April 19, 2004

BY MARY LANEY

The 9/11 Commission hearings are something to watch. The commission is supposed to be a group of intelligent people who are looking into and learning about how to prevent in the future what happened that horrible September morning when terrorists commandeered commercial jetliners and flew them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington, D.C., and a field in Pennsylvania.

Thousands of Americans died in those horrific crashes and explosions. They were killed by men who were consumed with hatred of Americans, Christians, Jews and all people who live in an advanced technological society. Those hate-filled, disillusioned Muslim men apparently had planned their evil attacks for months. The 9/11 Commission is to look into how those terrorists were able to plan such an horrific attack without our intelligence services learning of it and preventing it.

That's what we're told the commission is supposed to do.

That's not what the 9/11 Commission appears to be doing.

Watch and listen to the testimony for even a few minutes and you get the distinct feeling that this is a political inquisition, and that anyone on the Republican administration's side is going to get hammered with accusations instead of questions.

Of particular note is the harsh treatment of national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Take a look at the harshest questioner of Rice on the panel, Jamie Gorelick. Gorelick pummeled Rice with questions -- no, accusations -- on how poorly the administration had done and how poorly Rice's national security efforts had been in not preventing the 9/11 attacks.

Rice was asked repeatedly by Gorelick why her office of national security didn't put together all the pieces of information that were coming in regarding terrorists who wanted to do harm to America and Americans.

The questions were disingenuous coming from Gorelick because it was Gorelick, as deputy attorney general under Janet Reno, who issued a memo ordering the FBI to erect a legal wall between the FBI investigations and the CIA, preventing them from sharing information. It was Gorelick's legal memo -- later adopted by Attorney General Reno -- that prevented the FBI from searching the computer of suspected al-Qaida terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui. It was Gorelick's memo, according to Attorney General John Ashcroft, that created ''the single greatest structural cause for Sept. 11.''

So why is Gorelick on the 9/11 Commission? It is Gorelick who should be grilled by the commission and called to task for her key role in the very tragic events being investigated.

She should also be quizzed about her partnership in the law firm that represents a member of the Saudi royal family and director of a Saudi financial agency now being sued by a coalition of 600 Sept. 11 families.

The lawsuit, filed by Families United to Bankrupt Terrorism, is aimed at cutting off the pipeline of money to al-Qaida terrorists. The Saudi financial agency, Dar al-Maal al-Islami, DMI, boasts of $1 billion in assets. According to congressional testimony taken last fall, the Swiss-based DMI is central in the financing of international Islam, particularly the Saudi royal family's radical Wahabi Islamic cause. One of DMI's subsidiaries is the Al-Shamil Islamic Bank, whose directors include Osama bin Laden's half-brother and brother-in-law.

But that's not all. According to published reports, DMI was a major shareholder in the Bahamian Islamic bank that the administration shut down after it was identified as a major part of Osama bin Laden's financial network.

DMI is the legal client of Jamie Gorelick's high-powered Democratic law firm, Wilmer, Cutler and Pickering.

See what I mean about her being a person for the commission to question rather than a member of the commission? Gorelick wrote the order to prevent FBI agents from sharing information on its investigations, and her law firm represents a client that could well be the major source of funding for the al-Qaida terrorists.

If America is to learn anything from this commission, then the commission has to seriously look for answers and question everyone who holds some of them. If America is to trust this commission, then the commission has to be beyond reproach. It has to be non-partisan. It has to be focused on learning how a Sept. 11 can be prevented from ever happening again.

If the commission is to be trusted, former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick -- who played a central role in why investigators couldn't do their job -- has to come off the commission and come clean.