Nothing better illustrates the deplorable....
By jkelly
Irish Pennants
....state of American journalism today than the relative amount of coverage devoted to Cindy Sheehan and to the Able Danger controversy.
I have no difficulty with journalistic skepticism about the claims made by LtCol. Tony Shaffer and Rep. Curt Weldon. Skepticism is warranted. Unless someone who was more directly involved in Able Danger than Tony (he was the liaison between Able Danger and the Defense Intelligence Agency) comes forward, this story will go nowhere, and ought to go nowhere.
But if what Shaffer is saying is true, the story is profoundly important. The 9/11 attacks could have been prevented. Data mining is a critically important tool.
In its August 12th statement, the 9/11 Commission gave one lame, and one not so lame reason for blowing off Navy Captain Scott Philpott, when he briefed commission staff on Able Danger and its findings in July, 2004.
The lame reason is that Philpott didn't have any documentary evidence with him. The Able Danger materials were classified, highly classified. The United States government discourages its employees from walking about with classified information in their pockets, their home computers, or -- as Sandy Berger found out -- their socks. OF COURSE Philpott didn't have any documentary evidence with him.
The not so lame reason is that Able Danger's timeline put Mohammed Atta in the United States in February, 2000, and INS records indicate Atta didn't arrive in the United States (at the airport in Newark) until June 3rd.
But Johnelle Bryant, an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, claims that Atta came into her office in April and again in May of 2000, to try to obtain a loan to by a crop-dusting aircraft. April and May are before June 3rd.
I don't fault commission staffers from discounting Bryant's testimony, since it conflicts with INS records. They could have been confused, or making things up. But staff should have been aware of it, and when a senior naval intelligence officer walked in claimed on the basis of entirely different information that Atta was in the country before June 3rd, I would have viewed Johnelle's testimony with strange new respect, and wondered if the records of the INS -- which was unable to find tens of thousands of illegal immigrants who had been ordered deported -- might not be the last, definitive word on Atta's whereabouts.
Commission staff might just have been negligent in the July, 2004 meeting. It's report was on its way to the printers and staff didn't want to throw the brakes on the process because a guy who was dim on some details and didn't have any documentary evidence said Atta had been IDed before 9/11. But I don't see any way to reconcile the Commission's Aug. 12th statement that Shaffer didn't mention Atta in the October, 2003 meeting, and Shaffer's insistence that he did. Someone's not telling the truth.
I don't think its Tony. If the whole point of going before the 9/11 Commission was to tell them Able Danger had identified Atta's cell, it is hardly a detail he would be likely to omit.
Tony says the records on Able Danger no longer are where they were stored when the unit was folded in February, 2001. I wouldn't be surprised if they're missing. Tony says he tried so often to present Able Danger's findings to the FBI that a two-star general at DIA ordered him to stop. Suppose you were that two-star general, maybe a three star general, now. If Tony's telling the truth, then what you did was the single most egregious mistake that led to 9/11. If that got out, your career and your reputation would be shot. And the lawyers who argued so strenuously against sharing Able Danger's findings with the FBI wouldn't want their names to go public, either.
If the Able Danger files have been misplaced, how can this story be proved? (Assuming that what Tony and Capt. Philpott have been saying is true.)
Apparently all the people who worked on Able Danger are alive and kicking, and most are still working for the U.S. government. None wants to come forward, for two very good reasons.
First, these people are in the intelligence business, and their ability to operate effectively will be harmed if their names and faces are plastered on television screens and on newspaper pages.
Alas, the more important reason is that they fear retaliation from their bureaucratic superiors if they are identified as whistleblowers.
As a practical matter, the story will die unless one or two more members of the Able Danger team come forward to corroborate what Shaffer and Philpott have said.
But the only real way to get to the bottom of this is for a committee of Congress to interview all the members of Able Danger under oath. The interviews can be conducted in secret, by committee staffers with appropriate security clearances. Weldon or a member of his staff (with the appropriate clearances) should be present for the interviews. If the other members of the team back up what Shaffer and Philpott have said, then we can conclude that Able Danger did indeed find what Tony says they found, and that the absence of records more likely indicates skulduggery in the Pentagon than an absence of proof.
In the meantime, conservatives must not get ahead of their evidence in their speculations. We must not turn this into the Downing Street Memo of the Right.
I already hear a lot of that on talk radio.
First, there is no evidence that Jamie Gorelick's "wall" had anything to do with the refusal of Pentagon lawyers to permit Able Danger to brief the FBI. Gorelick was a powerful figure in the Clinton administration, the shadow attorney general (not even the Clinton's would give real responsibility to Janet Reno). But her ruling technically only forbade FBI agents working on intelligence gathering from sharing information with FBI agents working on criminal cases.
There is no evidence that Clinton White House aides even knew about Able Danger.
(Although, since what the Pentagon lawyers were worried about was another Waco, and it was the Clintons who launched the ill-fated attack on the Branch Davidian compound, I guess it all comes back to them anyway. And conspiracy theorists note Gorelick was a lawyer at the Defense Department before she went to the Department of Justice.)
Second, there is no evidence that Sandy Berger's pants stuffing at the National Archives had anything to do with Able Danger. He was caught purloining documents the same month Tony Shaffer met with the 9/11 Commission staff, which is a remarkable coincidence, but may be only that. There are, alas, many other bits of evidence of Clinton administration neglect of the bin Laden threat that he might have wanted to conceal.
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