Betsy's Page - Jim Geraghty isn't too impressed with the statement by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton that the briefing they got on Able danger wasn't deemed that important because the guy didn't have anything to back up his assertions. Here is how the Washington Post downplays the claims about Able Danger.
The commission statement raises significant doubts about the likelihood that Able Danger could have identified Atta or other Sept. 11 hijackers as al Qaeda operatives and placed them in Brooklyn in 1999 or early 2000. Atta never lived in New York and did not enter the United States until June 2000, and two other key hijackers mentioned by the intelligence officer in media interviews were not in the country until 2001, the statement said.
Here is Geraghty's response.
Okay, here’s the problem. How certain is the 9/11 Commission of its original data about where Atta lived, when he entered the country, and when these other guys entered the country?
When you have a certain amount of data, and someone comes along with a new piece of information that contradicts that earlier data, what do you do? Do you reexamine your original data to see if some of it may be in error, and that this new piece of information may fit in? Or do you reject the new data entirely, because the fact that it contradicts the previous timeline is prima facie evidence of its erroneousness?
The Commissioners are saying they’ve taken the first path. But one can’t help but wonder if in July 2004 they took the second path, since they were saying earlier in the week that they had never heard of this stuff. The assessment of the new information was being done by these staffers – who rejected it by not telling their bosses.
And John Podhoretz has some questions for Hamilton and Kean.
Also, Kean and Hamilton say Able Danger "did not turn out to be historically significant," which is a bizarre thing to say. If this operation managed to surface the name, identity and Al Qaeda role of Mohammed Atta, it was by definition "historically significant." Dismissing Able Danger in this way makes Kean and Hamilton sound disingenuous at best. Why wouldn't they want to get to the bottom of this?
Once again, I want to reiterate that I'm less interested in pointing fingers at the Commission, Jamie Gorelick, or anyone who may have made mistakes that could have prevented 9/11. My interest is that we figure out the best ways to prevent this happening again. And, if data-mining turned out to have been successful in identifying some of the 9/11 hijackers, we need to know about that so that we can examine ways to use data-mining in the future. I'm just afraid that that part of the story will get lost in all the defensiveness and finger-pointing. When people were getting all scared about civil liberties being lost when the Pentagon tried to set up TIA, would they have had a different attitude if they'd known that similar techniques had identified Atta a year before 9/11? I suspect that the public debate would have gone much differently. Perhaps we should be revisiting that debate now.
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