Anyway, Attorney General John Ashcroft testified yesterday before the 9/11 Blame Commission and dropped a bombshell. And it's about time somebody said it...these "hearings" have turned into a partisan debacle, so the Bush administration is fighting back. Ashcroft blamed the Clinton administration for leaving America open to attack, saying that the attacks of 9/11 happened because "for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to our enemies." The Democrats on this commission and their...

WASHINGTON - Attorney General John Ashcroft highlighted a bitter hearing on the 9/11 terror attacks yesterday by blaming the Clinton administration for intelligence failures that led to the catastrophe. In a stunning salvo, Ashcroft pinned the "single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11" on Jamie Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 commission who served as former President Bill Clinton's deputy attorney general. Ashcroft's accusation was part of a storm of finger-pointing during the televised hearing into intelligence failures that led to the 9/11 attacks. Former FBI boss Louis Freeh and his agency came under scathing criticism for its fumbling of...

<p>WASHINGTON — A huge uptick in terrorist chatter in the summer of 2001 suggested a "massive terrorist strike" sometime in the future, intelligence and law enforcement experts testified Tuesday, but no specific information pointed to the Sept. 11 attacks.</p> <p>"Had I known a terrorist attack on the United States was imminent in 2001, I would have unloaded our full arsenal of weaponry against it -- despite the inevitable criticism," Attorney General John Ashcroft said.</p>

<p>Attorney General John Ashcroft yesterday blamed the Clinton administration for neutering the FBI's counterterrorism efforts before the September 11 terrorist attacks, preventing the sharing of information that might have helped expose the plot. "The simple fact of September 11th is this: We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies," Mr. Ashcroft told the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, the congressionally chartered panel looking into the government failures leading up to the September 11 attacks. "Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions and starved for basic information technology," he said, calling the intelligence system "destined to fail." Before he testified, the commission's investigative staff released two reports in which it said the FBI and CIA had a series of opportunities to learn of and prevent the attacks in the summer before the hijackings, but financial and legal barriers and a lack of awareness prevented high government officials from putting the pieces together. "I read our staff statement as an indictment of the FBI for over a long period of time," said commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean. Yesterday's hearing, which focused on law enforcement and the intelligence community, was held in the Senate's Hart office. But it lacked the fireworks of previous public hearings before the commission, including testimony from Richard A. Clarke, former national coordinator for counterterrorism, and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. The commission also heard from former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, who served from 1993 to 2001; former acting FBI Director Thomas J. Pickard, who served from June 25, 2001, to Sept. 4, 2001; Clinton administration Attorney General Janet Reno and J. Cofer Black, who was the director of the CIA's counterterrorism center from 1999 to 2002. Among them, fingers pointed every which way over whether the FBI was allowed to, and did, share information with other agencies and within the bureau. The commission's staff report identified the FBI's "inability or unwillingness to share information" as a critical problem leading up to the attacks and said many sources had expressed "frustration" with the bureau over it. But Mr. Freeh disputed that notion and said he brought information to the top of the Clinton administration. "The attorney general and I, every two weeks, almost like clockwork in the last 14, 15 months of our overlapping tenure, sat with [Clinton administration National Security Adviser] Sandy Berger in his office for at least an hour, perhaps two hours, and went over every single piece of counterterrorism, counterintelligence case that we had," he said. "By the way, Dick Clarke was never present at any of those meetings. Why Sandy Berger didn't want him there, I don't know." Mr. Freeh also said the attacks could have been prevented with the right intelligence work. "September 11th, had we had the right sources overseas or in the United States, could have been prevented. We did not have those sources," he said. But Miss Reno said the FBI often didn't even know what information it did have. "It was common knowledge that one of the problems was that the bureau sometimes didn't know what it had and that it didn't share the information," she said, laying partial blame on the antiquated information systems that the bureau had. But the biggest charges of the day came from Mr. Ashcroft, who said the Justice Department in 1995 under Miss Reno "embraced flawed legal reasoning, imposing a series of restrictions on the FBI that went beyond what the law required" in setting up a barrier between law enforcement and intelligence gathering. He called that barrier "the wall," and said it made intelligence agents afraid to talk with prosecutors or law-enforcement officials. "In the days before September 11th, the wall specifically impeded the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui, the investigation of Khalid Almihdhar and of Nawaf Alhazmi," he said. "After the FBI arrested Moussaoui, agents became suspicious of his interest in commercial aircraft and sought approval for a criminal search warrant to search his computer. The warrant was rejected because FBI officials feared breaching the wall." Mr. Ashcroft also took aim at one of the commissioners, Jamie S. Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general who was responsible for the 1995 rules. Several times, Mr. Ashcroft made reference to the Clinton administration, at one point even comparing its funding of the FBI technology budget unfavorably to that of the first Bush administration, saying the amount left in 2001 by the Clinton administration "was actually $36 million less than the last Bush budget eight years before." His testimony contrasted sharply with Miss Reno, who just three hours earlier told the commission that she hoped that together they could do their work "not talking about blame, not talking about partisan politics." She said she thought information sharing could happen under the rules that existed, and she said the Patriot Act since has made that clearly permissible. Still, she said, "I don't blame anybody. I'm responsible. If somebody wants to be responsible, it's going to be me because I tried to work through these issues while I was attorney general and time ran out on me." Meanwhile, Mr. Pickard said that in his brief tenure as acting director, Mr. Ashcroft did not seem to consider counterterrorism a priority, based on his funding requests and on a remark he says Mr. Ashcroft made in one meeting that "he did not want to hear this information anymore." But Mr. Ashcroft said that never happened: "I did never say to him that I did not want to hear about terrorism." Yesterday's testimony is prompting some lawmakers to call for action. Sen. John Cornyn, Texas Republican, called for renewal of the Patriot Act. House Select Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Christopher Cox, California Republican, called for a renewed focus on sharing information with the new Department of Homeland Security, and Sen. John Edwards, North Carolina Democrat, renewed his call for an independent department to gather domestic intelligence. That recommendation, though, was roundly rejected by those who testified yesterday, including Miss Reno and Mr. Freeh, who said establishing such an agency would be "a huge mistake for the country."</p>

WASHINGTON, April 13 — Testifying on Tuesday afternoon before the commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft said "the single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11 was the wall" in the Justice Department that prevented criminal investigators from communicating freely with intelligence agents. "Somebody built this wall," Mr. Ashcroft declared. It was established, he said, by a memorandum written in 1995 that he had just declassified. "Full disclosure," he went on, "compels me to inform you that its author is a member of the commission." As most people in the hearing room knew, he was referring to...

<p>April 14, 2004 -- Attorney General John Ashcroft turned the tables on the 9/11 commission yesterday, blaming legal restrictions, including a memo written by one of commission's own members, for barring investigators from sharing information that might have stopped the terror attacks. Ashcroft blasted the "legal wall" put into effect in 1995 which stopped information flowing between intelligence agents and criminal probers.</p>

Attorney General John Ashcroft came out swinging in testimony before the 9-11 Commission on Tuesday. "In 1995, the Justice Department embraced flawed legal reasoning, imposing a series of restrictions on the FBI that went beyond what the law required," he said. "The 1995 Guidelines and the procedures developed around them imposed draconian barriers to communications between the law enforcement and intelligence communities. The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents. In 1995, the Justice Department designed a system destined to fail."  But Ashcroft's bombshell wasn't his description of the Clinton Administration's policies, which have been...

Print Article         Close Window     Gorelick Licked By Published 4/14/2004 12:05:12 AM His testimony is likely to be overshadowed by the president's news conference, but Attorney General John Ashcroft served notice yesterday that he is one administration player not afraid at all to go on offense against the Democratic louts on the so-called 9/11 commission. The full effect of the bombshell he dropped yesterday afternoon will take some time to settle. "The single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents," he said in his stirring and air-clearing opening remarks....