I’m sorry. Oral sex in the Oval Office? Perjury in a
federal court proceeding? No problem. One trembling lower lip, an
oh-so-sincere apology, and all is forgiven. Almost ten years as the
White House anti-terrorist chieftain with 9/11 as your legacy? No
problem. Even without the lower lip action, one profound apology on
behalf of a White House you didn’t run and all is forgiven. In
Wednesday night’s press conference, by my count, President Bush was
asked four times to apologize for 9/11, for Iraq, and for merely
being there.
So sorry. The problem is that the White House pressies
— who used to be distinguishable from the Kerry campaign staff —
are trying desperately to be straight men for a Kerry campaign
sound bite. They failed this time around because the president
isn’t taking — and shouldn’t take — the rap for 9/11. But the
Brenda Lee Press Corps will keep trying.
Please accept my apology. The shabbiness of it all
(especially the performance of John Roberts of CBS, who should pay
more attention to his badly-fitted whistling dentures and less to
his WASP-fro hairdo) made the president uneasy. He had every right
to be, because he knows it’s a setup. They wouldn’t give him the
pass they gave his predecessor again and again. If he confessed
error on anything remotely connected to 9/11 or Iraq, they’d be
tut-tutting forever, saying that America should accept the apology
of this nice but fatally-flawed man. They’d be so terribly sorry to
question his fitness for the presidency, and point out that John
Kerry didn’t make those mistakes.
The reaction to this nonsense is lost in the maelstrom of news
from the 9/11 Commission and about the fighting in Iraq. The
president has only two things in his mind: winning the war, and
winning the election. Unless he does the latter, we won’t do the
former. He — and we — can only expect the partisanship of the
press to grow worse, hard as that is to imagine. The partisanship
of the 9/11 Commission is no better.
IF THERE ARE APOLOGIES TO BE made, they should be emanating from
one member of the increasingly partisan and decreasingly credible
9/11 Commission. No, it’s not Richard Ben-Venomous, who at least
has the good grace to be openly and sneeringly partisan. The bigger
problem is former Clintonoid Deputy Attorney General and — before
that — Defense Department General Counsel Jamie Gorelick. The
Commission lost a lot of credibility on Tuesday when the Bush
cabinet member the left most loves to hate, Attorney General John
Ashcroft, went on the attack and hit Gorelick right between the
eyes.
This column has for years — and long before 9/11 — bemoaned
the utter fecklessness of the over-lawyered Clinton
administration’s approach to everything having to do with national
security. I’m sure, Dear Reader, you remember the incident when
Sandy Berger — Clinton’s national security advisor — shunned the
Sudanese offer of bin Laden on a silver platter because we didn’t
have enough evidence to indict UBL. And Loose Canons has often
complained that the Clintons’ approach went farther than the law
required in the interest of political correctness. After 9/11, it’s
been obvious that the intel community was emasculated by laws
dating back to the 1970s that made cooperation between the FBI,
CIA, NSA and DIA impossible. And the Clintons made it worse.
Ms. Gorelick, as Deputy AG, wrote a memo in 1995 that added
several layers of bricks to the top of the wall separating the
FBI’s criminal investigators and intelligence gatherers. It says,
in part, “…we believe that it is prudent to establish a
set of instructions that will clearly separate the
counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but
continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which do
beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating
an unwarranted appearance that [the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act] is being used to avoid procedural safeguards
which would apply in a criminal investigation.” Appearances
mattered more than allowing the investigators to put the pieces
together before 9/11.
THE HEADLINES FROM Tuesday’s hearing brought Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner
to call for Gorelick to resign, as the Commission’s rules require.
Sensenbrenner was right, but he may not have been aware of the
other big reason Gorelick has to be removed from the Commission.
There’s another big problem that Ms. Gorelick may be responsible
for, and which should result in her answering questions, not asking
them.
One of the appendices to Rowan Scarborough’s book,
Rumsfeld’s War, is a previously classified study of why
Clinton never used special ops troops to attack bin Laden. That
study says that when the Clintons considered employing special
operations forces against bin Laden, questions arose whether the
Defense Department had the legal authority to engage in such covert
operations. Part of it says, “Pentagon lawyers in the 1990s
argued that DoD did not have the legal authority.…Only the
CIA…had the license to conduct covert action…”
But, as the study found, the Pentagon lawyers’ objection is
wrong, and specific authority exists for the president to assign
covert missions to the armed services. And who was the chief lawyer
in the Pentagon in 1993 and 1994? None other than our gal Jamie.
She left DoD for the Justice Department before bin Laden became a
household word. But DoD top lawyers would have consulted with
Gorelick on an issue that would be — as that one was — briefed to
the Secretary of Defense, and probably to the president as well.
Did Gorelick participate in the decision to nix spec ops? What
advice did the DoD ask for and receive from her and the Justice
Department on that subject? The Commission needs to find out. Under
oath.
The 9/11 Commission can go along and play whatever games it may
choose. But the serious people on it cannot hope for any credible
result if Gorelick remains a member. She should be forced to
resign, and called to testify under oath about both the 1995 Memo
and the bad legal judgment that blocked the use of special ops
against bin Laden. If the Commissioners are serious about finding
what went wrong before 9/11, they should look to their left. Miz
Gorelick deserves a shot at her own Brenda Lee moment, and damned
little else.
TAS Contributing Editor Jed Babbin is author of the
forthcoming book, Inside the Asylum: How the UN and Old Europe
are Worse than You Think.
