| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: WoT |
| Flashback: MJ White hints a Gorelick Wall before Select Cmmtt |
| 2004-05-05 |
| exerpted from Mary Jo White’s tesstomony before Joint House And Senate Select Intelligence Committee October 8, 2002 MJ White provides specifc feedback to JFK on law enforcement approach to counter terrorism. But criminal prosecutions are, plainly, not a sufficient response to international terrorism. ...as one example -- and I’ll only give one -- of the limitations of the Criminal Justice System in dealing with international terrorism -- criminal prosecutions of international terrorists have limited deterrent effect. When thousands of international terrorists, all over the world, are willing, indeed anxious, to die in the service of their cause, we cannot expect prosecutions to effect significant deterrence. To clarify sucessful splodydopes are hard to prosecute or has anyone arraigned Atta’s ashes? -snip- This leads me to my final point about information sharing, but in the other direction. And I have to say if I were to single out the most significant concern that I had about our counterterrorism efforts, prior to September 11, dating from at least 1995, Jamie, what happened in 1995? it was that I feared we could be hampered in our efforts to detect and prevent terrorist attacks because of the barriers between the intelligence side and law enforcement side of our government. Some of these barriers were and, perhaps, still are statutory. Some were, and perhaps still are, cultural. Some were, and still are, court imposed. Some were, and may still be, voluntarily imposed by the agencies by way of guidelines to assure compliance with all legal requirements and to make an adequate record of such compliance. -snip- And yet, at least as things were done in the 1990s through September 11, as we perceived it, that evidence, if gathered on the intelligence side, could not be shared with prosecutors unless and until a decision was made in the Justice Department that it was appropriate to pass that information over the wall to prosecutors, either because it showed that a crime had been committed that needed to be dealt with by an arrest or further overt investigation or because evidence of such crime was relevant to an already ongoing criminal investigation. Because of this structure and these requirements, I do not know, even today, what evidence and information might have been relevant to our international terrorism investigations that was never passed over the wall. I don’t know that there is any, but I don’t know that there isn’t any either. To make a decision to pass information over the wall requires in the first instance a recognition of what that information is and what its significant is. In the area of international terrorism, this is a very difficult task, made more difficult by a combination of language and cultural barriers, coded conversations, literally tens of thousands of names of subjects that are confusing and look alike and an unimaginably complex mass of snippets of information that understandably may mean little to the people charged with reviewing and analyzing the information and deciding whether to recommend that it be passed over the wall. A prosecutor or criminal agent who, as it happens, has, for many years, been investigating particular terrorist groups or cells and who has, thus, amassed a tremendous body of knowledge and familiarity with the relevant names and events might well recognize as significant what seems to other conscientious and generally knowledgeable agents or lawyers as something essentially meaningless. What can happen, and I fear may have happened -- but I don’t know that -- is that some relevant information that could have been passed over the wall wasn’t and, thus, an opportunity could have been lost to make a connection that might have led to a further investigative step that might have led to the detection of an ongoing terrorist conspiracy. We must, in my view, do everything conceivably possible to eliminate all walls and barriers that impede our ability to effectively counter the terrorism threat. If policy and culture have to change to do that, they must change. If the law must be changed to do that, I would change the law. Indeed, I believe the Justice Department and the Congress thought that the law had been changed to help address this problem by the USA PATRIOT Act. A recent decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court -- the FISA court -- now on appeal, however, suggest otherwise. The FISA court decision also eludes to certain enhancements to the wall that the FISA court imposed prior to September 11, effectively making the court the wall in certain international terrorism investigations. The walls that so concerned us throughout my tenure as United States attorney, thus, were built higher prior to September 11. While we were not made privy to the full rationale for this decision, because we’re on the other side of the wall, and we certainly would not condone any misrepresentations -- inadvertent misrepresentations to any court or any abuse of the FISA authority, raising the walls did concern us greatly, from a public safety point of view. We voiced those concerns with officials in the Department of Justice prior to September 11. We do not know what, if any, relevant information was kept behind those walls. Incidentally, when I was asked after September 11 by the Justice Department and FBI Director Bob Mueller what legislative changes we would recommend, we made a number of recommendations. But what I said was the single most important point is to get the walls down between the intelligence and the law enforcement community. That remains my very strong view today. I, in my written statement, offered a number of other recommendations, but the single most important recommendation I would make to the committees would be to address the full range of issues presented by the bifurcation of the intelligence and law enforcement communities and functions as they operate in international terrorism investigations, including the permissible use of FISA and the dissemination and use of the product of FISA searches and surveillances. And so I will end there by thanking you very much for this opportunity to share my perspective and concerns. Thank you. Although this testimony is dated, I find it relavent and possibly damning ... if anyone in the media notices. |
| Posted by:Super Hose |
| #1 Super H.- I don't think this suits the "mainstream media" agenda. Laura Ingraham was talking about this last week on her radio show as well.. |
| Posted by: BigEd 2004-05-05 12:14:38 PM |