Oh oh, Maybe slick willy won't be able to slip out of this one.
Weldon wants answers in intelligence snafu
08/12/2005
delcotimes.com
Bolstered by widespread media coverage that has been favorable to his cause, U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon is calling for a congressional inquiry into an intelligence failure that could have thwarted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Weldon, a lead contender for the House Homeland Security Committee chairmanship, also wants to grill 9/11 Commission staffers to find out why the incident was not included in the commission’s final report last summer.
According to Weldon, R-7, of Thornbury, a secret military intelligence operation known as "Able Danger" had identified al-Qaida member and 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta as a terrorist threat more than a year before the attacks. The information, he claims, was never shared with the FBI because Atta and the three other hijackers were in the U.S. legally with green cards.
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Now, Weldon is on a crusade to track down where that legal opinion originated and "how high up the chain that decision went."
"Were they Special Forces lawyers, were they Pentagon lawyers, Justice Department lawyers, White House lawyers? We don’t know," Weldon said Thursday. "Who were the lawyers who weighed in to stop the Able Danger military intelligence folks from briefing the FBI? And why? What was their reasoning?"
At least two House committees - Armed Services and Intelligence - are informally investigating the matter or planning to do so, according to Weldon’s spokesman, but the congressman is pushing for formal inquiries with sworn testimony.
The USA Patriot Act, passed in response to 9/11 and awaiting reauthorization in Congress, removed some of the barriers to intelligence sharing, but Weldon said Thursday most of the information gathered by Able Danger was not classified, so sharing it with the FBI should not have been an issue. He said the information about Atta and the al-Qaida Brooklyn cell could have prevented or reduced the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people.
Weldon also wants an inquiry into why the 9/11 Commission did not include the Atta intelligence lapse in its July 2004 final report even though commission staffers had received the information prior to the report.
Having spoken to 9/11 commissioners Timothy Roemer and John Lehman and receiving assurances from both men that they had never been briefed on Able Danger, Weldon is convinced commission staff members "decided to basically silence any knowledge" of the secret intelligence operation.
"I want to bring in the 9/11 Commission staff and put them under oath and have them testify" about why the information was not passed upward to the commissioners, Weldon said.
Earlier this week, the commission’s former spokesman, Al Felzenberg, said the commission could not recall receiving information naming Atta. Felzenberg later acknowledged that staff members had received such information but did not act on it because certain details conflicted with what was already known about Atta’s activity in the U.S.
"Even if it were valid, it would’ve joined the lists of dozens of other instances where information was not shared," Felzenberg told the Associated Press. "There was a major problem with intelligence sharing."
Weldon’s efforts pertaining to the 9/11 Commission staff and the legal team that prevented the release of Able Danger intelligence to the FBI is his latest attempt to overhaul the way terrorist intelligence is gathered and how it is disseminated through government and military bureaucracies.
In June, the 10-term congressman published "Countdown to Terror," which accuses the CIA of a "gross dereliction of duty" for failing to protect America from a catastrophic terrorist attack backed by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The CIA has dismissed Weldon’s Iranian source as a fabricator.
Able Danger is briefly mentioned in the first chapter of Weldon’s book as an example of poor intelligence sharing. The passage describes a Sept. 25, 2001, meeting between the congressman and Stephen Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser to the president.
Upon seeing Weldon’s 2-foot by 3-foot chart regarding Atta and the Brooklyn cell, Hadley responded, "I have to show this to the big man," according to the book. |
