Able Danger: Congress Takes Charge
Captain Ed
Senator Arlen Specter has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on the revelations surrounding Able Danger and plans to cover wider-ranging issues on intelligence and information sharing:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., plans to hold a hearing on the "Able Danger" allegations and the larger issue of information-sharing between the Pentagon and the FBI, FOX News has confirmed. ...
One of the central Able Danger claims — that military lawyers blocked the sharing of the Atta information from the FBI in the late summer and early fall of 2000 — will be a priority of the committee's probe, FOX News has confirmed.
Some analysts involved with Able Danger have recently gone public with their findings, saying they were discouraged from looking further into Atta, and their attempts to share their information with the FBI were thwarted, because Atta was a legal foreign visitor at the time.
Not only is this news overdue, the use of the Judiciary Committee seems rather extraordinary. Issues surrounding intelligence and military matters would normally get hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence or the Armed Services Committee, not Judiciary. It makes some sense in this case, as the issue of coordination with law enforcement prior to 9/11 will undoubtedly -- and finally -- come back to the actions of the Clinton Administration and the Department of Justice in 1995 to make that coordination much more difficult.
Curt Weldon says that he has five people connected to the Able Danger project willing to testify under oath about data-mining, the identification of Atta, and their efforts to pass the information to the FBI. If Weldon delivers and the testimony remains consistent with what we have already heard, the 9/11 Commission will find itself in full retreat, its findings discredited and its members marginalized. But it won't just be them with questions to answer, nor the Clinton Administration; the Bush administration will also come back under scrutiny, especially in the Pentagon, which has yet to make any definitive statement regarding Able Danger.
These hearings should take place in full public view, with only the testimony regarding specific methodology taking place in closed session. Four years after the worst attacks on American soil since the Civil War, we deserve answers as to all of the parties behind those attacks, how we failed to prevent them, and now how we failed to investigate the terrorist attacks properly the first time around. Specter's hearings provide a good start for Congress. We need to make sure they also finish the job right this time.
captainsquartersblog.com |
