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Ann Coulter's Unoriginal Lie About the 9/11 Commission

This week's column by Ann Coulter is largely a reverberation of the conservative echo chamber, repeating Ashcroft's suggestion that the real cause of 9/11 was a memo written by 9-11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick. According to Ashcroft, and repeated by the GOP media machine, this 1995 memo "established a wall separating the criminal and intelligence investigations," and this wall impeded investigations that might have stopped the 9-11 attack. Coulter takes Ashcroft's innuendo to an outright accusation: she says Gorelick is "person who built that wall" and "The 9/11 commission has finally uncovered the proverbial 'smoking gun'!" These statements are just wrong. That Coulter would lie in her column is not surprising to me. That Ashcroft would mislead the country, under oath, is at least a little surprising.

In fact, the wall between foreign intelligence and criminal investigations was enshrined in law since at least 1978, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed. A good summary of the law and some of the implementing regulations can be found at the EFF. The source of the wall is quite clear if you read Gorelick's memo. Of course, until Ashcroft decided to have it declassified for obvious partisan reasons, the memo was secret. Now it's available from the National Review. What the memo actually shows is that Gorelick was making sure that the folks involved in the World Trade Center bombing investigation and prosecution followed the rules, because when a prosecution team doesn't follow the rules, convictions can get thrown out.

I'd like to make two points about this lie that "Gorelick built the wall." First, at the time of the memo, Gorelick was a mere Deputy Attorney General. If she made the rule, and Ashcroft didn't like it, Ashcroft could have changed it when he became AG. What did Ashcroft do to fix this supposed problem? Nothing. One explanation was that he didn't care about terrorism, and was focused elsewhere (like covering a statue's breast during press conferences). While that's probably true, there was another reason the "wall" survived long after Ashcroft took over, which brings me to . . . .

Second, both Ashcroft and Coulter have vigorously defended the PATRIOT Act. One of the reasons they like it is becasue it lifted the wall between intelligence and criminal investigations. As Ashcroft said just a few paragraps later in his testimony, "Finally, the USA PATRIOT ACT tore down this wall between our intelligence and law enforcement personnel in 2001." (The most relevant part is section 215 of the Act, available here) Do you need an Act of Congress to change a Deputy AG's memo? No. But you do need it to change another Act of Congress - like the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Obviously, the "wall" wasn't one Gorelick had the authority to build, or to remove. What she had the authority to do was to put procedures in place, and Ashcroft had the authority to change them. Gorelick was just doing one of her job as a government attorney, which is to help make sure people on her team follow the rules, and in particular make sure that the conviction of the first World Trade Center bombers wasn't tossed out because the FBI and CIA cut corners. And if Ashcroft's suggestions that the procedures were unnecessary and stopped effective law enforcement were true, why didn't he do anything about it?