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com | May 25, 2004 As the 9/11 Commission tries to uncover what kept intelligence agencies f rom preventing September 11, it has overlooked two vital factors: Jamie Gorelick and Bill Clinton. Gorelick, who has browbeaten the current admi nistration, helped erect the walls between the FBI, CIA and local invest igators that made 9/11 inevitable. However, she was merely expanding the policy Bill Clinton established with Presidential Decision Directive 24 . What has been underreported is why the policy came about: to thwart in vestigations into the Chinese funding of Clintons re-election campaign, and the favors he bestowed on them in return. government official and three other sources claimed that the 1995 me mo written by Jamie Gorelick, who served as the Clinton Justice Departme nts deputy attorney general from 1994 to 1997, created "a roadblock" to the investigation of illegal Chinese donations to the Democratic Nationa l Committee. The Gorelick memo , which blocked intelligence agents from sharing information that could have halted the September 11 hijacking plot, was only the mortar in a mu ch larger maze of bureaucratic walls whose creation Gorelick personally oversaw. Its a story the 9/11 Commission may not want to hear, and one that Goreli ck now incredibly a member of that commission has so far refused to tell . But it is perhaps the most crucial one to understanding the intentiona l breakdown of intelligence that led to the September 11 disaster. Nearly from the moment Gorelick took office in the Clinton Justice Depart ment, she began acting as the point woman for a large-scale bureaucratic reorganization of intelligence agencies that ultimately placed the gath ering of intelligence, and decisions about what if anything would be don e with it under near-direct control of the White House. In the process, more than a dozen CIA and FBI investigations underway at the time got ca ught beneath the heel of the presidential boot, investigations that woul d ultimately reveal massive Chinese espionage as millions in illegal Chi nese donations filled Democratic Party campaign coffers. When Gorelick took office in 1994, the CIA was reeling from the news that a Russian spy had been found in CIA ranks, and Congress was hungry for a quick fix. A month after Gorelick was sworn in, Bill Clinton issued Pr esidential Decision Directive 24. PDD 24 put intelligence gathering unde r the direct control of the presidents National Security Council, and ul timately the White House, through a four-level, top-down chain of comman d set up to govern (that is, stifle) intelligence sharing and cooperatio n between intelligence agencies. From the moment the directive was imple mented, intelligence sharing became a bureaucratic nightmare that requir ed negotiating a befuddling bureaucracy that stopped directly at the Pre sidents office. First, the directive effectively neutered the CIA by creating a National Counterintelligence Center (NCI) to oversee the Agency. NCI was staffed by an FBI agent appointed by the Clinton administration. It also brought multiple international investigations underway at the time under direct administrative control. The job of the NCI was to implement counterinte lligence activities, which meant that virtually everything the CIA did, from a foreign intelligence agents report to polygraph test results, now passed through the intelligence center that PDD 24 created. NCI reported to an administration-appointed National Counterintelligence Operations Board (NCOB) charged with discussing counterintelligence matt ers. The NCOB in turn reported to a National Intelligence Policy Board, which coordinated activities between intelligence agencies attempting to work together. The policy board reported directly to the president thro ugh the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. The result was a massive bureaucratic roadblock for the CIA which at the time had a vast lead on the FBI in foreign intelligence and for the FBI itself, which was also forced to report to the NCOB. All this occurred at a time when both a gencies were working separate ends of investigations that would eventual ly implicate China in technology transfers and the Democratic Party in a Chinese campaign cash grab. And the woman charged with selling this plan to Congress, convincing the media and ultimately implementing much of it? Many in Congress, including some Democrats, found the changes PDD 24 put in place baffling: they seemed to do nothing to insulate the CIA from in filtration while devastating the agencys ability to collect information. At the time, Democrat House Intelligence Chairman Dan Glickman referred to the plan as regulatory gobbledygook." Others questioned how FBI cont rol of CIA intelligence would foster greater communication between the l ower levels of the CIA and FBI, now that all information would have to b e run through a multi-tier bureaucratic maze that only went upward. Despite their doubts, Gorelick helped the administration sell the plan on Capitol Hill. But that wasnt good enough for the Clinton administration, which wanted c ontrol over every criminal and intelligence investigation, domestic and foreign, for reasons that would become apparent in a few years. For the first time in Justice Department history, a political appointee, Richard Scruggs an old crony or Attorney General Janet Renos from Florida was p ut in charge of the Office of Intelligence and Policy Review (OIPR). OIP R is the Justice Department agency in charge of requesting wiretap and s urveillance authority for criminal and intelligence investigations on be half of investigative agencies from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillanc e Act (FISA) court. The courts activities are kept secret from the publi c A year after PDD 24, with the new bureaucratic structure loaded with admi nistration appointees, Gorelick drafted the 1995 memo Attorney General J ohn Ashcroft mentioned while testifying before the 9/11 Commission. The Gorelick memo, and other supporting memos released in recent weeks, not only created walls within the intelligence agencies that prevented infor mation sharing among their own agents, but effectively walled these agen cies off from each other and from outside contact with the US prosecut ors instrumental in helping them gather the evidence needed to make the case for criminal charges. The only place left to go with intelligence information particularly for efforts to share intelligence information or obtain search warrants was straight up Clinton and Gorelicks multi-tiered chain of command. Instead , information lethal to the Democratic Party languished inside the Justi ce Department, trapped behind Gorelicks walls. In her letter of protest to Attorney Gene ral Reno over Gorelicks memo, United States Attorney Mary Jo White spell ed them out: These instructions leave entirely to OIPR and the (Justice Department) Criminal Division when, if ever, to contact affected US at torneys on investigations including terrorism and espionage, White wrote . But Scruggs acted as that enforcer, and he excelled at it. Scrugg s maintained Gorelicks walls between the FBI and Justice's Criminal Divi sion by threatening to automatically reject any FBI request for a wireta p or search warrant if the Bureau contacted the Justice Department's Cri minal Division without permission. This deprived the FBI, and ultimately the CIA, of gathering advice and assistance from the Criminal Division that was critical in espionage and terrorist cases. It is no coincidence that this occurred at the same time both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese and ultimately the Clinton administration itse lf. Between 1994 and the 1996 election, as Chinese dollars poured into D emocratic coffers, Clinton struggled to reopen high-tech trade to China. Had agents confirmed Chinese theft of weapons technology or its transfe r of weapons technology to nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria, Clinto n would have been forced by law and international treaty to react. Gorelicks appointment to the job at Justice in 1994 occurred during a...
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