The Wall

In previous posts I've mentioned the reckless stupidity -- recklessness and stupidity which border on treason -- of the Clintonistas. In addition, I find it the height of irony that one Clintonista, Jamie Gorelick, was on the 9/11 Commission when she should have been an investigative target of the Commission.

Today Power Line has a post linking to an excellent article in the New York Post on the efforts of Mary Jo White, former U.S. Attorney, pleading with Gorelick to abolish the "wall" Gorelick had established which prevented our intelligence agencies from communicating valuable intelligence to our law enforcement agencies.

Note that this "wall" that Gorelick established was not required by law -- it was required by politically correct sensitivites of the Clinton Administration. Sensitivites which led to the deaths of 3,000 Americans.

Here is the article in its entirety:

NY'S CASSANDRA

By DEBORAH ORIN

PRESIDENT Bill Clinton's team ignored dire warnings that its approach to terrorism was "very dangerous" and could have "deadly results," according to a blistering memo just obtained by The Post.

Then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wrote the memo as she pleaded in vain with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to tear down the wall between intelligence and prosecutors, a wall that went beyond legal requirements.

Looking back after 9/11, the memo makes for eerie reading — because White's team foresaw, years in advance, that the Clinton-era wall would make it tougher to stop mass murder.

"This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities," wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.

"The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary. Excessive conservatism . . . can have deadly results."

She added: "We must face the reality that the way we are proceeding now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous."

White must have felt like Cassandra, foreseeing dangers that proved all too real while no one at Clinton's Justice Department would listen. Team Clinton put up the "wall" in 1995 and it stayed up until after the 9/11 attacks.

Questions about the "wall" recently arose in regard to possible warnings from Able Danger, a pre-9/11 military-intelligence program, but the White memo makes clear that the issue was far, far broader.

In theory, the "wall" was supposed to avoid legal challenges to terror prosecutions. The problem was, as White and her team noted, only prosecutors familiar with a case or a cast of terror players might see the connections that could led to nabbing a suspect or foiling a plot.

Justice honchos overruled White's plea — even though her team knew better than anyone else in law enforcement what the real risks were. White's team won a host of convictions — including Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who plotted to bomb landmarks like the Statue of Liberty.

Equally troubling is that the 9/11 Commission, charged with tracing the failure to stop 9/11, got White's stunning memo and several related documents — and deep-sixed all of them.

The commission's report skips lightly over the wall in three brief pages (out of 567). It makes no mention at all of White's passionate and prescient warnings. Yet warnings that went ignored are just what the commission was supposed to examine.

So it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the commission ignored White's memo because it was a potential embarrassment to the woman to whom it was addressed: commission member Jamie Gorelick. (White has declined to discuss the matter, and Gorelick didn't immediately respond to requests for comment yesterday.)

White wrote the memo after her earlier pleas against the "wall" were rejected. She enlisted the help of her "Bomb II Team" — prosecutors working on terror bombings like the 1993 Twin Towers attack.

They gave six pages of detailed reasons why it was a mistake to create too much of a wall between intelligence and prosecutions. White forwarded that analysis to Gorelick and added her own notes on the Clinton-era decision "to keep prosecutors in the dark about intelligence investigations."

"What troubles me even more than the known problems we have encountered are the undoubtedly countless instances of unshared and unacted-upon information that reside in some file or other or in some head or other or in some unreviewed or not fully understood tape or other," White wrote. "These can be disasters waiting to happen."

For instance, in August 2001 — a month before the attacks — the FBI learned that two dangerous characters, future hijackers, might have arrived in the United States but didn't connect the dots to see that as a priority.

Also in August 2001, FBI headquarters failed to see the significance of the fact that arrested "20th hijacker" Zaccarias Moussaoui had taken flight lessons — despite desperate bids by field agents to sound the alarm.

Could some of those dots have been connected, absent the wall? There's no way to know — but surely the 9/11 Commission should have examined the issue.

Deborah Orin is The Post's Washington Bureau chief.