NRO blog comments this morning
ABLE DANGER, ETC [Michael Ledeen]
Since Angleton's taking some vacation, let me just remind everyone about his basic points regarding Able Danger. There are many such stories, documented to a fare-thee-well. Many people--invariably "little people," worker bees, not famous names--in the Intelligence Community tried to get the policy people to pay attention to al Qaeda, including activities inside the United States. Their warnings ranged from reports about people learning to maneuver an aircraft in flight (but not how to take off or land) to connections between the first World Trade Center terrorists and Iraqi intelligence, to information about terrorist sleeper cells here. Able Danger is one more such case. It is part of an alarming pattern in which the superiors in the Intelligence Community did not act on the information they had, but instead for the most part quashed it. Why?
There is a long section in The War Against the Terror Masters, in which I address this subject, arguing that the explanation is political. For two generations, policy makers did not want to hear about such things, because they had no intention of taking vigorous action. Thus, the information was annoying (since it implied that they SHOULD be acting). The bureaucracy learned the lesson. Don't forward this kind of stuff, as it only gets your boss angry and is bad for your career.
I don't believe that "the wall" is the root cause of the failure to act on the information provided by all these people. As I understand it, "the wall" restricted what the FBI could do; namely, it was forbidden to circulate certain kinds of intelligence that might be used in criminal prosecutions. I don't thnk there was a legalistic, formall "wall" that prevented Army Intelligence from telling the FBI anything. The legalistic excuse used by Shaffer's superiors, on his account--which makes total sense to me--was that they might be accused of domestic spying. And one can well imagine some Torricelli type making such accusations, can't one? Over the years, lots of intelligence officers got crucified because they found something they thought important, and sent it up the lne, and Congress endlessly added new restrictions, and Executive Branch lawyers interpreted the restrictions very broadly. After a while...well, you know the rest of the story.
It's politics, which creates a self-defeating culture. The Rabb-Silverman Commission describes this exceptionally well, and properly insists that this is the central problem. Yes, the lawyers did their part, and the 9/11 Commission looks pretty bad (I mean, three different "explanations" in three days is right out of the old Yiddish joke book--the lady accused of stealing her neighbor's pot says to the judge "I never took the pot. And it was a very old pot. And it was cleaner when I returned it.") because they, too, had a highly politicized agenda. Their recommendations--a new intel czar, an even more cumbersome bureaucracy, greater centralization instead of more competitive intelligence--do not address this central problem, and, parenthetically, they make it harder to fix the central problem. I think they spiked the Able Danger story for many reasons, but one of them is that it didn't fit their story.
WHAT'S IN A NAME? [Mark Steyn]
I'd like to second Andy's point re Mohammed Atta's name. He's the only one of the 9/11 hijackers I can mention in a column without checking first. Call me a schmuck, but even now I find the rest of the batting order confusing: be honest, can you tell your Ahmed al-Ghamdi from your Ahmed al-Nami or your Ahmed al-Haznawi or your Ahmed al-Gore? (For the benefit of the 9/11 Commission, one of these was not a 9/11 hijacker.) How about your Waleed al-Shehri from your Wail al-Shehri? You can't tell the players with a score card.
On any list of Arab suspects, Mohammed Atta's stands out because it's closest to a Western form. Two names, no intervening al or bin. The surname could be Italian - like Tony Danza, who like Mr Atta is also believed to have spent time in Brooklyn. I think it's highly likely that, if you were going to remember any name on a terrorist watch list, it would be this one.
If JPod is going to question memory, the more interesting question is why, until they were handed their cue cards, Lee Hamilton and the other Commissioners apparently had no memory of this "Able Danger" unit or its work. Unlike Andy, I'm no expert in this field, but simply because I don't want to sound like a chump in interviews I'm pretty much on top of the Mohammed Atta timeline, its contradictions and its gaps. Isn't that the least Americans are entitled to expect from the grandees in whose name the "definitive" "non-partisan" report on 9/11 is issued? The sense you get from the Commissioners' statements last week is that they left way too much of this stuff to anonymous staffers to fillet. Maybe they should have spent less time in make-up for CNN.
IF STEYN AND MCCARTHY AND MY INTELLIGENCE SOURCE ARE RIGHT... [John Podhoretz]
...and there's no question but that an intelligence watcher worth his salt could remember Mohammed Atta and three others off a list of 60 -- which, given all the blather and palaver, I'm more than willing to acknowledge is a likely possibility -- this means Shaffer is either a) telling the truth, in which case a colossal scandal is in the early stages of eruption that will suck in the Clinton administration, the Pentagon both under Clinton and Bush and the 9/11 Commission. Or he's b) not telling the truth, in which case he has ruined his life. Or c) this is a cascading series of crazy misunderstandings. I don't see a (d), do you?
WAS IT THE WALL OR PENTAGON PARANOIA? [Andy McCarthy]
Both Jim Geraghty and JPod this morning confront the interesting question of whether, if information was withheld by the Defense Department from the FBI, it is appropriate to blame that on the wall between criminal intelligence investigators heightened by the Clinton Justice Department’s 1995 internal procedures.
As a technical matter, the wall was a DOJ management tool to regulate information sharing from the different sides of its own house (i.e., foreign counterintelligence and law enforcement). From that perspective, the wall by definition should not be blamed here because the claim is that the alleged information about the eventual hijackers never got to DOJ in the first place. (The standard operation of the wall would have been if DOD had given the information to DOJ, and DOJ then decided only the intelligence agents but not the criminal investigators and prosecutors would be permitted to learn of it.)
But, as John suggests, you can’t sensibly decouple the wall from the ethos that created it. A culture of not sharing information – of making national security actors believe there was something sinister about comparing notes. Thus the wall culture is relevant. Moreover, given that this Able Danger controversy refocuses us on the 9/11 Commission’s methodology, it is entirely appropriate to consider it in conjunction with the commission’s treatment of the wall – which was an abomination.
Finally, one other not so coincidental tidbit about whether the wall culture at DOJ might also have been found at DOD. Does anyone remember what Jamie Gorelick’s job was before she became the Clinton Justice Department’s Deputy Attorney General? Yup: she was General Counsel of the Clinton Defense Department. Obviously, that’s years before the alleged Able Danger revelations – by which time Gorelick was out of government service. But it’s interesting. |
