Posted on 08/11/2005 5:57:46 PM PDT by 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?
"We may be finding out now why the Berger hearing on his plea bargain was slipped until September with no real explanation. That plea bargain may have gone up in smoke or he is now ratting out the Clintons and their minions."
Totally agree and said something very similar on another thread a day or 2 ago - -I seem to recall everyone scratching their heads as to why Burglar's hearing was all of a sudden postponed.
I heard a day or 2 ago that the Commission's staff is at the Nat'l Archives looking through their notes - - sure hope there aren't any shredding machines and that there are security folks in there watching very closely as to what is going on w those files.
When President Bush first came into office, one of his trips to Florida was published on a RAT website with the exact location by intersection and time. At that point it was considered likely that there was a mole in the USSS. Now I am beginning to think the Clintons planted people in all of these agencies as moles.
Bump for later read - thanks for posting.
Read someplace that the archives now videotapes everyone that gets access to classified information as they are going through the info and their movements, etc., are monitored. Looks like Berger was good for something -- they tightened up security at the Archives.
Let's be CLEAR. Sandy Berger did not just steal papers. He returned DIFFERENT COPIES to the archives before the 9/11 Commission could review them. It doesn't take Det. Columbo to realize that he almost certainly ALTERED and created FRAUDULENT notes to replace prior notes which may have implicated him, Jamie Gorelick, and other serior members of the Clinton Administration.
This is a key distinction. For if he did in fact alter and replace documents, he can be convicted on conspiracy charges and spend the rest of his life in prison. And it also means there are most certainly other Clintonites who can be implicated as well. As it stands now under the stupid DoJ's "deal", Berger would not spend a day in jail and keep his security clearance and be able to serve in government again. Now it must be clear even to the "new tone" idiots in the White House, that Berger MUST now be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. The American people will not stand for any shady deals for the sake of Bush's bizarre romance with the Clintons.
Someone scamming Oil for Campaign...er...Food money? Hillary is on the intel committee, and Chinagate sure paid off.
Don't know how I forgot Elian -- that was another strange happening under the Clinton watch.
"My goodness, it was a freeper that found out the duplicitousness of Cindy Sheehan, for goodness sake!!!"
And, let us not forget the FReeper who outed Dandy Dan Rather's documents!
Speaking of Sandy Burglar, shouldn't he just about be done serving his 10 hours of community service by now?
BTTT
And here we are, knowing all of this information that is not being distributed by the MSM, yet we can communicate it all if we know how to put a consonant inside of parentheses. I am absolutely f****ng blown away. There is an amazing thing happening here: New York City is no longer the cultural center of the US.
Think the days of the Clintons using FBI raw data files is coming to an end. Those files were 1993 and we had a whole group elected in 1994 that were not in the House when Ms. Co-President got the files. I know it hasn't bothered Jim Inhofe -- he keeps right on attacking the Clintons and the liberals.
Plea bargain hearing was delayed until September for reasons not stated at the time.
Destruction of government property - what's the usual penalty for that?
Thanks.
What events ...
They fired everyone in the travel office and put their cronies in to pull off travelgate. My guess is they still have low lives still hanging around in places they shouldn't be. Hopefully, Bush's people are hunting them down one by one.
People who worked under Clinton said he was as paranoid as hell about everyone and everything. The guy was a bloody criminal!
Yes, and a bit of curiosity about whether there were Republican staffers who may not have been quite as "Republican" as others.
Clinton Was Warned of bin Laden Hijacking Plot
PRNewswire
Monday, July 19, 2004
NEW YORK -- In its final report due out this week, the 9-11 Commission will disclose new evidence suggesting that the hard-line Islamist clerics who now exercise near total control over Iran directed their border guards to help jihadists coming from Afghanistan.
And sometime between October 2000 and February 2001, eight to 10 of the "muscle" hijackers of the September 11 plot were among those who benefited, reports Investigative Correspondent Michael Isikoff in the July 26 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, July 19).
That conclusion -- the strongest evidence yet of a relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda -- is one of the most surprising findings to emerge in the commission's report, which also found there was no "collaborative, operational" relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda and amounts to a blistering critique of the performance of the CIA, the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and a host of other agencies, reports Isikoff.
According to a December 2001 memo buried in the files of the National Security Agency, obtained by the commission, Iranian officials instructed their border inspectors not to place Iranian or Afghan stamps in the passports of Saudi terrorists traveling from Osama bin Laden's training camps through Iran. Such "clean" passports undoubtedly would have helped the 9/11 terrorists pass into the United States without raising alarms among U.S. Customs and visa officials, sources familiar with the report tell Newsweek.
The 9-11 Commission report emphasizes there is no evidence suggesting that Iranian officials had advance knowledge of the September 11 plot. Still, the report raises new, sharper questions about whether the Bush administration was focused on the right enemy when it decided to remove Saddam Hussein.
The NSA memo adds to a large accumulation of intelligence indicating that Iran has had more suspicious ties to Al Qaeda than Iraq did. Among those who once had a base in Iran: Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, allegedly the No. 1 terrorist in Iraq today.
Warning Went to Clinton
Among the report's other new disclosures: Bill Clinton also got a strong warning that bin Laden wanted to hijack planes. On Dec. 4, 1998, Clinton was presented with a President's Daily Brief (PDB) with the eye-catching title "Bin Laden Preparing to Hijack U.S. Aircraft and other attacks," Newsweek has learned.
The PDB, which has just been declassified, was prompted by a British intelligence report that the son of the Egyptian "blind sheik" Omar Abdel- Rahman -- who had been convicted of a plot to blow up New York City landmarks -- proposed to hijack airplanes and ransom the passengers in exchange for his father's release.
Curiously, the same information turned up 20 months later, in the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB presented to President Bush, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." One White House official suggested that the existence of the earlier PDB was evidence that President Bush was never properly informed by the outgoing Clintonites about the full depth of the Qaeda threat.
"This was never briefed to us," said the official about the 1998 PDB. Clinton officials dismiss this, saying the timing of the declassification is likely an effort to blunt criticism that Bush bears primary responsibility for failing to avert 9/11.
Clinton officials say they acted aggressively, placing New York City airports on maximum alert, but no evidence ever turned up establishing that the plot was real.
The 9-11 report is destined to be picked apart by partisans seeking political ammunition against either the Clinton or Bush administrations. The report criticizes both for failing to respond to the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen in October 2000, especially in light of multiple intelligence briefings strongly pointing to Qaeda complicity.
To correct pre-9-11 intelligence failures by the CIA, the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies, the report recommends the creation of a national-intelligence director who would serve as an "intelligence czar" with budgetary authority over the entire U.S. intelligence community. But some administration and intel officials are already deriding the plan as bureaucratic box-drawing.
Grimly, what the new 9-11 report makes clear is that nearly three years into the war on terror, America is still not close to understanding the enemy, reports Isikoff. And despite recent portrayals of bin Laden as a man hunted and on the run, U.S. counterterrorism officials now say the threat today from Al Qaeda may be just as serious as in the summer of 2001.
The warnings are based on unusually high-quality intelligence emanating from the Afghanistan- Pakistan border near Waziristan, where top al Qaeda leaders are said to be hiding. "This is absolutely real," says one senior U.S. counterterrorism official. "We feel very confident that they are trying hard to attack us inside the United States before the election and that some of the operatives are already here."
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