The Gortons and Slades - Washington Secretary of State

confRontAtion And consensus 347
memos. The news didn’t go down well, but they finally settled on a review
team: Kean and Hamilton, with Gorelick and Zelikow doing the heavy
lifting. “By that time most of the other Republicans also had full confidence
that Jamie would do things right,” Gorton recalls, emphasizing
that consensus was crucial to the credibility of the commission. “We
never had a vote that was partisan—that was tied 5 to 5. In fact, you could
count on one hand the number of times we voted at all. We worked out
the difficult questions.” 9
It’s easy to see why Gorton and Gorelick were so simpatico. She even
talks like him, reeling off measured compound sentences: “Slade would
look at a problem that divided the commission and look for ways we could
find common ground. Fortunately for me, the person to whom he turned,
because I am similar in approach, was me. Working through issues like
that, seeing how another person’s mind works, watching his dedication to
taking the facts wherever they might go, was a remarkable experience for
me and forged an unbreakable bond between the two of us.” That bond—
and Gorton’s disdain for duplicity—led to one of the commission’s most
dramatic moments.
AttoRney geneRAL John AshcRoft was convinced the commission was
plotting to portray him as lackadaisical about al-Qaida. His staff scrambled
for evidence that the Justice Department had done due diligence
prior to the terrorist attacks. Plopping down a sheaf of classified internal
memos from Gorelick’s tenure at the department, they told Ash croft he
could make a case that America’s guard was down because of her.
“Had I known a terrorist attack on the United States was imminent
in 2001, I would have unloaded our full arsenal of weaponry against it,
despite the inevitable criticism,” Ashcroft assured the commission on
April 13, 2004. “The simple fact of September 11th is this: We did not
know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government
had blinded itself to its enemies. Our agents were isolated by governmentimposed
walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions, and
starved for basic information technology. The old national intelligence
system in place on September 11th was destined to fail.” 10
Ashcroft charged that a 1995 memo had imposed evidence rules in terrorism
cases that amounted to the “single greatest structural cause for
September 11th.” It constructed “a wall that segregated or separated criminal
investigators and intelligence agents” and kept them from sharing
evidence. “Government erected this wall; government buttressed this
wall and—before September 11—government was blinded by this wall.