Via UPI

“Former Attorney General John Ashcroft this week became the only Cabinet-level Bush official to attack the Sept. 11 Commission, writing in his memoirs it “seemed obsessed with trying to lay the blame for the terrorist attacks at the feet of the Bush administration, while virtually absolving the previous administration of responsibility.”

Ashcroft also writes that the commission’s hearings “were not so much about discovering the truth as they were about assessing blame and grandstanding,” adding that they “degenerated into show trials.”

GOP Commissioner Slade Gorton, a former senator from Washington State, told United Press International Thursday that he found the charges “extraordinary,” recalling that President Bush had personally repudiated Ashcroft’s tactics in his sparring with the commission.

“Most of the criticism (the commission received) was the exact opposite: that we didn’t blame anyone,” he said. “Our job was to write a factual account which readers could use to assess blame for themselves.”

Ashcroft “may very well have been the worst witness we interviewed,” he said, adding he was “very unresponsive and unhelpful.”

“I was particularly disappointed,” he added, “because I liked him when we were in the Senate together.” Ashcroft served as GOP Senator for Missouri 1994-2000.”

Remember that Ashcroft got the “Deer the Headlights” look from Commission members when he sprung the Gorelick Wall

“n his memoir, “Never Again: Securing America and Restoring Justice,” Ashcroft accuses the commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon The United States, of trying to “stimulate media interest” in their hearings by leaking “juicy tidbits” beforehand. He writes that this was why he — alone of all the serving and former senior officials who were witnesses for the commission — did not provide them with advance copies of his testimony.

Gorton dismissed that explanation, saying “The reason, I’m convinced, is that he intended to — and did — use his testimony to launch a disingenuous and underhanded personal attack on a member of the commission.”

At his April 14, 2003, appearance Ashcroft sprung on the commission a just-declassified top secret memo written by commission member and former Clinton administration Justice Department official Jamie Gorelick in 1995. The memo, Ashcroft said, was “the basic architecture” for the so-called wall, which he said was “the greatest structural cause for Sept. 11.”

The wall — in effect a hodge-podge of laws, court rulings and departmental regulations that had accreted over time — had strictly separated intelligence from criminal investigations out of concern that prosecutors should not be allowed to use the much less restrictive rules about wiretapping and other kinds of surveillance that applied in intelligence operations to gather material for criminal cases, effectively end-running the Fourth Amendment.”

Yeah, that was a gasser! UPI tries to spin that by telling us that the Wall really began in the 80s, blah, blah, moonbat talking points from the report, but the fact is that Gorelick should have been a witeness, not an inquisitor. Gorelick and fellow Clintonista Ben-Veniste, were there, along with a supporting part by Sandy (Docs in his Jocks) Berger to make sure Clinton’s negligence didn’t get discovered.

Amazing the difference isn’t it, between the way the press covers Woodward who channels “feelings” and Ashcroft who was there and knows.

It’s the difference between night and day.