9/11 OMISSIONS, CONT'D
NEW YORK Post Opinion
August 18, 2005
An Army intelligence officer yesterday publicly charged that the unit in which he worked had indeed identified two al Qaeda cells — and 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta — more than a year before the terrorist attacks.
Properly handled, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer says, that information might have prevented the terror attacks.
And Shaffer insists that his unit, code-named Able Danger, provided that information to the 9/11 commission headed by former Gov. Tom Kean — which failed to include it in its final report.
Moreover, the officer's revelations come as newly declassified documents show that State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration as early as 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan "could prove . . . dangerous to U.S. interests."
Those assessments also are missing from the 9/11 report — portrayed as the definitive history of the worst terrorist attack on America.
Kean and other commission staff in recent days finally have admitted, after earlier denials, that they were told of the Able Danger information — but continue to dismiss it as "historically insignificant." (In fact, Shaffer says that the data given to the commission was less than 5 percent of what Able Danger had put together on the al Qaeda cell.)
Kean & Co. are going to have to do better than that.
Because, it's becoming clear that the commission's failure to delve into Able Danger has less to do with the unit's credibility than it does with protecting commission member Jamie Gorelick.
Gorelick, then a deputy attorney general under Clinton, put into place the "wall of separation" that precluded sharing intelligence on terrorists with law-enforcement agencies.
Still, the problem transcends Gorelick.
Shaffer disclosed that his unit tried three times in 2000 to meet with agents of the FBI's Washington field office — only to have the meetings canceled each time at the direction of military lawyers concerned that Able Danger might have violated the privacy of terrorists legally present in the U.S.
One of the more partisan Democrats on the commission, Richard Ben-Veniste, has called on the Pentagon to "provide a clear and comprehensive explanation regarding what information it had in its possession regarding Mr. Atta."
That's all well and good. But it's Ben-Veniste and his fellow commissioners who owe the American people — and New Yorkers in particular — an answer to the same questions.
They also need to explain why their report barely touched on the Gorelick-imposed wall — an order that, as The Post's Deborah Orin reported exclusively yesterday, was described back in 1995 as "very dangerous," with potentially "deadly results," by then-U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, who prosecuted the first World Trade Center bombing case.
The 9/11 commission had a series of White's memos complaining about how the Clinton Justice Department was hindering the ability to find terrorists before they struck — but you won't read about them in the commission's report.
Gorelick knew about the memos, but she said nothing about them — even as she refused demands that she step down from the commission because she appeared hopelessly compromised.
Those who suspected that the Kean Commission was meant to be used to hang blame for 9/11 on President Bush will not be surprised to learn that evidence suggesting the Clinton team was horribly lax in its pursuit of terrorists was dismissed as irrelevant.
Whether 9/11 might have been prevented will never be known.
But why the 9/11 commission ignored the Able Danger revelations is a question that must be answered, and soon.
nypost.com |
