It may be a new year, but the right-wing media are peddling the same old falsehoods, as we've previously documented.

Ann Coulter joins this dubious trend in her latest column by sniping at former Clinton deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, asserting that she built a “giant wall ... between the FBI and the CIA,” thus “making 9/11 possible.”

Except, of course, that she didn't. As we detailed in 2005, when this falsehood first surfaced, the so-called “wall” between law enforcement and intelligence agencies was first constructed long before Gorelick appeared on the scene. A joint House and Senate intelligence committees' report of pre-September 11 intelligence failures found that the “wall” was “constructed over 60 years as a result of legal, policy, institutional and personal factors,” and a ruling by the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review -- when it met for the first time in 2002 -- traces the origin of the “wall” to “some point during the 1980s.”

The Gorelick memo that conservatives have cited as the creation of the “wall” applied only to divisions within the Justice Department; it did not apply to military intelligence agencies. So, for instance, if military intelligence had identified 9-11 hijacker Mohammed Atta as a potential terrorist prior to the attack, there was nothing preventing the military from sharing that information with intelligence agencies or law enforcement officials, despite what some have claimed and what Coulter seems to be suggesting.

Further, as we've also noted, the “wall” was reauthorized in August 2001 by Larry D. Thompson, deputy attorney general under then-Attorney General John Ashcroft -- appointed by President George W. Bush, a Republican -- and Thompson even proposed expanding it.

Funny, we don't recall Coulter taking to task any official working under a Republican president for their role in building the “wall.”