Washington -- Attorney General John Ashcroft, painted Tuesday in two reports from the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks as disinterested in terrorism, lambasted the Clinton administration for overly legalistic rules that he said hamstrung inquiries into men who eventually participated in the suicide hijackings.
Ashcroft's aggressive testimony before the bipartisan commission, perhaps the most partisan it has heard in 16 days of public hearings over the past year, was highlighted by his release of a previously classified memo written a decade ago by Democratic commission member Jamie Gorelick when she was deputy attorney general under former President Bill Clinton.
That memo, which Ashcroft said displayed "flawed legal reasoning,'' erected a wall between domestic intelligence and criminal investigations because Gorelick wrote that mixing the two types of probes could jeopardize prosecutors' chances for success.
"Government erected this wall. Government buttressed this wall. And before Sept. 11, government was blinded by this wall,'' Ashcroft said. The attorney general said fears about violating the Clinton-era rules impeded the FBI investigations into Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, and Khalid al Midhar and Nawaf al Hazmi, who were among the suicide attackers.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/04/14/MNGFD64QR41.DTL
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