Untitled Document

19 April 2004

Blow Up

The buzz is that they are trying to force Jamie Gorelick off the 9/11 Commission. They are not stopping at that. Some people are e-mailing her office and her home and saying they are going to blow her up.

That is pretty cold, and is a symptom of our e-culture and the politics of personal destruction. Not that you need e-mail to be petty and venal. We really started that in the campaign of Andrew Jackson, as they accused his wife of being a woman of loose standards and worse.

Part of the entry fee to participate in the big game, I suppose. But the venom is pretty extraordinary. I think during wartime we ought to concentrate a little more.

I have a lot of sympathy for Jamie. She used to be a Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton Justice Department, and she is accused by some of the attack wing of the Republican Party of being complicit in the decisions that brought a steel curtain down between the foreign intelligence folks and the nice people at the FBI.

She stands accused of writing a memo that establishing distinctions between intelligence that could be used for law-enforcement purposes and intelligence that could be used for national security purposes. There was a lot of concern at the time about the law enforcement people being out of control.

It was on the 19th of April that they sent the tanks in against those goofy Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and it may be no coincidence that it was on the 19th of April in 1995 that Timothy McVeigh drove the fertilizer truck up to the Alfred Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

She wrote the preciously classified memo in 1995, two years after the slaughter at Waco, and after that strange siege at Ruby Ridge. The current Attorney General, Mr. Ashcroft, felt it was necessary to get the facts on the table. He had an uncomfortable session in front of Ms Gorelick and her fellow panelists.

Gorelick's memo does not have a date, which either reflects the high standards of the last administration or means something is missing. I cannot tell from the record if it was written before or after the massacre in Oklahoma.

I was in Nevada the day the Murrah Building got lit up. We looked at the crater of the Sedan Test, the biggest ever conducted above ground. It looks just like someone stuck a gigantic icecream cone into the desert floor.

I was in the company of some Army guys, the last of the line of hard-rock miners in the Service who set up the nuclear tests. They were interested, on a professional basis, in what happened. The Colonel explained how fuel-air explosives worked to me, and how they could be extremely powerful.''

I t was kind of spooky, since we were walking through a tunnel toward where the last bomb has been detonated a few years before. It was sort of wistful. The Colonel knew he was going to be out of a job, since the Administration had announced that there would be no more tests. We were going to rely on computer modeling to ensure that our nukes would actually go off.

You need to help me with that one, but I was in the Administration, too, and we all just did what we were told.

Like Jamie Gorelick. She says she will recuse herself from any decisions regarding her time in the government. She also says that despite the threats she is not going to resign from the Commission. I applaud her on the decision, even as I understand why John Ashcroft did what he did. This is not the minor leagues here.

But the whole thing is curious. We assumed at the first report that it was Middle Eastern whackos who planted the bomb. Remember? Who could imagine that it was somebody home-grown. But they say that Tim McVeigh was angry about Waco and Ruby Ridge. And there wre a lot of us that were concerned about how the Government was acting.

There is no lack of loonies out there. One group claims that seismograph readouts at the University of Oklahoma indicated more than one blast impulse, and assert that a car-bomb with low intensity fertilizer explosives could not have inflicted such extensive damage to the building. They claim it was an "inside job."

The conspiracy theory mafia makes me tired. Sometimes I think it is just a lone gunman acting alone. But maybe not every time.

Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Advisor who was just in front of Ms Gorelick, said the Administration was worried that terrorist groups could find the approaching presidential election "too good to pass up."

Just like they could not resist the temptation in Madrid.

The new Spanish government announced they were going to pull out of Iraq, just like they promised before their election and before the bombings. I think Condy was talking to Spain yesterday, part of that high-level dialogue that is usually invisible to us here on the ground.

But I had been thinking of taking the train to my new job downtown. I think I am going to take a pass on it.

It is too bad. It really is more convenient. And Metro needs the revenue.