Deborah Orin revisits Mary Jo White's pleadings with Jamie Gorelick in the 1990s to tear down the wall that separated sharing intelligence on terrorists with prosecutors. This was the wall of separation that Gorelick wanted upheld even beyond what the law required.

In theory, the "wall" was supposed to avoid legal challenges to terror prosecutions. The problem was, as White and her team noted, only prosecutors familiar with a case or a cast of terror players might see the connections that could led to nabbing a suspect or foiling a plot.

Justice honchos overruled White's plea — even though her team knew better than anyone else in law enforcement what the real risks were. White's team won a host of convictions — including Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who plotted to bomb landmarks like the Statue of Liberty.

Equally troubling is that the 9/11 Commission, charged with tracing the failure to stop 9/11, got White's stunning memo and several related documents — and deep-sixed all of them.

The commission's report skips lightly over the wall in three brief pages (out of 567). It makes no mention at all of White's passionate and prescient warnings. Yet warnings that went ignored are just what the commission was supposed to examine.

So it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the commission ignored White's memo because it was a potential embarrassment to the woman to whom it was addressed: commission member Jamie Gorelick. (White has declined to discuss the matter, and Gorelick didn't immediately respond to requests for comment yesterday.)

White wrote the memo after her earlier pleas against the "wall" were rejected. She enlisted the help of her "Bomb II Team" — prosecutors working on terror bombings like the 1993 Twin Towers attack.

They gave six pages of detailed reasons why it was a mistake to create too much of a wall between intelligence and prosecutions. White forwarded that analysis to Gorelick and added her own notes on the Clinton-era decision "to keep prosecutors in the dark about intelligence investigations."

"What troubles me even more than the known problems we have encountered are the undoubtedly countless instances of unshared and unacted-upon information that reside in some file or other or in some head or other or in some unreviewed or not fully understood tape or other," White wrote. "These can be disasters waiting to happen."

Fortunately, a lot of that wall has been torn down since 9/11. But it was certainly one of the factors that the 9/11 Commission should have been investigating and reporting back to the country on. We needed to have an on-the-record examination of the damage that the former policy provided just in case there should come a time when the same sort of people who supported the wall in the first place should propose erecting barriers again between intelligence and prosecutors. And the Commission covered this up and there doesn't seem to be any reason for it beyond a desire to protect one of their members who was actually responsible for building that wall higher. It was a scandal then and still is. It is the reason why so many have never had any great respect for the 9/11 Commission's supposedly objective and final analysis of the problems that led to 9/11. If they couldn't be fully honest about this part of the history, what else might they have been ignoring or downplaying?