THE 9/11 COMMISSION IN MORTAL DANGER

The Corner on National Review Online ^ | 08/11/05 | John Podhoretz

[TonyInOhio]

It behaved disgracefully and in a nakedly partisan fashion, with former officials of the Clinton administration attempting to use the platform to damage the president's reelection chances. Then, after months of ludicrous conduct, out of nowhere came the brilliantly conceived and written report that set a new standard of eloquence and coherence for government documents, became a major bestseller and redeemed the commission's reputation.

Well, that didn't last long.

In a story filed at 7:10 PM, the Associated Press is now confirming all the particulars of what will now forever be called the Able Danger disaster. The 9/11 Commission staff did hear about intelligence-gathering efforts that hit pay dirt on the whereabouts of Mohammed Atta -- in 1999 -- and deliberately chose to omit word of those efforts.

And why? Because to do so might upset the timeline the Commission had established on Atta.

And why is that significant? Because the Mohammed Atta timeline established by the Commission pointedly insisted Atta did not meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.

And why is that significant? Because debunking the Atta-Iraq connection was of vital importance to Democrats, who had become focused almost obsessively on the preposterous notion that there was no relation whatever between Al Qaeda and Iraq -- that Al Qaeda and Iraq might even have been enemies.

I was very skeptical of this Able Danger stuff about Atta, thought it was just sme way Rep. Curt Weldon was trying to sell a book. No longer. This is clearly becoming the biggest story of the summer -- the fact that, as Andy McCarthy alluded to, the "intelligence wall" set up by 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick when she was in the Justice Department did, in fact, cause the linchpin of the 9/11 attacks to evade capture by American law enforcement.

So was the staff a) protecting the Atta timeline or b) Jamie Gorelick or c) the Clinton administration or d) itself, because it got hold of the information relatively late and the staff was lazy?

More important, what will co-chairmen Tom (pound his fist on the table) Kean and Lee (look sorrowful) Hamilton do and say in the next 36 hours about this calamity?

[musicman]

"Okay, now is this really something that is going to make it above the blog level or am I going to be hearing of this on GMA, the nightly news, Nightline, etc.?:

IMHO....The first you will hear about this in a seriously correctly reported blockbuster exposing manner on ANY MSM, it will be the the LEAD story on news anchor Peter Jennings next live news broadcast....

[STARWISE]

Excellent link .. thanks! The worms are beginning to slither and writhe in fear, I hope. God .. Gorelick and the DOD or whichever Jags need to be publicly hung next to the Burglar!!

[thoughtomator]

It is surprising that the Clintons didn't have her knocked off yet.

[concerned about politics]

Bump

[popdonnelly]

Now, children. You don't take Top Secret documents out of their repository and shred them. No, NO, NO. That is against the law.

[ThePythonicCow]

This war is going to take longer than three years, I'm afraid.

Much longer.

When Reagan got the Soviet Union on the economic ropes, bleeding faster than they could recover, it took ten years to bring about the collapse of that empire.

We are at war with three factions:

• The left - with billions from fools (such as Soros), foundations, and our federal government.
• The tyrants ruling Communist China, from whom we buy billions of dollars of packaged goods.
• Islam, funded by OPEC, from whom we buy billions of dollars of oil.

The story unfolding in this thread today shows how the corruption of our government by the left, to cover up their alliance with China, had the side affect of covering up the looming dangers posed by the OPEC funded Islamic terrorists.

Until the enemy is driven to economic ruin, they will persist.

We are a long, long way from victory. Indeed, the only way to victory may be for the enemy to first kill off the economic engine that hosts these parasites. ( that's us)

Or - hopefully - there is another way. Part of what brought down the Soviet Union was the increased flow of information. The internet, the cell phone, the fax machine and forums such as this one are making it increasingly difficult for evil to hide.

[PhiKapMom]

There is a lot more out there that has not been reported is my guess about the events surrounding 9/11.

[Southack]

Here are two *other* 9/11 factoids that didn't make the 9/11 Commission's report:9/11/2001 hi-jackers used ID of dead 9/11/2000 attacker to rent car

Essay; Inside The Bunker

By WILLIAM SAFIRE (NYT) Op-Ed 727 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 27 , Column 1

ABSTRACT - William Safire Op-Ed column on activities at President's Emergency Operations Center, underground facility hardened to withstand blast overpressure from nuclear detonation, to which Secret Service brought Vice Pres Cheney and other high administration officials after World Trade Center attack;

says Secret Service received threat that 'Air Force One is next,' and that is why they did not allow Pres Bush to return to White House immediately; says most troublesome question is ****how did terrorists get code-word information**** and transponder know-how that allowed them to convey their threat; says knowledge of code words and presidential whereabouts and possession of secret procedures indicates terrorists may have mole in White House, or informants in Secret Service, FBI, FAA or CIA (M)

[montag813]

As Michael Savage has been saying for two days, those responsible for this calamity must be imprisoned, preferably for the rest of their natural lives, including Jamie Gorelick and the DoD lawyers. Congress also needs to investiage the 9/11 Commission for deception in the Atta matter with an eye towards possible criminal charges for Ben Veniste and Kean. If Sandy Berger has not yet been sentenced, his plea bargain must be cancelled on account of new evidence, and he must stand trial on fraud, theft and falsifying of government documents, and conspiracy.

Even the goverment's cooperative star WoldCom witness got 5 years in the slammer today. If Berger does not get at least that much, both Bush and Gonzalez should be impeached. As it is the Congress needs to investigate Sandy Berger's plea deal with the DoJ in the first place. The miscreant government lawyers who arranged that deal need to be exposed and fired.

[PhiKapMom]

Thanks! I remember him testifying. This whole deal is mind boggling. Was so disgusted with the 9/11 Commission that after awhile I quit paying attention. It has my full attention now.

[stickywillie]

Thank you for posting that. Everything else is superfluos bs. They need to be hung on a public square post haste.

[aposiopetic]

Berger shred three of the five versions because they were allegedly identical.

Just trying to save the Archives a little space, I guess.

[raynearhood]

JUST IN CASE NO-ONE ELSE HAS POSTED IT (I haven't read all 400+ posts... sorry). THE RAW DATA FROM FOXNEWS. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165408,00.html

On Wednesday, Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA), vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, sent the following letter to the former 9/11 Commission members, also known as the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, in which he rejects the Commission's claim that they were not briefed on "Able Danger".

Below is a copy of a letter sent by Congressman Curt Weldon to the former 9/11 Commission members:

August 10, 2005

The Honorable Thomas H. Kean, Chairman

The Honorable Lee H. Hamilton, Vice Chairman

9/11 Public Discourse Project

One DuPont Circle, NW

Suite 700

Washington, DC 20036

Dear Chairman Kean and Vice Chairman Hamilton:

I am contacting you to discuss an important issue that concerns the terrible events of September 11, 2001, and our country's efforts to ensure that such a calamity is never again allowed to occur. Your bipartisan work on The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States shed light on much that was unclear in the minds of the American people regarding what happened that fateful day, however there appears to be more to the story than the public has been told. I bring this before you because of my respect for you both, and for the 9-11 Commission's service to America.

Almost seven years ago, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1999 established the Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons of Mass Destruction, otherwise known as the Gilmore Commission. The Gilmore Commission reached many of the same conclusions as your panel, and in December of 2000 called for the creation of a "National Office for Combating Terrorism." I mention this because prior to 9/11, Congress was aware of many of the institutional obstacles to preventing a terrorist attack, and was actively attempting to address them. I know this because I authored the language establishing the Gilmore Commission.

In the 1990's, as chairman of the congressional subcommittee that oversaw research & development for the Department of Defense, I paid special attention to the activities of the Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) at Ft. Belvoir. During that time, I led a bipartisan delegation of Members of Congress to Vienna, Austria to meet with members of the Russian parliament, or Duma. Before leaving, I received a brief from the CIA on a Serbian individual that would be attending the meeting. The CIA provided me with a single paragraph of information. On the other hand, representatives of LIWA gave me five pages of far more in-depth analysis. This was cause for concern, but my debriefing with the CIA and FBI following the trip was cause for outright alarm: neither had ever heard of LIWA or the data mining capability it possessed.

As a result of experiences such as these, I introduced language into three successive Defense Authorization bills calling for the creation of an intelligence fusion center which I called NOAH, or National Operations and Analysis Hub. The NOAH concept is certainly familiar now, and is one of several recommendations made by your commission that has a basis in earlier acts of Congress. Despite my repeated efforts to establish NOAH, the CIA insisted that it would not be practical. Fortunately, this bureaucratic intransigence was overcome when Congress and President Bush acted in 2003 to create the Terrorism Threat Integration Center (now the National Counterterrorism Center). Unfortunately, it took the deaths of 3,000 people to bring us to the point where we could make this happen. Now, I am confident that under the able leadership of John Negroponte, the days of toleration for intelligence agencies that refuse to share information with each other are behind us.

The 9-11 Commission produced a book-length account of its findings, that the American people might educate themselves on the challenges facing our national effort to resist and defeat terrorism. Though under different circumstances, I eventually decided to do the same. I recently published a book critical of our intelligence agencies because even after 9/11, they were not getting the message. After failing to win the bureaucratic battle inside the Beltway, I decided to take my case to the American people.

In recent years, a reliable source that I refer to as "Ali" began providing me with detailed inside information on Iran's role in supporting terror and undermining the United States' global effort to eradicate it. I have forwarded literally hundreds of pages of information from Ali to the CIA, FBI, and DIA, as well as the appropriate congressional oversight committees. The response from our intelligence agencies has been underwhelming, to put it mildly. Worse, I have documented occasions where the CIA has outright lied to me. While the mid-level bureaucrats at Langley may not be interested in what I have to say, their new boss is. Porter Goss has all of the information I have gathered, and I know he is ready to do what it takes to challenge the circle-the-wagons culture of the CIA. And Pete Hoekstra, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is energized as well. Director Goss and Chairman Hoekstra are both outstanding leaders that know each other well from their work together in the House of Representatives, and I will continue to strongly support their efforts at reform.

All of this background leads to the reason I am writing to you today. Yesterday the national news media began in-depth coverage of a story that is not new. In fact, I have been talking about it for some time. From 1998 to 2001, Army Intelligence and Special Operations Command spearheaded an effort called Able Danger that was intended to map out al Qaeda. According to individuals that were part of the project, Able Danger identified Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat before 9/11. Team members believed that the Atta cell in Brooklyn should be subject to closer scrutiny, but somewhere along the food chain of Administration bureaucrats and lawyers, a decision was made in late 2000 against passing the information to the FBI. These details are understandably of great interest to the American people, thus the recent media frenzy. However I have spoken on this topic for some time, in the House Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, on the floor of the House on June 27, 2005, and at various speaking engagements.

The impetus for this letter is my extreme disappointment in the recent, and false, claim of the 9-11 Commission staff that the Commission was never given access to any information on Able Danger. The 9-11 Commission staff received not one but two briefings on Able Danger from former team members, yet did not pursue the matter. Furthermore, commissioners never returned calls from a defense intelligence official that had made contact with them to discuss this issue as a follow on to a previous meeting.

In retrospect, it appears that my own suggestions to the Commission might have directed investigators in the direction of Able Danger, had they been heeded. I personally reached out to members of the Commission several times with information on the need for a national collaborative capability, of which Able Danger was a prototype. In the context of those discussions, I referenced LIWA and the work it had been doing prior to 9/11. My chief of staff physically handed a package containing this information to one of the commissioners at your Commission's appearance on April 13, 2004 in the Hart Senate Office Building. I have spoken with Governor Kean by phone on this subject, and my office delivered a package with this information to the 9-11 Commission staff via courier. When the Commission briefed Congress with their findings on July 22, 2004, I asked the very first question in exasperation: "Why didn't you let Members of Congress who were involved in these issues testify before, or meet with, the Commission?"

The 9-11 Commission took a very high-profile role in critiquing intelligence agencies that refused to listen to outside information. The commissioners very publicly expressed their disapproval of agencies and departments that would not entertain ideas that did not originate in-house. Therefore it is no small irony that the Commission would in the end prove to be guilty of the very same offense when information of potentially critical importance was brought to its attention. The Commission's 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.

Questions remain to be answered. The first: What lawyers in the Department of Defense made the decision in late 2000 not to pass the information from Able Danger to the FBI? And second: Why did the 9-11 Commission staff not find it necessary to pass this information to the Commissioners, and why did the 9-11 Commission staff not request full documentation of Able Danger from the team member that volunteered the information?

Answering these questions is the work of the commissioners now, and fear of tarnishing the Commission's legacy cannot be allowed to override the truth. The American people are counting on you not to "go native" by succumbing to the very temptations your Commission was assembled to indict. In the meantime, I have shared all that I know on this topic with the congressional committee chairmen that have oversight over the Department of Defense, the CIA, the FBI, and the rest of our intelligence gathering and analyzing agencies. You can rest assured that Congress will share your interest in how it is that this critical information is only now seeing the light of day.

Sincerely,

CURT WELDON

Member of Congress

cc:

Richard Ben-Veniste

Fred F. Fielding

Jamie S. Gorelick

Slade Gorton

Bob Kerrey

John F. Lehman

Timothy J. Roemer

James R. Thompson

Dennis Hastert

Peter Hoekstra

Frank Wolf

Pat Roberts

Richard Shelby

[popdonnelly]

"bet the phone lines are burning up."

And tomorrow a number of people will be calling their Washington attorneys.

[PhiKapMom]

I have wondered all along how they got that code word information. There were suspicious happenings the night before in Florida as well.

I think we are very fortunate that the President survived all of this.

[PhiKapMom]

If I were any of this Clintonite group, I think my first call would be to a place where you can hire bodyguards! :)

[I'm ALL Right!]

They won't...know why? Hillary still has their FBI file info. That's how the Klintons keep getting away with murder (literally and figuratively.)

[Libloather]

The 9/11 Commission staff did hear about intelligence-gathering efforts that hit pay dirt on the whereabouts of Mohammed Atta -- in 1999 -- and deliberately chose to omit word of those efforts.

So - if someone was dumb enough to buy the book, can they get their money back?

[concerned about politics]

possession of secret procedures indicates terrorists may have mole in White House, or informants in Secret Service, FBI, FAA or CIA (M)

Plame