Skimming the pond scum

NY Post - Scandal of Dems Who Put Politics Above Truth

Now there is no doubt that the Democratic attack dogs on the national 9/11 commission are embarked on a partisan mission: To defeat George W. Bush in November. They want this more than they want the United States to win the war on terror.

Indeed, more than they want to deliver truth to Americans everywhere, but especially to the families of the 9/11 victims - who expect better, and certainly deserve it.

And John F. Kerry, the Democrat who presumes to the presidency, is just fine with all this.

What a disgrace.

Indeed. Then there's the Teresa Kerry funded Jersey Girls, known at your local big media outlet as The Professional 9/11 Widows:

A fair number of the Americans not working in the media may, on the other hand, by now be experiencing Jersey Girls Fatigue--or taking a hard look at the pronouncements of the widows. Statements like that of Monica Gabrielle, for example (not one of the Jersey Girls, though an activist of similar persuasion), who declared that she could discern no attempt to lessen the casualties on Sept. 11. What can one make of such a description of the day that saw firefighters by the hundreds lose their lives in valiant attempts to bring people to safety from the burning floors of the World Trade Center--that saw deeds like that of Morgan Stanley's security chief, Rick Rescorla, who escorted 2,700 employees safely out of the South Tower, before he finally lost his own life?

But the best known and most quoted pronouncement of all had come in the form of a question put by the leader of the Jersey Girls. "We simply wanted to know," Ms. Breitweiser said, by way of explaining the group's position, "why our husbands were killed. Why they went to work one day and didn't come back."

The answer, seared into the nation's heart, is that, like some 3,000 others who perished that day, those husbands didn't come home because a cadre of Islamist fanatics wanted to kill as many of the hated American infidels in their tall towers and places of government as they could, and they did so. Clearly, this must be a truth also known to those widows who asked the question--though in no way one would notice.

They're enjoying their 15 minutes too much to care.

And then there's the puzzling case of 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick:

For those of us who were in the trenches of the struggle against militant Islam beginning in the early 1990s, it is jarring to hear, of all people, Jamie Gorelick - now a member of the 9/11 Commission - hectoring government officials about their asserted failure to perceive how essential it is that the right pieces of intelligence get into the right hands.
...
Commissioner Gorelick, as deputy attorney general - the number two official in the Department of Justice - for three years beginning in 1994, was an architect of the government's self-imposed procedural wall, intentionally erected to prevent intelligence agents from pooling information with their law-enforcement counterparts. That is not partisan carping. That is a matter of objective fact. That wall was not only a deliberate and unnecessary impediment to information sharing; it bred a culture of intelligence dysfunction. It told national-security agents in the field that there were other values, higher interests, that transcended connecting the dots and getting it right. It set them up to fail. To hear Gorelick lecture witnesses about intelligence lapses is breathtaking.

And even more galling for the Donks, it was John Ashcroft who pointed it out:

Attorney General John Ashcroft turned the tables on the 9/11 commission yesterday, blaming legal restrictions, including a memo written by one of commission's own members, for barring investigators from sharing information that might have stopped the terror attacks.

Ashcroft blasted the "legal wall" put into effect in 1995 which stopped information flowing between intelligence agents and criminal probers.

In a moment of high drama, Ashcroft made his point by referring to a just-declassified memo he brought to the hearings.

"Full disclosure compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the commission," he said.

Ashcroft, the target of criticism by earlier witnesses, was referring to Jamie Gorelick, a former deputy attorney general under Janet Reno and now one of the commission's 10 members.

"The simple fact of Sept. 11 is this," Ashcroft said. "We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies."

"Even if they could have penetrated [Osama] bin Laden's training camps, they would have needed a battery of lawyers" to take action, he said. "The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk to criminal prosecutors or agents."

Gorelick, who wrote the "wall" memo to then-FBI Director Louis Freeh that codified the restrictions, was not visibly surprised by Ashcroft's move, although other commission members seemed taken aback.

Exactly why is she on the commission? And why doesn't she resign now?

Andrew McCarthy has more on the whole "wall" business going back to 1978 when the whiners in Congress and Jimmy Carter decided to cripple CIA and FBI intelligence and counterintelligence operations although Gorelick did her best to "enhance" it.