IS 'ABLE DANGER' ONE OF THE BIGGEST STORIES TO COME DOWN THE PIKE IN A WHILE? [08/10 08:39 PM]
Boy, if Rep. Curt Weldon is right, a political earthquake is about to hit Washington.
If this checks out, it's going to have a lot of repercussions. Clear-thinking folk will have to seriously reexamine 9/11 commission's work and conclusions. Missing a key fact like this is inexcusible. Most fascinatingly, it appears Commission staffers were told of Able Danger and what it found, but never passed this information on to the commissioners themselves. Why???
The dispute, as described by the New York Times:
The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed the former staff director of the Sept. 11 panel, Philip D. Zelikow, and at least three other staff members about Able Danger when the staff members visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003. The official said that he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta in the briefing as a member of the American terrorist cell.
Mr. Kean, the commission head, said the staff members were confident that Mr. Atta's name was not mentioned in the briefing or subsequent documents from the Pentagon.
"None of them recalls mention of the name Atta," he said. "I think if that had been mentioned, it would have been on the tips of their tongue."
Mr. Kean said he had asked the staff members to retrieve their classified notes from government storage to be certain about not overlooking any reference to Mr. Atta or to an American-based cell in any of the Pentagon material.
Somebody's lyin.
If this checks out, a lot of folks left, right and center are going to have to ask hard questions about what the heck Jamie Gorelick was doing on that Commission instead of answering questions to it. The whole, "well, both administrations were to blame, let's move on" conventional wisdom regarding 9/11 could be shot to hell, if it turns out the U.S. military intelligence had these guys identified and located within NYC and an effort to capture them was vetoed. Over a legal argument that seems flat-out wrong. Atta wasn't a U.S. citizen; none of these guys were.
The Sandy Berger stuffing his socks has always looked like a deliberate coverup, but now that slap on the wrist sentence he recieved looks truly outrageous. And the defense of him from President Clinton — something along the lines of, "oh, that's just absent-minded Sandy, we always laughed about him walking off with papers" becomes supremely implausible. No, if Weldon's account is accurate, this entire thing smells of a stunningly brazen coverup.
By the way, the blogs are buzzing about Slate's dismissal of the story, stating, "Weldon has a reputation for relying on iffy sources" and calls him "a congressman known to make wildly dubious claims." They say that right now it's the word of the 9/11 Commission vs. Weldon and one unnamed former military intelligence official.
I don't know. Weldon seems to indicate he's got multiple sources on this, according to the Times:
Weldon said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that he had spoken with three team members, all still working in the government, including two in the military, and that they were consistent in asserting that Mr. Atta's affiliation with a Qaeda terrorism cell in the United States was known in the Defense Department by mid-2000 and was not acted on.
This is in addition to the former intelligence official. Four government guys, and a document shown to the AP? I don't know if everything is exactly as Weldon says it, but there's clearly something here.
THE 9/11 COMMISSION SAYS, 'OH, YEAH, WE WERE BRIEFED ABOUT ABLE DANGER' [08/11 06:46 AM]
Today's New York Times serves up an interesting development in the Able Danger story:
Al Felzenberg, who served as the commission's chief spokesman, said earlier this week that staff members who were briefed about Able Danger at a first meeting, in October 2003, did not remember hearing anything about Mr. Atta or an American terrorist cell. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Felzenberg said the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members in July 2004 had indeed mentioned Mr. Atta.
Mr. Felzenberg said the commission's staff remained convinced that the information provided by the military officer in the July 2004 briefing was inaccurate in a significant way...
"He wasn't brushed off," Mr. Felzenberg said of the officer. "I'm not aware of anybody being brushed off. The information that he provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing" from the commission's investigation.
Mr. Felzenberg said staff investigators had become wary of the officer because he argued that Able Danger had identified Mr. Atta, an Egyptian, as having been in the United States in late 1999 or early 2000. The investigators knew this was impossible, Mr. Felzenberg said, since travel records confirmed that he had not entered the United States until June 2000.
"There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report," Mr. Felzenberg said. "This information was not meshing with the other information that we had."
But Russell Caso, Mr. Weldon's chief of staff, said that "while the dates may not have meshed" with the commission's information, the central element of the officer's claim was that "Mohammed Atta was identified as being tied to Al Qaeda and a Brooklyn cell more than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, and that should have warranted further investigation by the commission."
Captain Ed's take:
First we hear that no such meeting occurred. After that, the Commission says one might have occurred in October 2003 but that no one remembered it. Now we find out that the Commission had two meetings where the heard about Able Danger and its identification of Mohammed Atta, including one just before they completed their report. Instead of saying to themselves, "Hey, wait a minute — this changes the picture substantially," and postponing the report until they could look further into Able Danger, they simply shrugged their shoulders and published what they had...
What does that mean for the Commission's findings? It meant that the cornerstone of their conclusions no longer fit the facts. Able Danger showed that the US had enough intelligence to take action — if the government had allowed law enforcement and intelligence operations to cooperate with each other. It also showed that data mining could effectively identify terrorist agents.
So what did the Commission do? It ignored those facts which did not fit within its predetermined conclusions. It never bothered to mention Able Danger even one time in its final report, even though that absolutely refuted the notion that the government had no awareness that Atta constituted a terrorist threat. It endorsed the idea of data mining (which would die in Congress as the Total Information Awareness program) without ever explaining why. And while the Clinton policy of enforcing a quarantine between law enforcement and intelligence operations came under general criticism, their report never included the fact that the "wall" for which Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick had so much responsibility specifically contributed to Atta's ability to come and go as he pleased, building the teams that would kill almost 3,000 Americans.
If I were on the Commission, and a military intelligence guy was telling me something that didn't jibe with what I knew about Atta's travels, I could understand some skepticism, some doubt, some questioning of whether the account of what the Able Danger group knew and when it learned this vital information is accurate, or misremembered, or mis-dated. (I would also want to go back and check out whether my previous information on Atta's travels could be mistaken.)
But it's hard to understand their choice to dismiss this information entirely and not even mention a word of this in the final report.
During much of the media circus that was the 9/11 Commission, I had a hard time bringing myself to care. Yeah, we weren't fighting al-Qaeda vigorously enough during the Clinton years. Yeah, the new Bush administration didn't jump on this topic when it took office, and its initial plans for ultimately deposing the Taliban were set to take three years, way too long to deal with the growing threat. There were tons of mistakes and plenty of blame to go around. Not banning boxcutters, instructing pilots and passengers to cooperate when taken hostage, immigration rules, etc. Enough of this, I felt, let's focus on killing the guys still out there.
But the "Able Danger" revelations, if true, seem to change things a lot. First, it helps explain why we haven't been hit again in the homeland since 9/11, aside from the mysterious anthrax mailings. (Knocking on wood, crossing fingers, and thanking God).
Terrorists are not supermen. They're ruthless, but it's hard to escape the collective eyes of the FBI, CIA, NSA, that other NRO, the Secret Service, the beat cop, and in this case of Atta and the gang, military intelligence. When our good guys in uniforms and badges start looking, they can find them. There's no wall now, and any punk seeking to hit the U.S. homeland has to avoid a lot of eyes and ears, who can now, finally, coordinate.
The "Able Danger" revelation suggests that "the wall" was a suicide pact. That there was no point in anyone but the FBI doing counterterrorism work, because no one could communicate the information to anyone who could actually act on it. The policy, put in place by Gorelick, put a higher priority on ensuring legally-viable prosecutions than actually catching them before they act.
*sigh* I don't want guys like Mohammed Atta prosecuted. I want them nabbed off the street and subjected to every form of interrogation that the writers of "24" can think of.
And as for the 9/11 Commission, after all that patting themselves on the back, all that gushing praise from left, right, and center, after their work was called "miraculous" by Newsday, and the nomination for a National Book Award, and calling their own work "extraordinary"... man, these guys stink. Really, if this checks out, and the staffers had information like this and they disregarded it, never believing that we in the public deserved to know that the plot's ringleader was identified, located and recommended to be arrested a year before the attacks... boy, these guys ought to be in stocks in the public square and have rotten fruit thrown at them. What a sham.
tks.nationalreview.com |
