Posted on 09/22/2006 7:07:33 AM PDT by americaprd
U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon’s crusade to prove that a defunct military intelligence program had identified Sept. 11 hijackers prior to the attacks was dealt a serious blow Thursday by a Pentagon report that found no evidence to support any of the congressman’s allegations. The Defense Department inspector general’s report concluded that members of the Able Danger data-mining operation "did not identify Mohammed Atta or any of the 9/11 terrorists as possible threats at any time during its existence."
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"In fact, Able Danger produced no actionable intelligence information," Acting Inspector General Thomas Gimble wrote in the 71-page report.
Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, angrily rejected that conclusion, saying Gimble and his staff acted in a "sickening bureaucratic manner" and "cherry picked testimony from witnesses in an effort to minimize the historical importance of the Able Danger effort."
He also questioned whether the Pentagon was attempting to interfere with the upcoming congressional elections.
"The IG narrowly focused their investigation on the witnesses recollections of the 9/11 hijackers and a chart," he said in a statement. "The report trashes the reputations of military officers who had the courage to step forward and put their necks on the line to describe important work they were doing to track al-Qaida prior to 9/11."
The 9/11 Commission has previously dismissed Weldon’s claims, which led the congressman to ratchet up his accusations that commission members and staffers conspired to exclude the Able Danger findings from their final report to shield the Clinton administration from embarrassment.
"This is a scandal, I think, bigger than Watergate," Weldon told the Daily Times in December.
Weldon hit the national media circuit in the summer of 2005, saying Atta was a known terrorist threat prior to Sept. 11, but that the information was never provided to law enforcement authorities due to intelligence-sharing restrictions.
He was backed by Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott and others, though the latest report said their statements cannot be corroborated.
The report said the information gathered by Able Danger, created in October 1999 by the U.S. Special Operations Command on the order of then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Henry H. Shelton, "was for purposes of demonstration and was not subjected to rigorous intelligence analysis."
In his book, "Countdown to Terror," Weldon writes that on Sept. 25, 2001, he gave Stephen Hadley, then deputy national security adviser to President Bush, a chart that "diagrammed the affiliations of al-Qaida and showed Mohammed Atta and the infamous Brooklyn cell."
Gimble’s report dismissed that claim as well, saying Atta had not been linked to the terrorist organization before the attacks.
"Although it is conceivable that the name ‘Mohammed Atta’ or a photograph of Mohammed Atta may have appeared along with thousands of other bits of information examined by the Able Danger team," the report said, "neither Mohammed Atta nor any other 9/11 terrorist was identified in a manner that would have linked them to al-Qaida or justified more focused information gathering."
But Weldon said Thursday that within the past three months, a recently retired military officer had come forward to support his version of Able Danger and another Defense Department official "has conducted data runs of stored pre-9/11 data that has yielded information about the Brooklyn cell."
Richard Ben-Veniste, a 9/11 commissioner who is backing Weldon’s Democratic opponent, Joseph Sestak, said Weldon’s focus on Able Danger has hindered the implementation of the commission’s recommendations for improving homeland security.
"At a time when we needed help from responsible members of Congress to enact and implement our recommendations, and for Congress to be robust in its oversight responsibilities, this was a distraction," Ben-Veniste said. "There is absolutely no question that this Able Danger business was a false trail," he added.
In rejecting Thursday’s report, which follows an earlier Pentagon investigation that failed to corroborate Weldon’s claims, the congressman criticized Gimble for leaking the information to the media before Congress had been briefed and questioned whether his office was attempting to influence the November elections.
"The timeliness of this report, just weeks before congressional elections, also raises serious questions about the IG’s motivations," Weldon said.
Sestak, the first director of the Navy’s anti-terrorism group, Deep Blue, called on Weldon to accept the Pentagon’s conclusions and "put his baseless conspiracy theories to rest."
Not surprisingly, President Clinton told Fox News yesterday that the Weldon-Sestak race is on of the top three races he is monitoring this election cycle:
"And ex-Pres. Clinton was asked what races besides NY SEN he's watching for '06: "I'm looking at that Senate seat in Virginia between Jim Webb, President Reagan's former navy secretary and now running as a Democrat for the Senate against George Allen. And Harold Ford in Tennessee, that's an interesting race. He's recently pulled even or a little bit ahead. There is a House race in Pennsylvania where Curt Weldon, a 20 year veteran is being opposed by Admiral Joe Sestak, who was a career military man who served in that capacity on my National Security Council staff" ("On the Record," FNC, 9/21).
Source: http://hotlineblog.nationaljournal.com/archives/2006/09/hotline_after_d_92.html
So the military is going from "Able Danger did not exist" to "Able Danger did not uncover anything?"
We know which side William Bender's on.
WE'll find out in 50 years when all is declassified. On the bright side, the Magic Bullet theory has been disproven.
In about 3 years, they'll go to "Able Danger did uncover a few minor items, but not what you thought they did," and several years after S(l)ick Willie kicks the bucket, they'll finally arrive at "Able Danger, if it had been listened to, would have fingered Mohammed Atta and company."
Not if the truth of the matter disappeared down Sandy Berger's pants...
Sleestak is gonna get crushed by Weldon. Last poll I saw, Curt was up by about 25 points.
The only thing Sleestak can even use to fool himself is the daytime polls of unemployed people and drunks who will have no clue it's election day/where to go/if they're registered/how to vote (aka, the typical democrat voter).
Good luck counting on that demographic to help you pull within 10 points.
Owl_Eagle
If what I just wrote made you sad or angry,
it was probably just a joke.
Their timing in releasing this "information" is interesting, too, just before an election.
Wrong Title..........Curt Weldon is one of the few people in our government who is RIGHT and can be TRUSTED.......the rest of this is typical government CYA. Seems like about all the American people can expect anymore.
Sorry, missed Arlen's confession re this matter.....LOL....
"Inspector General Thomas Gimble's report dismissed that claim as well, saying Atta had not been linked to the terrorist organization before the attacks."
THEN WE HAVE THIS:
August 23, 2001: Mossad Reportedly Gives CIA List of Terrorist Living in US; at Least Four 9/11 Hijackers Named
According to German newspapers, the Mossad gives the CIA a list of 19 terrorists living in the US and say that they appear to be planning to carry out an attack in the near future. It is unknown if these are the 19 9/11 hijackers or if the number is a coincidence. However, four names on the list are known, and these four will be 9/11 hijackers: Nawaf Alhazmi, Khalid Almihdhar, Marwan Alshehhi, and Mohamed Atta. [Die Zeit (Hamburg), 10/1/2002; Der Spiegel (Hamburg), 10/1/2002; BBC, 10/2/2002; Ha'aretz, 10/3/2002] The Mossad appears to have learned about this through its “art student spy ring.” Yet apparently, this warning and list are not treated as particularly urgent by the CIA and the information is not passed on to the FBI.
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&warning_signs:_specific_cases=foreignIntelligence
SOMEBODY IS LYING!
HAHA...but Arlen had nothing to do with it. The discovery channel ran a very informative special disproving the theory.All they need to do is run a special disproving the theory that Bush is a conservative.
Great find!
Damn! Surely you jest? None of those inside the beltway bastards would LIE!
Would they?
In George Orwell's "1984", this was called "the Memory Hole". Anything inconvenient to "Big Brother's" worldview would go down the memory hole.
I guess it's not surprising to see Bubba trying desperately to dump as much of his Administration's history into that memory hole so he can pull the "flush" lever. China-gate, FBI-Files-gate, Ron Brown's peddling envoys around the globe for campaign contributions (before his untimely death), pardon-gate (and we can add all the missed opportunities to take Osama Bin Laden out during the Clinton years): flush them all down the memory hole. Meanwhile, Bubba and the b*tch, go smiling off into their waning years looking for a path back to the White House.
There you have it folks! In a nut shell!
Details of the origins and efforts of Able Danger were corroborated in a telephone interview by GSN with a former defense intelligence officer who said he worked closely with that program. That intelligence officer spoke to GSN while sitting in Rep. Weldon’s Capitol Hill office.
The intelligence officer recalled carrying documents to the offices of Able Danger, which was being run by the Special Operations Command, headquartered in Tampa, FL. The documents included a photo of Mohammed Atta supplied by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and described Atta’s relationship with Osama bin Laden. The officer was very disappointed when lawyers working for Special Ops decided that anyone holding a green card had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had amassed about the only terrorist cell they had located inside the United States could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded.
“We were directed to take those 3M yellow stickers and place them over the faces of Atta and the other terrorists and pretend they didn’t exist,” the intelligence officer told GSN. http://www.gsnmagazine.com/aug_05/dod_lawyers.html
[In George Orwell's "1984", this was called "the Memory Hole". Anything inconvenient to "Big Brother's" worldview would go down the memory hole.]
Is this "hole" of which you speak in Sandy Burglar's pants, perhaps?.
C.Y.A.B.S.
Actually, it says "Able danger did not uncover anything ACTIONABLE."
To liberal-do-nothings, an attack on World Trade Center was not "actionable."
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