posted August 12, 2005 01:54 AM            

This person was also a member of the 9/11 commission which was responsible for an investigation and a report detailing the failures of intelligence in the 9/11 disaster, the very disaster which she played a crucial role in hamstringing the intelligence services and FBI from communicating with each other what they knew.

9/11 Commission's Staff Rejected Report on Early Identification of Chief Hijacker
By DOUGLAS JEHL and PHILIP SHENON
Published: August 11, 2005

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 - The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.

What Was Known About the 9/11 Plot: An AmendmentThe officials said that the information had not been included in the report because aspects of the officer's account had sounded inconsistent with what the commission knew about that Qaeda member, Mohammed Atta, the plot's leader.

But aides to the Republican congressman who has sought to call attention to the military unit that conducted the secret operation said such a conclusion relied too much on specific dates involving Mr. Atta's travels and not nearly enough on the operation's broader determination that he was a threat.

The briefing by the military officer is the second known instance in which people on the commission's staff were told by members of the military team about the secret program, called Able Danger.

The meeting, on July 12, 2004, has not been previously disclosed. That it occurred, and that the officer identified Mr. Atta there, were acknowledged by officials of the commission after the congressman, Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, provided information about it.

Mr. Weldon has accused the commission of ignoring information that would have forced a rewriting of the history of the Sept. 11 attacks. He has asserted that the Able Danger unit, whose work relied on computer-driven data-mining techniques, sought to call their superiors' attention to Mr. Atta and three other future hijackers in the summer of 2000. Their work, he says, had identified the men as likely members of a Qaeda cell already in the United States.

In a letter sent Wednesday to members of the commission, Mr. Weldon criticized the panel in scathing terms, saying that its "refusal to investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly withholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners, and is evocative of the worst tendencies in the federal government that the commission worked to expose."

Al Felzenberg, who served as the commission's chief spokesman, said earlier this week that staff members who were briefed about Able Danger at a first meeting, in October 2003, did not remember hearing anything about Mr. Atta or an American terrorist cell. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Felzenberg said the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members in July 2004 had indeed mentioned Mr. Atta.

Both Mr. Weldon's office and commission officials said they knew the name, rank and service of the officer, but they declined to make that information public.

Mr. Weldon and a former defense intelligence official who was interviewed on Monday have said that the Able Danger team sought but failed in the summer of 2000 to persuade the military's Special Operations Command, in Tampa, Fla., to pass on to the Federal Bureau of Investigation the information they had gathered about Mr. Atta and the three other men. The Pentagon and the Special Operations Command have declined to comment, saying they are still trying to learn more about what may have happened.

Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Pentagon spokesman, said Wednesday that the military was working with the commission's unofficial follow-up group - the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, which was formed by the panel's members when it was disbanded - to try to clarify what had occurred.

Mr. Felzenberg said the commission's staff remained convinced that the information provided by the military officer in the July 2004 briefing was inaccurate in a significant way.

"He wasn't brushed off," Mr. Felzenberg said of the officer. "I'm not aware of anybody being brushed off. The information that he provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing" from the commission's investigation.

Mr. Felzenberg said staff investigators had become wary of the officer because he argued that Able Danger had identified Mr. Atta, an Egyptian, as having been in the United States in late 1999 or early 2000. The investigators knew this was impossible, Mr. Felzenberg said, since travel records confirmed that he had not entered the United States until June 2000.

Skip to next paragraph

What Was Known About the 9/11 Plot: An Amendment"There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report," Mr. Felzenberg said. "This information was not meshing with the other information that we had."

But Russell Caso, Mr. Weldon's chief of staff, said that "while the dates may not have meshed" with the commission's information, the central element of the officer's claim was that "Mohammed Atta was identified as being tied to Al Qaeda and a Brooklyn cell more than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, and that should have warranted further investigation by the commission."

"Furthermore," Mr. Caso said, "if Mohammed Atta was identified by the Able Danger project, why didn't the Department of Defense provide that information to the F.B.I.?"

Mr. Felzenberg confirmed an account by Mr. Weldon's staff that the briefing, at the commission's offices in Washington, had been conducted by Dietrich L. Snell, one of the panel's lead investigators, and had been attended by a Pentagon employee acting as an observer for the Defense Department; over the commission's protests, the Bush administration had insisted that an administration "minder" attend all the panel's major interviews with executive branch employees. Mr. Snell referred questions to Mr. Felzenberg.

The Sept. 11 commission issued its final report on July 22, 2004. Mr. Felzenberg noted that the interview with the military officer had taken place in the final, hectic days before the commission sent the report to the printers, and said the meeting reflected a willingness by the commission to gather facts, even at the last possible minute.

"Lots of stuff was coming in over the transom," Mr. Felzenberg said. "Lots of stuff was flying around. At the end of the day, when you're writing the report, you have to take facts presented to you."

Correction:

A headline in some copies yesterday about a military officer who told the staff of the 9/11 commission that a secret unit had identified the leader of the attacks as a potential threat a year beforehand misstated the staff's reaction. As the article said, the statement was reviewed and rejected because its description of the movements of the plot leader did not match travel records. It was not ignored.

posted August 12, 2005 02:10 AM            

A group of 9/11 widows say they are "horrified" over reports that the 9/11 Commission ignored evidence that the Clinton administration had identified the two 9/11 hijackers who destroyed the World Trade Center as terrorist threats two years before the attack.

"We are horrified to learn ... that the 9/11 Commission failed to fully investigate all of the facts and circumstances surrounding the 9/11 attacks," the group Sept. 11 Advocates said in a statement late Wednesday.

A separate group of 9/11 widows, known as "the Jersey Girls," is also expressing outrage over the 9/11 Commission's decision to ignore testimony that military intelligence had identified Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi in 1999 as terrorist threats operating inside the U.S. - but was ordered not to share the information with the FBI.
"This calls into question the credibility of the [9/11 Commission] report because this is not an insignificant piece of information," Kristen Breitweiser told the Asbury Park Press.

"The idea we didn't know this is quite disturbing," she added.

"People have been led to believe that the hijackers were in the country undetected, but this information shows that is not true," said fellow Jersey Girl Mindy Kleinberg.

"Now the truth is our intelligence agencies did not fail," Kleinberg told the Press. "They were tracking them. Now the question is why did we perpetrate that myth and why were we not able to unravel the plot, especially in light of the fact that we had Mohamed Atta in our sights."

Rep. Curt Weldon, who first revealed the 9/11 intelligence blunder on Monday, blamed the "firewall" erected by the Clinton Justice Department that prevented sharing intelligence with law enforcement.

posted August 12, 2005 02:23 AM            

Online commentators are taking aim at the 9-11 commission for its failure to include in its report that intelligence officials reportedly ID'd hijack ringleader Mohamed Atta as part of an al-Qaida cell in the U.S. over a year before the September 11 tragedy, saying the panel was acting politically instead of factually.

Jamie Gorelick

One commentator specifically points his finger at former Clinton staffer Jamie Gorelick, a member of the panel who has been accused in the past of acting to protect her ex-boss from any political fallout of the commission's work.

Members of the commission now are calling for a review of the matter, saying they knew nothing about a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger" identifying Atta and three of his accomplices in 1999. The information was shared publicly this week by Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees.

While Weldon says Able Danger personnel recommended Atta and the others be deported, the information was not shared with federal law enforcement agencies, another symptom of the Clinton-era wall of separation that had been erected between intelligence and law enforcement personnel.

The New York Times reports the 9-11 commission staff decided not to share the Able Danger information with the panel members because some of the information sounded inconsistent with what they thought they knew about Atta.

"… [W]hy did [the commission] ignore the Able Danger operation in their deliberations?" asked Captain's Quarters blogger Ed Morrissey, as highlighted by columnist Michelle Malkin. "It would emphasize that the problem was not primarily operational, as the commission made it seem, but primarily political – and that the biggest problem was the enforced separation between law enforcement and intelligence operations upon which the Clinton Department of Justice insisted. The hatchet person for that policy sat on the Commission itself: Jamie S. Gorelick."

It was Gorelick who, as deputy attorney general in the Clinton Justice Department, established the wall of silence between intel and law enforcement.

"We believe it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations," Gorelick wrote in 1995. "These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."

Gorelick rejected calls for her resignation from the commission last year when conflict-of-interest charges were raised.

Morrissey further discusses the apparent failure of commission staff to address the Able Danger data:

First we hear that no such [briefing on the info] occurred. After that, the commission says one might have occurred in October 2003 but that no one remembered it. Now we find out that the commission had two meetings where [they] heard about Able Danger and its identification of Mohamed Atta, including one just before they completed their report. Instead of saying to themselves, "Hey, wait a minute – this changes the picture substantially," and postponing the report until they could look further into Able Danger, they simply shrugged their shoulders and published what they had.
Why? Able Danger proved that at least some of the intelligence work done by the U.S. provided the information that could have helped prevent or at least reduce the attacks on 9-11. They had identified the ringleader of the conspiracy as a terrorist agent, even if they didn't know what mission he had at the time.

What does that mean for the commission's findings? It meant that the cornerstone of their conclusions no longer fit the facts. Able Danger showed that the U.S. had enough intelligence to take action – if the government had allowed law enforcement and intelligence operations to cooperate with each other. It also showed that data mining could effectively identify terrorist agents.

Morrissey says Gorelick's "wall of separation" between intelligence and law enforcement agencies "specifically contributed to Atta's ability to come and go as he pleased, building the teams that would kill almost 3,000 Americans."

National Review's Jim Geraghty hammered the commission as well, saying, "[A]s for the 9-11 commission, after all that patting themselves on the back, all that gushing praise from left, right and center, after their work was called 'miraculous' by Newsday, and the nomination for a National Book Award, and calling their own work 'extraordinary' ... man, these guys stink. Really, if this checks out, and the staffers had information like this and they disregarded it, never believing that we in the public deserved to know that the plot's ringleader was identified, located and recommended to be arrested a year before the attacks ... boy, these guys ought to be in stocks in the public square and have rotten fruit thrown at them. What a sham."

Family members of 9-11 victims also are speaking out against the commission. Yesterday, the organization September 11 Advocates released a statement calling on commission members to be held accountable, saying it was "horrified" that the Atta information was not considered.

"We believe that the time has come for the American people to demand the necessary accountability from all of our leaders," the statement said. "The 9-11 commissioners and staff who had a legal obligation to investigate and report upon all of the facts relevant to the 9-11 attacks should, therefore, be the very first individuals to be held accountable and responsible for their collective failure to meet their legislative mandate."

Continued the statement: "As 9-11 widows who fought tirelessly for the creation of the 9-11 commission, we are wholly disappointed to learn that the commission's Final Report is a hollow failure."

Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, one of the commission's co-chairs, insists the panel members themselves knew nothing of the Able Danger intel.

posted August 12, 2005 09:59 AM            

A 1995 memo from a top terrorism prosecutor warning that a directive by Clinton administration Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick "could cost lives" is being concealed by the 9/11 Commission.

Compounding the cover-up - Gorelick herself was a prominent member of the Commission and refused to recuse herself from parts of the 9/11 investigation that covered the now notorious "wall" she erected that prevented intelligence and law enforcement agencies from cooperating in the war on terror.

In June 1995, U.S. Attorney for New York's Southern District Mary Jo White warned the Justice Department that Gorelick's directive prohibiting intelligence sharing between agencies like the CIA and the FBI would hamper U.S. counterterrorism efforts.
"It is hard to be totally comfortable with instructions to the FBI prohibiting contact with the United States Attorney's Offices when such prohibitions are not legally required," White wrote on June 13, 1995 in a memo reported Friday by the New York Post's Deborah Orin.

"The most effective way to combat terrorism is with as few labels and walls as possible so that wherever permissible, the right and left hands are communicating," advised White, who was then in the midst of prosecuting the 1993 World Trade Center bombers.

According to Orin, however: "White was so upset that she bitterly protested with another memo - a scathing one" - blasting Gorelick's wall of separation.

While the former Clinton official and her fellow 9/11 Commissioners have so-far declined to make the second memo public, the Post reports that White used it to warn that Gorelick's wall "hindered law enforcement and could cost lives."

The 9/11 Commission omitted any mention of White's scathing second warning to Gorelick from its final report.

"Nor does the report include the transcript of its staff interview with White," the Post said.

The revelation that the 9/11 Commission covered-up White's full account comes on the heels of news that Gorelick's wall may have prevented the FBI from learning that lead 9/11 hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi had entered the U.S. and had been identified by military intelligence as terrorist threats a year before the attacks.

posted August 12, 2005 11:30 AM            

A year before the 9/11 attacks, lawyers at the Clinton White House told a group military intelligence officers that information they had developed on 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta could not be shared with the FBI, saying of Atta himself: "You can't even touch him - it doesn't matter what information you have."

Rep. Curt Weldon, who helped develop the military intelligence group code-named "Able Danger," delivered the bombshell revelation in an interview Thursday with WABC Radio host Sean Hannity.

WELDON: In September of 2000 we tried on three occasions to take the information we had developed and pass it along to the FBI so they could follow up and take action against this [al Qaeda] cell and perhaps bring in Atta and question him and do whatever else was necessary.
Three times we were turned by lawyers in the administration.

HANNITY: We're talking about lawyers in the Clinton administration.

WELDON: Yes, it was the Clinton administration. Lawyers said there were two reasons why you can't do that. And they even put stickies over the face of Mohamed Atta on this chart they had. They said, "He's here legally. He's either got a green card or he's got a visa. So you can't even touch him - it doesn't matter what information you have." [END OF EXCERPT]

Moments later, Weldon said he was determined to find out who it was who ultimately gave the order to protect the lead 9/11 hijacker.

WELDON: The American people need to have answers. They need to have answers about who made the decision to stop our military intelligence from sharing information with the FBI, and how high up the ladder that went.

posted August 12, 2005 03:57 PM            

The scary thing is people are constantly complaining about Bush going to war and our soldier dying in vain. But let me ask this... If Clinton and his cronies would have done something about Atta in the beginning 9/11 would have been prevented, as would the senseless deaths of our people as well as this war, why isn't ANYONE talking about THAT?

posted August 12, 2005 09:00 PM              

quote:

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the Bush administration had insisted that an administration "minder" attend all the panel's major interviews with executive branch employees.

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posted August 12, 2005 10:07 PM              

"the Bush administration had insisted that an administration "minder" attend all the panel's major interviews with executive branch employees."

Oh my God.

I'm sitting here trying to remember what the hell that reminds me of. And then it comes to me. Katie whats-her-name being escorted to her publicity interviews by a Scientology "minder".

Yeah, that makes sense.

posted August 12, 2005 11:10 PM              

quote:

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What's Bush doing with this evil man TINK? How about ensuring a steady supply of oil for the energy needs of western civilization.
Bush better work to support the Saudi government because the alternative is a takeover of the country by radical fundamentalist terrorists**
If that happens Algore and his followers would get their wish...a bicycle for every commuter.--jwhop

---

thats a pretty accurate assessment...... i bet jwhop rides a crappy american made bicycle(or more probably doesnt ride at all)

posted August 12, 2005 11:32 PM              

apparently you dont see the big picture here...... apart from the fact that clintons secretary of defense was a republican and that the fbi already knew that osamas men were in the u.s. taking flying lessons(not takeoff or landing lessons) and still did nothing.....

the big picture is that the dod intelligence didnt require anything from the fbi to continue to surveil the atta cell....either here in the us or abroad ......nope nothing at all stopping them (let alone a memo)and any1 who thinks they werent watching atta right up to the attacks has got to be naive imo.......this information only helps support the "rumor" that israeli intelligence were also surveiling attas cell in florida right up to the attacks.....and knew what they were up to.......

according to various sources, atta was living with khalil bin ladens driver in florida (khalil bin laden...osamas halfbrother and Brazil's honorary consul to saudi arabia) who had connections to terrorists in brazil and who was among osamas relatives who fled the country right after 911....

you really think they werent watching them?

http://prisonplanet.com/fbi_knew_terrorists_using_flight_schools.html http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/americas/11/07/inv.terror.south/index.html http://www.wesjones.com/saudi1.htm http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2005/02/310092.shtml

posted August 12, 2005 11:36 PM              

I understand why he would maintain diplomatic relations with them ( I don't agree mind you, but I understand ) but why must he be friends with them ???

This whole play nice with monsters because they have something you want stuff really sucks. Can't he do better? And aren't the Saudi princes radical fundementalists?!? Or are they just money-grubbing, corrupt hypocrites?

posted August 13, 2005 01:18 AM              

quote:

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But those faults don't make Bush an angel of grace and wisdom. There are some of us out here - call us crazy, America hating, divisive commies if you must - that feel both administrations have f*cked up royally.

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posted August 13, 2005 08:11 AM              

I'm not sure what you mean, lovely. Are you giving me a hand with my reading comprehension skills or are you giving me a list of acceptable/unacceptable topics? Are you my minder?

Pid brought up the fact that everyone complaines about Bush's mistakes, while ignoring Clinton's. Hence my comment. Of course she's right, but the deal breaker is that Clinton isn't sitting in the White House this morning.

posted August 13, 2005 03:38 PM              

it was pidaua who brought up bush and how our soldiers are dying in vain in iraq....because of 911----(so then iraq isnt his fault either)

(and the dia just dropped their surveillance of atta because they couldnt make the fbi arrest him....pffft)

posted August 15, 2005 02:52 PM            

Facts:

Able Danger identified 4 terrorist suspects..suspects who later committed acts of terrorism against the United States on 9/11.

They attempted to pass the information on to the FBI...because the FBI is the law enforcement agency tasked with investigations, arrests and interrogation within the United States.

They were told by lawyers from the Clinton White House they couldn't tell the FBI anything about the terrorist suspects they had uncovered here in the United States.

The person who erected the wall of separation between intelligence services and law enforcement, including the FBI was a Clinton appointee, the Clinton appointee who wrote the rules which even she said went beyond the requirements of the law. The very same Clinton appointee put on the 9/11 Commission to conceal and divert attention from the fact it was Clinton Administration policy which prevented the FBI from finding out about a terrorist al-Qaida cell in the United States.

I notice any time Commander Corruption is mentioned leftists spring to his defense...even those who "say" they didn't and don't support Clinton. Very interesting but why deny it?

Some even go so far to declare Commander Corruption was/is middle of the road politically You have to be far, far, far, far into the left ditch to look to your right and find Commander Corruption in the middle of the road

Pure and simple, 9/11 didn't have to happen and if Clinton had done his job going all the way back to 1993 with the first bombing of the WTC..an act of war...and responded to attacks on the United States, on that occasion and all the others which followed; had Clinton taken the Sudanese up on their offer to turn bin Laden over to the United States, 9/11 wouldn't have happened.

All the whining, moral equivalence nonsense, blame shifting and pants wetting by leftists notwithstanding.

Now, we find the 9/11 Commission was in damage control mode and not in a truth seeking mode at all because they were told about Able Danger and staffers interviewed the officers involved. They also hid a memo to the Justice Department by a prosecutor who was livid that the Clinton Administration was exceeding the requirements of the law in information sharing between intelligence agencies and law enforcement.

Right, Atta and his murdering terrorist buddies had green cards and/or visas and couldn't be touched. Utter bull*hit. First of all, foreigners visit America for stated reasons, school, work, visit relatives and a number of other reason. Establishing a terrorist al-Qaida cell is not a valid reason for being in America.

posted August 15, 2005 04:35 PM            

Once again, ‘the official government story' is leaking like a colander. I just read the August 12 ‘Kean-Hamilton statement on ABLE DANGER' from the 9/11 Commission ... henceforth to be referred to as ‘Commission CYA Addendum (Revised)'.

Recently two separate groups of 9/11 widows articulated their shock and horror that the 9/11 Commission ignored significant and critical evidence. Duh! Hell-o?
The 9/11 Commission's decision to flat-out ignore testimony that military intelligence had identified Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi in 1999 as terrorist threats already in the U.S. but was specifically ordered not to tell the FBI suffers inadequate adjectives to replace contemptible, reprehensible, monumentally malfeasant and freaking crazy…

The Commission says, ‘nuh-uh' ... but a reasonable person would conclude they are being less than forthcoming (translation: they are lying).

Last year, Regan Books published "Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror." Author Peter Lance (http://www.peterlance.com) has shown how the government repeatedly, chronically and outrageously sacrificed national security for petty personal and political preferences.

As one of the widows said: "Now the truth is our intelligence agencies did not fail. …They were tracking them. Now the question is why did we perpetrate that myth and why were we not able to unravel the plot, especially in light of the fact that we had Mohamed Atta in our sights."

Good question. Perhaps Jaimie Gorelick and Dieter Snell should be asked, under oath?

Rep. Curt Weldon blames the so-called "firewall" erected by the Clinton Justice Department that myopically prohibited sharing intelligence with law enforcement. He is not the Lone Ranger. Such a territorial imperative exceeds even the most egregious bureaucratic brain flatulence.

According to Weldon, a year before 9/11, Clinton lawyers told a group of military intelligence officers that information they had developed on 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta could not be shared with the FBI. Reportedly, they said of Atta, "You can't even touch him – it doesn't matter what information you have." Huh?!?!

Before we rip Weldon for the long stall, give him points for ‘trying'. He told Sean Hannity, "In September of 2000 we tried on three occasions to take the information we had developed and pass it along to the FBI so they could follow up and take action against this [al-Qaida] cell and perhaps bring in Atta and question him and do whatever else was necessary."

Three times they tried and three times they were blown off by administration lawyers.

According to Weldon, the lawyers said: "He's here legally. He's either got a green card or he's got a visa. So you can't even touch him – it doesn't matter what information you have."

BULLfeathers! I am not a lawyer and never played one on TV or radio: however, this doesn't pass the smell test.

Hell, the government arrested and tried (and the jury ACQUITTED) former IRS Special Agent Joseph Banister (http://www.freedomabovefortune.com) just because he asked questions it didn't like and is a credible albeit embarrassing pain in the government's butt.

For a known bad guy with known links to known bad guys (see pages 362-362 in Peter Lance's "1000 Years for Revenge") to get a pass from government lawyers is nuts ... even by Clinton administration standards.

I have done considerable research, talked to hundreds of people and interviewed dozens of experts, and I still can't fathom how Jamie Gorelick and Dieter Snell were not called as witnesses before the 9/11 Commission, let alone the galactically epic ‘whoops' of their working for the very commission allegedly investigating their work product.

In 1995, U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White warned in a memo that the directive by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick "could cost lives" ... and it did! The 9/11 Commission is still concealing that memo. Why?

Gorelick refused to recluse herself from parts of the 9/11 investigation that covered the now infamous "wall" she erected that prevented intelligence and law enforcement agencies from cooperating in the war on terror. And none of her ‘esteemed colleagues' did ‘Jack-spit' to complain. How come?

"It is hard to be totally comfortable with instructions to the FBI prohibiting contact with the United States Attorney's Offices when such prohibitions are not legally required," White wrote on June 13, 1995, in a memo reported recently by the New York Post's Deborah Orin.

Orin reports that White was big-time ticked off, "White was so upset that she bitterly protested with another memo – a scathing one" – blasting Gorelick's wall of separation. So how come the commissioners have failed to make the second memo public?

Jaimie Gorelick and Dieter Snell (among other Clinton aides) should be investigated … not tasked with guarding the chicken coop.

Meanwhile, once again, ‘the official government story' (like a long list of ‘official' stories) does not and will not bear scrutiny.

Geoff is an author and talk show host. He is a ninth-generation commissioned officer in the U.S. armed services, a former Green Beret and retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel. Geoff hunts down the stories the rest of the media ignores and exposes them for public scrutiny. He is also Editor of CalNews.com.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/8/14/153552.shtml

posted August 15, 2005 05:20 PM            

Article published Saturday, August 13, 2005

Able Danger disabled

THE report of the 9/11 commission, once a best seller and hailed by the news media as the definitive word on the subject, must now be moved to the fiction shelves.

The commission concluded, you'll recall, that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon couldn't have been prevented, and that if there was negligence, it was as much the fault of the Bush Administration (for moving slowly on the recommendations of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke) as of the Clinton administration.

Able Danger has changed all of that.

Able Danger was a military intelligence unit set up by Special Operations Command in 1999. A year before the 9/11 attacks, Able Danger identified hijack leader Mohammed Atta and the other members of his cell. But Clinton administration officials stopped them - three times - from sharing this information with the FBI.

The problem was the order Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick made forbidding intelligence operatives from sharing information with criminal investigators.

"They were stopped because the lawyers at that time in 2000 told them Mohammed Atta had a green card" - he didn't - "and they could not go after someone with a green card," said Rep. Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican who brought the existence of Able Danger to light.

The military spooks knew only that Atta and his confederates had links to al-Qaeda. They hadn't unearthed their mission. But if the FBI had kept tabs on them (a big if, given the nature of the FBI at the time), 9/11 almost certainly could have been prevented.

What may be a bigger scandal is that the staff of the 9/11 Commission knew of Able Danger and what it had found, but made no mention of it in its report. This is as if the commission that investigated the attack on Pearl Harbor had written its final report without mentioning the Japanese.

Mr. Weldon unveiled Able Danger in a speech on the House floor June 27, but his remarks didn't attract attention until the New York Times reported on them Tuesday.

When the story broke, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, a Democrat from Indiana, co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission, at first denied the commission had ever been informed of what Able Danger had found, and took a swipe at Mr. Weldon's credibility:

"The Sept. 11th Commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of the surveillance of Mohammed Atta or his cell," Mr. Hamilton said. "Had we learned of it obviously it would have been a major focus of our investigation."

Mr. Hamilton changed his tune after the New York Times reported Thursday, and the Associated Press confirmed, that commission staff had been briefed on Able Danger in October, 2003, and again in July, 2004.

It was in October, 2003, that Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger stole classified documents from the National Archives and destroyed some. Berger allegedly was studying documents in the archives to help prepare Clinton officials to testify before the 9/11 Commission. Was he removing references to Able Danger? Someone should ask him before he is sentenced next month.

After having first denied that staff had been briefed on Able Danger, commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said no reference was made to it in the final report because "it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks," the AP reported.

The only dispute over Atta's whereabouts is whether he was in Prague on April 9, 2001, to meet with Samir al Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer. Czech intelligence insists he was. Able Danger, apparently, had information supporting the Czechs.

The CIA, and the 9/11 Commission, say Atta wasn't in Prague April 9, 2001, because his cell phone was used in Florida that day. But there is no evidence of who used the phone. Atta could have lent it to a confederate. (It wouldn't have worked in Europe anyway.)

But acknowledging that possibility would leave open the likelihood that Saddam's regime was involved in, or at least had foreknowledge of, the 9/11 attacks. And that would have been as uncomfortable for Democrats as the revelation that 9/11 could have been prevented if it hadn't been for the Clinton administration's wall of separation.

The 9/11 commission wrote history as it wanted it to be, not as it was. The real history of what happened that terrible September day has yet to be written.

posted August 15, 2005 06:49 PM              

quote:

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Tink I'm wondering why you bring up Bush when we are discussing something which has nothing to do with his administration

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I didn't bring Bush up. Pidaua brought Bush up and I responded. Pid has every damn right to bring it up, should she so desire, and I would never in a million years dream of telling her otherwise.

posted August 15, 2005 06:58 PM              

By Jamie S. Gorelick
Sunday, April 18, 2004; Page B07

The commission investigating the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has a critical dual mission to fulfill -- to help our nation understand how the worst assault on our homeland since Pearl Harbor could have occurred and to outline reforms to prevent new acts of terrorism. Under the leadership of former governor Tom Kean and former congressman Lee Hamilton, the commission has acted with professionalism and skill. Its hearings and the reports it has released have been highly informative, if often disturbing. Sept. 11 united this country in shock and grief; the lessons from it must be learned in a spirit of unity, not of partisan rancor.

At last week's hearing, Attorney General John Ashcroft, facing criticism, asserted that "the single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents" and that I built that wall through a March 1995 memo. This is simply not true.

First, I did not invent the "wall," which is not a wall but a set of procedures implementing a 1978 statute (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA) and federal court decisions interpreting it. In a nutshell, that law, as the courts read it, said intelligence investigators could conduct electronic surveillance in the United States against foreign targets under a more lenient standard than is required in ordinary criminal cases, but only if the "primary purpose" of the surveillance were foreign intelligence rather than a criminal prosecution.

Second, according to the FISA Court of Review, it was the justice departments under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in the 1980s that began to read the statute as limiting the department's ability to obtain FISA orders if it intended to bring a criminal prosecution. The practice of prohibiting prosecutors from directing intelligence investigations was first put in place in those years as well. Then, in July 1995, Attorney General Janet Reno issued written guidelines that spelled out the steps FBI intelligence agents and criminal investigators and prosecutors needed to follow when sharing information. The point was to preserve the ability of prosecutors to use information collected by intelligence agents.

Third, Mr. Ashcroft's own deputy attorney general, Larry Thompson, formally reaffirmed the 1995 guidelines in an Aug. 6, 2001, memo addressed to the FBI and the Justice Department. Ashcroft has charged that the guidelines hampered the department's ability to pursue terrorists Zacarias Moussaoui, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in August 2001, but his own department had endorsed those guidelines at the pivotal time.

Fourth, the memo I wrote in March 1995 -- which concerns information-sharing in two particular cases, including the original World Trade Center bombing -- permits freer coordination between intelligence and criminal investigators than was subsequently permitted by the 1995 guidelines or the 2001 Thompson memo. The purpose of my memo was to resolve a problem presented to me: facilitating investigations on both the intelligence side and criminal side at the same time. My memo directed agents on both sides to share information -- and, in particular, directed one agent to work on both the criminal and intelligence investigations -- to ensure the flow of information "over the wall." We set up special procedures because of the extraordinary circumstances and the necessity to prevent a court from throwing out any conviction in those cases. Had my memo been in place in August 2001 -- when, as Ashcroft said, FBI officials rejected a criminal warrant of Moussaoui because they feared "breaching the wall" -- it would have allowed those agents to obtain a criminal warrant without fear of jeopardizing an intelligence investigation.

Fifth, nothing in the 1995 guidelines prevented the sharing of information between criminal and intelligence investigators. Indeed, the guidelines require that FBI foreign intelligence agents share information with criminal investigators and prosecutors whenever they uncover facts suggesting that a crime has been or may be committed. The guidelines did set forth procedures, but those procedures implemented court decisions and, as noted, were reaffirmed by the Ashcroft Justice Department.

The Patriot Act, enacted after 9/11, together with an unprecedented appeal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, paved the way for the Justice Department to permit largely unrestricted information-sharing between intelligence and criminal investigators because the law changed the legal standard that had given rise to the guidelines in the first place. The Patriot Act says that electronic surveillance can be conducted in the United States against foreign threats as long as a "significant purpose" -- rather than the "primary purpose" -- is to obtain foreign intelligence.

This history has all been well-rehearsed in publicly available briefs, opinions and reports, all available to the 9/11 commission. I have -- consistent with the policy applied to all commissioners -- recused myself from any consideration of my actions or of the department while I was there. My fellow commissioners have spoken for themselves in rejecting the call by a few partisans that I step aside based upon false premises. I have worked hard to help the American public understand what happened on Sept. 11. I intend -- with my brethren on the commission -- to finish the job.

posted August 15, 2005 10:36 PM            

There is not one word to suggest the rules for communicating between intelligence agencies and law enforcement were changed until after the 9/11 Commission report.

Face facts Petron, Commander Corruption bears primary responsibility for 9/11...for a whole string of reasons.

The reason their report was suppressed by 9/11 Commission staffers was because it showed Atta meeting an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague...which shows a connection between al-Qaida and Saddam in 9/11.