Mr. Obama, tear down this Gorelick Wall!

Although you understand the debilitating impact of the [Gorelick] wall, I cannot imagine that the commission knew about this [1995] memorandum, so I have declassified it for you and the public to review.

~ John Ashcroft, attorney general, before the 9/11 commission, April 13, 2004

The tragic murder of 14 people (I include the preborn baby) at Fort Hood last week by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan was the first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. This terrible act has brought to the fore all the usual suspects, recriminations and rationalizations. Each day brings new revelations or “red flags” concerning this Muslim fanatic that military officials, the FBI, CIA, NSA, Homeland Security and even Hasan’s medical colleagues knew about for years, but did nothing.

Two things shielded America’s enemies from swift justice: 1) Political correctness, which I call “perversity correctness,” or what conservative intellectual Michael Savage calls “political cowardice”; and 2) the Gorelick Wall.

Let’s take the first shield Maj. Hasan (and technically untold millions of Muslims) have protecting him – PC, political cowardice. Our military brass and Congress are so cowed by even the appearance of singling out Muslims to prevent terrorists attacks in America that they literally looked at every other thing in the room but the 800-pound gorilla sitting in the corner shouting Allahu akbar! – until it was too late.

This insane PC policy of American cowardice toward Muslims is evidenced by the Obama administration refusing to use the phrases “war on terror,” “Islamic terrorism,” “terrorists” or “Muslim,” preferring the less judgmental term, “manmade disaster.”

The second policy America has launched against itself is the infamous “Gorelick Wall.” What is the Gorelick Wall? It is a policy developed by Clinton appointee and former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who after the first terrorist bombings of the World Trade Center of Feb. 26, 1993, was placed as the head of a blue ribbon commission to find the causes in our internal security that allowed these bombings to occur.

In March 1995, Gorelick co-wrote a radical and treasonous memo that, in the words of Attorney General John Ashcroft, “go beyond what is legally required … [to] prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.”

What does this mean? It means that the FBI cannot share intelligence with the CIA, the NSA, the DEA, ATF, the military or any other security agency in America. It is a unilateral, self-binding policy reminiscent of the proverbial saying, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

In his opening statement before the 9/11 commission on April 13, 2004, Attorney General Ashcroft was outraged to learn that the commission had not investigated or been told of Gorelick’s memo and her role regarding the “wall.” To show the utter duplicity and incompetence by politicians of both parties, Ashcroft’s assertion was disputed by former Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., a member of the commission, who said, “Nothing Jamie Gorelick wrote had the slightest impact on the Department of Defense or its willingness or ability to share intelligence information with other intelligence agencies.”

Furthermore, after almost 15 years since Gorelick’s memo, it is now beyond question that the Gorelick Wall led to barred anti-terror investigators from accessing the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker, already in custody on an immigration violation on 9/11. The Gorelick Wall also caused protracted, internecine struggles between the Janet Reno Justice Department and FBI Director Louie Freeh because Reno (and President Bill Clinton) viewed terrorist attacks as police matters rather than issues of counterterrorism.

How did the Gorelick Wall prevent our security agencies from discovering and expelling Maj. Hasan from the military before he could commit his murderous acts against our brave soldiers? The treachery of Gorelick’s Wall was that it kept all of our security agencies in the dark. It prevented security agencies’ access to the common-sense tactics of the past in sharing intelligence with one another to stop terrorist attacks and future terrorist plots on American soil.

Of course, I realize that we can’t put all the blame on poor Ms. Goerlick, for the Gorelick Wall extended back in one form or another to the treasonous “Church Committee” of Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, in 1975. Church was one of the many enemies within that virtually destroyed the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies under the pretext of protecting Americans from being spied on, forcing the agencies to comply with the restrictive strictures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. Thanks, President Carter!

I lay Maj. Hasan’s murderous treachery directly at the feet of the Church Committee, for leading to FISA in 1978, the 1995 Goerlick Wall memo and, finally, to the “manmade disaster” policies of Obama in 2009.

Thanks to progressives, Democrats and Republicans for being such political cowards and fearful of a “Muslim backlash” post-9/11 that they created policies and allowed harmful policies to stand for decades that in essence allowed murderers like Maj. Hasan easy access to our great military.

Even a socialist like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 67 years ago in the throes of World War II, had the leadership and fortitude to immediately hang six of the eight Nazi saboteurs in the 1942 case, In Re Quirin. What will Obama, the Stalinist media, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party do to protect us against the evils of Muslim-inspired terrorism? These PC bureaucrats will continue to drone on and on about Hasan’s “constitutional rights,” fear of a Muslim backlash, that Christianity has nut jobs, too, and how we should not “jump to conclusions.”

Jump to conclusions? It is common sense for America’s security to prevent a murderous Muslim fanatic like Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan from even being admitted into our military; however, if we continue on this PC road of political cowardice, then America will jump not to conclusions, but jump into the abyss of self-genocide.

To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 speech at Berlin, “Mr. Obama tear down this Gorelick Wall!”

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington, authorized biographer for the conservative intellectual Dr. Michael Savage (see www.MichaelSavage.com), is former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). See his law review article “Reply to Judge Richard Posner.” Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”