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Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

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It is possible to do the right thing without the promise of a cookie.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

The snowflake in chief appeared visibly frustrated when questioned by a reporter about egg prices.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

I did not have this on my fuck 2025 bingo card.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

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“But what about the lurkers?”

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How stupid are these people?

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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Gorelick Wall Flap

Gorelick Wall Flap

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Last week, when the new information regarding Able Danger was released, I incorrectly intimated that this somehow involved Jamie Gorelick’s ‘wall’ decision/enforcement. It does not.

I stand by my other statements regarding Gorelick’s conflict of interest because of her close relationship with the House of Saud.

On a side note, I do find it increasingly pathetic that Thinkprogress is spending all their time demanding that Glenn Reynolds make a retraction for a statement he never made, and to compound that demand with demands he retract statements that remain accurate. Pretty amusing stuff.

Reader Interactions

14Comments

  2. 2.

    ppGaz

    I stand by my other statements regarding Gorelick’s conflict of interest because of her close relationship with the House of Saud.

    Wow. I’m looking forward to your treatise on the Bush family’s close relationship with the House of Saud, too.

    I’ll assume that you are working hard on it, seeing as you seem to be taking such a long time getting it published.

    (Editorial aside: “Seeing as” is used here as a campy mechanism for underlining the sarcasm in the post. Otherwise it is a construction unsuited to the highly important and gravid subject of Jamie Gorelick’s “conflict of interest.” We all know how seriously “conflict of interest” is taken around here!!)

  3. 3.

    ppGaz

    Yet another indication that the Bush apologists

    Your link won’t work, but this one will:

    Decline of Punditry — Blogs Next?

    Good lord, will blogs be the next venue abandoned by people hungry for some straight talk, disgusted with the pandering and the manipulation that used to be the purview of politicians alone, but now is the stock and trade of seemingly every talking/typing head?

  6. 6.

    ppGaz

    ppGaz- Which member of the Bush family was on the 9/11 Commission?

    If this is Usenet, that’s a giant Whoosh.

    Knowing that you aren’t clueless, I am left to conclude that your question is rhetorical, in a “serious” vein. I put “serious” in quotes because, you know, we really don’t want to get “serious” about this war thing around here. We just want to focus on the personality and snarky parts.

    I can’t answer your ‘question’ without really pissing you off.

    So I choose not to answer it. Those who got my meaning will still get it, and those who didn’t, still won’t.

  8. 8.

    Mike S

    I find the Able Danger story interesting. But even more nteresting is the way Shaffer’s story is changing.

    August 8: “[Shaffer] said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003. [Shaffer] said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a Qaeda cell in the United States.”

    August 12: “As with their other meetings, Commission staff promptly prepared a memorandum for the record. That memorandum, prepared at the time, does not record any mention of Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers, or any suggestion that their identities were known to anyone at DOD before 9/11.”

    August 16: “Colonel Shaffer said that he had provided information about Able Danger and its identification of Mr. Atta in a private meeting in October 2003 with members of the Sept. 11 commission staff when they visited Afghanistan, where he was then serving.”

    August 19: “Shaffer conceded that during his own personal briefing of Sept. 11 commission staffers in Afghanistan in Oct. 2003, he didn’t specifically name the terrorists. Instead, he detailed how Able Danger had uncovered information about three terror cells with the use of then-advanced data-mining techniques.”

  9. 9.

    MI

    haha, ppGaz’s first response is what initially went through my head with I read what John had written. I mean, I know intellectually what John meant, but it was kind of a “whaaaa?” moment, having a Bush *supporter criticize someone’s relationship with the House of Saud.

    *Although I’m not sure John even qualifies as much of a Bush suppoter at this point in the game?

  10. 10.

    JoeTX

    Conflict of Interest? Republicans in office are a conflict of interest! Ohio Gov Taft, Tom Noe, Abramhoff, Delay, Cunningham, and on and on and on…

    A personal friend and academic collaborator of current National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and a former member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Zelikow was part of the transition team between the Clinton and Bush administrations. During this period he briefed incoming security advisors, including Dr. Rice, on issues such as Iraq and al-Qaeda. According to Bush Advisor Karen Hughes, “Mr. Zelikow was recruited by the administration to brief us during the transition because he was one of the foremost experts in the world on al-Qaeda.” The bulk of Zelikow’s academic research, however, has been concentrated on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the American presidency and he has not published any articles or books directly relating to al-Qaeda or Middle Eastern terrorism.

    Al-Qaeda expert or no, many outside groups feel Zelikow’s extensive connections with the current administration endanger the integrity of the commission. Although he has officially recused himself from taking part in those parts of the investigation that deal with the time he was on the Bush transition team, the 9-11 Family Steering Committee and 9-11 Citizens Watch, two separate public interest groups that have been lobbying for a fair and transparent investigation, don’t consider that enough. These groups have called for his immediate resignation due to a conflict of interests.

    The conflicts of interests start at the top of the 9/11 commission!

  11. 11.

    JoeTX

    More on Zelikow from SourceWatch..

    Philip D. Zelikow is Executive Director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, otherwise known as the 9-11 Commission.

    There’s a raft of evidence to suggest that Zelikow has personal, professional and political reasons not to see the commission hold Rice and other Bush officials accountable for pre-9/11 failings, and may be the de facto swing vote for Republicans on the panel.[1] (http://antiwar.com/sperry/?articleid=2209) Here are just a few of them:

    He and Rice worked closely together in the first Bush White House as aides to former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft.

    Zelikow was director of European security affairs, and Rice was senior director of Soviet and East European affairs, as well as special assistant to the president. Rice reportedly hired Zelikow. Both started in 1989 and left in 1991.

    A few years after leaving the White House, Zelikow and Rice wrote a book together called, “Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft.”

    The two associated again when Zelikow directed the Aspen Strategy Group [2] (http://www.aspeninstitute.org), a foreign-policy strategy body co-chaired by Rice’s mentor Scowcroft. Rice, along with Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, were members.

    Zelikow also directed the Markle Foundation’s Task Force on National Security in the Information Age [3] (http://www.markletaskforce.org)under co-chairman James Barksdale, a Bush adviser and major Bush-Cheney donor. A 9/11 commissioner, Republican Sen. Slade Gorton, also served with Zelikow on the task force. (Interestingly, the pair serves together on yet another panel – The National Commission on Federal Election Reform – with Gorton acting as vice-chairman and Zelikow as executive director.)

    After the 2000 election, Zelikow and Rice were reunited when George W. Bush named him to his transition team for the National Security Council. Rice reportedly asked Zelikow to help organize the NSC under the Scowcroft model, which was insular and steeped in Cold War worldview.

    Former White House terrorism czar Richard Clarke says he briefed not only Rice and Hadley, but also Zelikow about the growing al-Qaida threat during the transition period. Zelikow sat in on the briefings, he says.

    A month after the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks, President Bush appointed Zelikow to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which is chaired by Scowcroft.

    Zelikow’s regular job, the one he’ll return to after the commission releases it final report in late July, is director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. The center is dedicated to the study of the presidency, and maintains contact with the Bush White House, which fought the creation of the commission.

    Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow, insists Zelikow has a “clear conflict of interest.” And she suspects he is in touch with Bush’s political adviser, Rove, which she says would explain why the White House granted him, along with just one other commission official, the greatest access to the intelligence briefing Bush got a month before the 9/11 suicide hijackings.

    It is interesting that Zelikow had to recluse himself during the transition period between Clinton and Bush when the transfer of intelligence was to occur. It is during this period when most say Bush and co failed to heed the warnings of Clark and others in the intelligence community…

  12. 12.

    Nash

    New sales pitch for Balloon Juice:

    “We’re not sayin’ two wrongs make a right, but look over there…Thinkprogress!”

    You are practicing the time-honored (it’s been honored since the time apologists for President Bush invented it out of sheer necessity) art of retraction as passive-aggressive theater.

    An apology or retraction by a confident man is never followed by justification or misdirection or “yes, Mommy, but he hit me harder” of any sort.

    This is, IMHO, the “greatest gift” bequeathed to us by the actions of those in power over the past 5 years: the near one-for-one replacement of true strength and integrity with the empty appearance of strength in the form of verbal aggressiveness.

    That Mr. Cole, certainly not a person that anyone would term as amongst the power elite, resorts to this type of behavior just shows how well-established and socially acceptable this mindset has become. It is disgusting.

  13. 13.

    JoeTx

    There has always been a pattern on the right, no doubt thanks to Karl Rove, of deflecting blame.

    Here is a great column by Frank Rich from the NYTIMES..
    The Swift Boating of Cindy Sheehan

    The most prominent smear victims have been Bush political opponents with heroic Vietnam résumés: John McCain, Max Cleland, John Kerry. But the list of past targets stretches from the former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke to Specialist Thomas Wilson, the grunt who publicly challenged Donald Rumsfeld about inadequately armored vehicles last December. The assault on the whistle-blower Joseph Wilson – the diplomat described by the first President Bush as “courageous” and “a true American hero” for confronting Saddam to save American hostages in 1991 – was so toxic it may yet send its perpetrators to jail.

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