GOP banshees are screaming for Jamie Gorelick's head -- the New York Post, Rush Limbaugh, Dick Morris (who says, God help us, "Of all of the public officials in the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, the one who is most directly, in my judgment, responsible for 9/11 happening is Jamie Gorelick"), House Judiciary Committee chairman James Sensenbrenner, Linda Chavez, and apparently (though I'm not a subscriber and can't read the piece) the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

Here's a a PDF of Gorelick's much-maligned 1995 memo, which John Ashcroft was able to declassify. (Say, whatever happened to that declassification of Richard Clarke's 2002 congressional testimony? Just wondering.)

Rush says that the "wall" between criminal and counterterrorism investigators was "erected by Clinton's justice department [in] 1995" by means of Gorelick's memo; The New York Times, however, points out that the federal appeals court that upheld the USA Patriot Act in November 2002 said the "wall"

had been erected earlier and was only codified by Ms. Gorelick.

The Times notes that

the court added a stunning observation, saying that even without the counterterrorism law, the wall had never been necessary and that courts and Justice Department officials had misinterpreted the law for more than 20 years.

If this interpretation of the law had been around for twenty years, why is Gorelick's 1995 memo being blamed for it?

The Times also notes this:

Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator from Washington, challenged Mr. Ashcroft, noting that the deputy attorney general under Mr. Ashcroft renewed the 1995 guidelines. Mr. Gorton said the Bush Justice Department ratified those guidelines, saying in its own secret memorandum on Aug. 6, 2001, that "the 1995 procedures remain in effect today."

The New York Post, scurrilously, also attacks Gorelick simply for having been a participant in the events under investigation:

How can someone who played a key role in the events under investigation possibly sit as one of the investigators?

The Post, to the best of my knowledge, has never objected to the fact that Philip Zelikow is the commission's director -- even though he participated in intelligence briefings as part of the Bush transition team, was named a member of President Bush's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in October 2001, and once wrote a book with Condoleezza Rice (source; source).

The Post also attacks Gorelick because her law firm "represents Prince Mohammed al-Faisal al-Saud, a member of the Saudi royal family and director of a key Saudi financial agency, against a lawsuit filed by a coalition of 600 Sept. 11 families" -- even though she is "not ... litigating the lawsuit." And the Post has the gall to attack her for events in her life that didn't happen or might happen:

Gorelick, who might have become attorney general in an Al Gore administration, could get that same job if John Kerry wins in November.

If all of this is not intolerable for a 9/11 commissioner, then there's no such thing as conflict of interest.

Unbelievable.

I think the right-wing vultures are overestimating their ability to game the system these days. Commission members of both parties are rallying to Gorelick's defense; she's recused herself from questioning some officials (Zelikow, also defended by commissioners, has agreed to similar recusals).

(Incidentally, commission head Tom Kean had his own mini-conflict of interest -- as Fortune reported in 2003, "Kean is a director of petroleum giant Amerada Hess, which in 1998 formed a joint venture--known as Delta Hess--with Delta Oil, a Saudi Arabian company," although "Three weeks before Kean's appointment, Hess severed its ties with Delta." And do I even have to mention the small number of degrees of separation between the house of Saud and the house of Bush, which doesn't seem to trouble the Post at all?)