Here's another one that has been entirely ignored by the 9/11 Commission and the MSM, as far as I can tell -- there's less and less reason to believe that the 9/11 Commission was anything but a whitewash for the political convenience of both parties. I think the Democrats were desperate to divert attention from the Clinton years, and the Rs on the commission generally obliged in order to try to minimize the bloodbath over the ridiculous Richard Clarke stuff, etc.:
Another Detail The 9/11 Commission Seems To Have Missed
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/005200.php#comments ....[excerpt of Captain Quarters Blog thread, there's lots more stuff there]:
The most serious report contained information that Iraq and Osama bin Ladin were working together. German authorities were surprised by the arrest of the two Iraqi agents and the discovery of Iraqi intelligence activities in several German cities. German authorities, acting on CIA recommendations, had been focused on monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin. They discovered the two Iraqi agents by chance and uncovered what they considered to be serious indications of cooperation between Iraq and bin Ladin. The matter was considered so important that a special team of CIA and FBI agents was sent to Germany to interrogate the two Iraqi spies.
Not one word of this gets addressed in the final Commission report, as far as I can tell. The report contains thirty-one references to arrests, most of them for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Zacarias Moussaoui, but none of them mention any German arrests of Iraqi spies in Germany for March 2001. It isn't as if the 9/11 Commission considered Al-Watan al-Arabi an unreliable source, either; they used it as a reference for an editorial by Saudi Prince Bandar.
The CIA apparently knew something about this; why didn't it come out during the hearings? This looks like a very strange coincidence, that the Germans found such an extensive Iraqi espionage ring within their borders at the same time that al-Qaeda planned its largest and most complicated attack on Western interests ever. That attack required extraordinary coordination and planning, with a large amount of resourcing. The attacks before and since have all been suicide or hit-and-run affairs, on a much smaller scale and with much more modest ambitions.
This information was published contemporaneously in March 2001 and was in the public domain. If anyone brought it to the Commission's attention, no evidence of it exists in the report. Presumably, such public information would have been addressed in the report even if it turned out to be mistaken had anyone bothered to look at it -- or if the Commission could explain it away in favor of their "no operational connection" analysis between Iraq and 9/11.
In March 2001, the CIA suspected that the Iraqis had allied themselves with Islamist extremists to carry out attacks on American interests, and as a result the Germans discovered exactly that -- right where the planning for 9/11 took place. Did this information get the Able Danger treatment as well? (h/t: CQ reader Tom M.)
Addendum: It's worth noting that syndicated columnist Amir Taheri considered Al-Watan Al-Arabi to be a pro-Saddam weekly.
Don't you think this will eventually become a MAJOR issue.
If you think this through to its natural ending, it sounds like Able Danger had nailed the main al-qaeda cell which carried out 9/11 and were PREVENTED from picking them up or sharing the intel.
9/11 could have been stopped easily.
This is not the result of a screw-up or someone failing to connect the dots, but an amazingly bad error in policy.
9/11 could have been stopped.
Shouldn't this have been the main finding of the 9/11 Commission. The issue is not just why wasn't it mentioned in the report but why wasn't it the key finding.