The Wall
Former chief assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy and others have asserted that the Able Danger intelligence was suppressed as a result of a policy of forbidding the CIA and FBI to share intelligence known as "the wall." During the 9/11 Commission hearings, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft testified the wall was strengthened under the Clinton administration by Jamie Gorelick to prohibit sharing of terrorist intelligence within the federal government.
This assertion was disputed by former senator Slade Gorton (R-WA), a member of the 9-11 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." Gorton also asserted that "the wall" was a long-standing policy that had resulted from the Church Committee in the 1970s, and that the policy only prohibits transfer of certain information from prosecutors to the intelligence services and never prohibited information flowing in the opposite direction.
Read more about this topic: Able Danger
Famous quotes containing the word wall:
“I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)