Posted on 08/11/2005 8:48:47 AM PDT by Maria S
A member of the group, the "Jersey Girls," who lost her husband in the 9/11 attacks, is defending 9/11 Commission member Jamie Gorelick against allegations that, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, she blocked critical intelligence that had identified the two 9/11 hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center.
"Gorelick gets a bad rap with that whole, you know, 'wall thing,'" Lorie Van Auken told WABC Radio's John Gambling - referring to Ms. Gorelick's 1995 directive prohibiting intelligence agencies from sharing evidence on suspected terrorists with law enforcement.
Calling it insread "the Reno wall," Van Auken insisted that its primary impact was limited to the investigation into so-called 20th hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui, where investigators were prevented from searching Moussaoui's computer until after the 9/11 attacks. Van Auken offered no comment on reports that the Gorelick restrictions bottled up critical intelligence on 9/11 conspirators Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, whose hijacked planes destroyed the World Trade Center.
But Rep. Curt Weldon, who revealed earlier this week that military intelligence had identified Atta and al-Shehhi as terrorist threats operating inside the U.S. two years before the attacks, blamed the Clinton Justice Department's "wall."
"There was no reason not to share this information with the FBI," he complained in a radio interview Wednesday night, "except that the firewalls that existed back then were so severe that they wouldn't let these agencies talk to one another."
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