NPR did a good job of setting the record straight on Gorelick

[G_j]

this morning. Anyone else hear it?
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/

Played a bit of Rush spewing lies and corrected them. The "wall" was put in place during the Reagan and Bush terms. Gorelick actually lowered the wall a bit.
They also spoke to her about the recent death threats.

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Here is Gorelick's Washington Post op-ed:

At last week's hearing, Attorney General John Ashcroft, facing criticism, asserted that "the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents" and that I built that wall through a March 1995 memo. This is simply not true.

First, I did not invent the "wall," which is not a wall but a set of procedures implementing a 1978 statute (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA) and federal court decisions interpreting it. In a nutshell, that law, as the courts read it, said intelligence investigators could conduct electronic surveillance in the United States against foreign targets under a more lenient standard than is required in ordinary criminal cases, but only if the "primary purpose" of the surveillance were foreign intelligence rather than a criminal prosecution.

Second, according to the FISA Court of Review, it was the justice departments under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the 1980s that began to read the statute as limiting the department's ability to obtain FISA orders if it intended to bring a criminal prosecution. The practice of prohibiting prosecutors from directing intelligence investigations was first put in place in those years as well. Then, in July 1995, Attorney General Janet Reno issued written guidelines that spelled out the steps FBI intelligence agents and criminal investigators and prosecutors needed to follow when sharing information. The point was to preserve the ability of prosecutors to use information collected by intelligence agents.

Third, Mr. Ashcroft's own deputy attorney general, Larry Thompson, formally reaffirmed the 1995 guidelines in an Aug. 6, 2001, memo addressed to the FBI and the Justice Department. Ashcroft has charged that the guidelines hampered the department's ability to pursue terrorists Zacarias Moussaoui, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in August 2001, but his own department had endorsed those guidelines at the pivotal time.

(In her fourth point, Ms. Gorelick writes: "Had my memo been in place in August 2001 -- when, as Ashcroft said, FBI officials rejected a criminal warrant of Moussaoui because they feared 'breaching the wall' -- it would have allowed those agents to obtain a criminal warrant without fear of jeopardizing an intelligence investigation." In her fifth point, she writes: "... nothing in the 1995 guidelines prevented the sharing of information between criminal and intelligence investigators.")


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20786-2004Apr17.html

[G_j]

1. about the death threats

CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/04/17/gorelick.threats /
9/11 commissioner: 'I've received threats'
Gorelick says she won't step down; FBI investigating
Saturday, April 17, 2004 Posted: 8:13 PM EDT (0013 GMT)


Here is a worldnet report:
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=38094
Gorelick gets 'death threats'
9-11 Commissioner under fire for Justice memo, not quitting
Posted: April 18, 2004
5:53 p.m. Eastern