He has apparently learned nothing.

President Elect Barack Obama is looking at Jamie Gorelick as a possibly candidate for Attorney General. Gorelick is best know for her role in Bill Clinton's Justice Department creating a "wall" that kept American intelligence and law enforcement agencies from communicating with each other, which contributed significantly to security lapses that led to al Qaeda's success on 9/11.

But even without that taint of corruption, Gorelick would signal a return to incompetence and infighting. Gorelick played a major role in keeping counterterrorist and law-enforcement agents from sharing information and "connecting the dots" before 9/11. In a series of judgments at the DoD and at Justice during her tenure in the Clinton administration, Gorelick hamstrung our efforts to find and disarm terrorist infiltrators by discouraging any cooperation between intelligence and enforcement efforts by making "the wall" much more significant than Congress ever intended.

Gorelick wound up serving as a panelist on the 9/11 Commission, but she should have been served a subpoena instead. Two memos from Clinton-appointed US Attorney Mary Jo White made this point crystal clear, as did an explanation from someone involved for years in the counterterrorist effort. Gorelick imposed an unrealistic standard on intelligence gathering that led directly to the 9/11 attacks. As AG, she would have even more power to reimpose those same limitations, and leave us just as blind as we were before those attacks.

Gorelick's fundamental incompetence played a role in the deaths of thousands of Americans, and that Obama is even considering her for such a position merely serves to highlight his own lack of judgment.

Obama is also secretly planning U.S. trials for terrorist prisoners of war. Like Bush's military tribunals, such trials fly in the face of the Geneva conventions and established historical customs, which stands firmly against the trial of POWs during a conflict for fear of unfair show trials. As I understand it, the proper method of dealing with POWs is to hold them in confinement until the conflict is over or until a prisoner exchange is implemented. Look for an Obama Justice Department unfettered by reality to set many, many terrorists free because soldiers fighting a war aren't equipped to collect evidence and play CSI-Tora Bora the way unreasonable ideologues prefer.

We learn all of this after finding out that al Qaeda, with all of their usual bluster, is once again claiming to have plans afoot for new wave of terror strikes on the West that will dwarf 9/11.

After 9/11, President Bush did everything within his power to keep another wave of terror attacks from claiming lives on U.S. soil. Obama's obvious contempt for President Bush seems to be detrimentally impacting his decisions, as he seems to imagining he can somehow return to a 9/10 world.

Posted by: Confederate Yankee at 12:11 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
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