It's beginning to look that way. Deborah Orin in the NY Post tells us that Jamie Gorelick was warned in 1995 by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who prosecuted the blind sheikh for the first World Trade Center bombing, that the "wall" Gorelick had ordered set up which forbade contact between intelligence services, the FBI and US Attorney's offices would bite us. White sent a letter to Janet Reno complaining that the "wall" was not legally required. When Gorelick and Reno refused to remove the wall, White wrote a bitter - and scathing - letter to Attorney General Reno warning that the wall could cost lives (the actual letter is secret and White refuses to comment). And look what happened. Military intelligence, using "open sources", that is, public records, nothing secret or covert, discovered and named Mohammed Atta and 3 of the other 9/11 hijackers as likely threats to the US and suggested they be picked up and deported. Because of the wall set up by Gorelick and Reno, this information was never passed on to the FBI or any US Attorney. Voila! 9/11, 3000 citizens murdered and Atta is a martyred hero in all of Allahland.
Gorelick's membership on the 9/11 committee and the committee's refusal to allow her to testify as a witness underscores the whitewash that was being conducted. The 9/11 Committee staff was briefed twice by intelligence officials where this sordid story of incompetent government officials was laid out for them. They ignored it and did not include it in their final report. When confronted early this week, committee members denied ever being briefed. Then, with intelligence officers who gave them the briefings willing to publicize their briefing notes, the committee backpedaled and said that no one could recall the briefings. Then, after sending staffers to check the National Archives and finding the committee's own briefing notes, suddenly everyone remembers. But the exclusion of the briefings from the committee's final report was then blamed on the fact that the information did not jibe with other information that the committee had been given. That would be a clear violation of the committee's charter. The purpose of the committee was to try to determine what went wrong that caused us to suffer 3000 murdered American citizens and to make recommendations as to what steps to take to prevent a recurrence. Conflicting intelligence and conflicting reports and conflicting timelines have to all be laid out for everyone to see because these conflicts indicate gaps in our intelligence. Gaps that must be addressed and corrected. If the conflicts are buried or whitewashed, the intelligence gaps won't be addressed and corrected and we are at risk of getting whacked again.
It looks like the American people, and specifically the 3000 people who lost their lives in the twin towers, the Pentagon and in the field in Pennsylvania have been shortchanged again. Sometimes one wonders if there is anyone on a position of power and responsibility looking out for us at all.
UPDATE: The New York Times reports that suddenly all kinds of information is coming from the committee. The information that they earlier denied ever receiving, and then claimed to have forgotten, and then claimed was rendered moot by conflicting information, now is being refuted as "unsubstantiated by documentation". It would seem that they know an awful lot about something they knew nothing about just a couple of days ago.
TAGS: 9/11, Jamie Gorelick, Janet Reno, 9/11 Commission, Mohammed Atta, hijackers, incompetence
No comments:
Post a Comment