“The 9/11 9/11 Commission” (Not a Misprint)

Enough has come out about the failure of the 9/11 Commission to include critical information about Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 attackers, to suggest a new Commission to investigate the original Commission. The cure may not be that drastic, but it is that important.

In short, a special Army intelligence operation known as “Able Danger” identified Atta and four of his accomplices, and identified Al-Qaeda cells in Hamburg and Brooklyn and elsewhere, a year before the 9/11 attacks. They offered then to share that information with law enforcement agencies including the FBI.

Those offers were cut off by Clinton Administration attorneys and based that refusal on the “wall of separation” memo written by Jamie Gorelick, then a deputy under Attorney General Janet Reno. By the time 9/11 staffers received multiple briefings on Able Danger’s findings and efforts, Ms. Gorelick had become a member of that Commission.

All details now known, and some reasonable speculation on why Ms. Gorelick wrote that memo, and why the Administration wanted to prevent prosecutors from receiving information from intelligence agencies, is well covered in an article by my colleague, Gregory Borse. His title is, “Gorelick 'MemoGate': It Just Got Worse,” and is here: http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=16201

I deal here with two aspects not addressed by Greg -- the fascinating nature of the research done by Able Danger, and the solution Congress can apply to this festering problem.

“Open Source” means using sources that are out in public. It seems like a contradiction in terms that highly secret information can be derived from documents, articles, speeches, radio and TV broadcasts made in public, in front of God and everybody, as they say hereabouts.

Imagine a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box, you don’t know how many pieces there are, the pieces are each hidden in a pile of other pieces that aren’t part of the puzzle, and the pieces are anywhere in the world and written in languages from English to German to Farsi. For a fictional (but accurate) depiction of this process, rent and review an excellent movie, “Three Days of the Condor,” starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway.

Or use this real example. Three decades ago, I attended a speech by Isaac Asimov at Johns Hopkins University. I still remember one particular aspect of Dr. Asimov’s talk. He said, “Japanese or German spies during WW II could have discovered America’s most secret scientific project, using information the federal government required to be published.”

Here is Dr. Asimov’s thinking: 1. Analog Science Fiction & Fact has gone through several changes of name and control, but has always carried articles based on sound science. (Think the accurate science of Arthur Clarke’s “2001" series, rather than the bad science of George Lucas’ “Star Wars.” There is no air in space for Ti fighters to bank against, nor to transmit any sound of exploding Death Stars or planets. But I digress.)

2. As a result, many of America’s “hard” scientists subscribe to Analog. 3. The Post Office required every magazine with a second-class mailing permit to recount, once a year, the circulation of its paid subscriptions. 4. Therefore, Analog published information showong a statistical bulge, a “rat in the snake,” a group of scientists appearing first in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and then in Los Alamos, New Mexico. 5. Since there was no new university or other private employer who hired these scientists, this had to indicate some type of government-sponsored scientific research.

So it was. This “open source” investigation, with some common sense employed, would have led a spy to the location of the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb.

Now, we turn to the solution to this 9/11 Commission problem. It is a normal duty of Congress to exercise oversight concerning all federal agencies. The Commission is/was a federal agency. Its failures concerning the Able Danger research is a very focused inquiry. Therefore, an appropriate Committee of Congress should and can convene an inquiry to get to the bottom of this problem.

How fast can Congress act? Well, it ginned up a hearing on steroid use in baseball on 30-days’ notice. It seems to me that the 9/11 failure is slightly more important than that. So start your steroid clocks now. Let’s see if Congress can get Jamie Gorelick on camera and under oath within 30 days. Let the “9/11 9/11" hearings begin.

About the Author: John Armor is a First Amendment attorney and author who lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. John_Armor@aya.yale.edu

THE AUSTRALIAN (Murdoch Newspaper, today.)

New facts back tale of brush with Atta
David Nason, New York correspondent
13aug05

NEW intelligence reports suggesting that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta arrived in the US in late 1999 or early 2000 - six months earlier than previously thought - are likely to spark a reassessment of public servant Johnelle Bryant's incredible story of a face-to-face meeting with the terrorist.

In an extraordinary 2002 interview later branded a hoax by some media -- including the ABC's Media Watch -- Ms Bryant claimed to have met Atta in late April or early May of 2000 when she worked as a loan officer with the US Department of Agriculture's farm services agency in Florida.
Ms Bryant, who was medically retired from the department last year, said Atta had tried to apply for a $US650,000 US government loan to buy a six-seat, twin-engine aircraft that he wanted to convert to a crop duster.

In her interview with the US's ABC network, Ms Bryant told how Atta became angry when told he was ineligible for the loan and how he became fixated with an aerial photo of Washington DC hanging on her office wall.

When told the picture was not for sale, Ms Bryant said Atta became "very bitter".

"I believe he said: 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it'."

But despite some independent support for her claims, Ms Bryant's account was dismissed as a fake on the grounds that Atta did not get a visa to enter the US until May 18, 2000, and did not arrive until June 3 that year on a flight from Prague that landed at New Jersey's Newark airport.

Her claims were ignored in last year's 9/11 commission report on the events leading up to the terrorist attacks. The commission accepted the advice of US immigration authorities that Atta did not arrive until June 2000.

But revelations that a military intelligence unit known as Able Danger believed Atta had actually arrived in the US in late 1999, or at the latest very early in 2000, have lent new credibility to Ms Bryant's claims, while at the same time raising questions about the exchange of intelligence between US security agencies.

Investigations are now under way into what was done before September 11, 2001, about Able Danger's identification of Atta and three of the other future hijackers as members of an al-Qa'ida cell operating in the US and why the 9/11 commission also chose to ignore the unit's intelligence findings.

Republican congressman Curt Weldon has accused the commission of ignoring material that would have forced a rewriting of the September 11 events.

Spokesman Al Felzenberg admitted this week the commission had been sceptical when an Able Danger officer briefed it in July last year and said Atta had been in the US in late 1999 or early 2000. The investigators knew this was impossible, Mr Felzenberg said, since travel records confirmed he had not entered until June 2000.

"The information that (the officer) provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing," he said. "There was no way that Atta could have been in the US at that time."

But British columnist Mark Steyn, who wrote an opinion article for The Australian last month describing Ms Bryant's meeting with Atta as "the defining encounter of the age", claims US immigration did not keep then -- and still does not keep now -- reliable and comprehensive records of entry by foreigners.

"It (US immigration) cannot authoritatively state the date of Atta's first visit to the US," Steyn said. "If you choose to believe June 3, 2000, as the definitive date of his first visit, that's basically an act of faith. There were a number of sightings of Atta in the US before that time, in Florida and elsewhere."

In his column Steyn attacked Ms Bryant for failing to realise the danger Atta represented because of political correctness.

"She knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one," he wrote.

In her interview, Ms Bryant said Atta had threatened to cut her throat and initially didn't want to deal with her because she was a woman.

But she said: "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from. I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation to our country as easy for him as I could."

Ms Bryant recognised Atta from a newspaper photograph after the 9/11 attacks and defied Agriculture Department orders in telling her story to the media.

"The American people, the public, need to be aware that if these men can walk into my office, they can walk into your office, they can walk into anyone's office," she said.

Ms Bryant could not be reached for comment this week but Bob Epling, president of Community Bank of Florida, which let office space to the agency Ms Bryant worked for, said he had no doubt Atta visited the premises.

He said Ms Bryant had referred Atta to the "agriculture-friendly" CBF. "Atta was 15 steps away from walking into our loan department and making an application," Mr Epling said yesterday. "He chose not to."

privacy terms © The Australian

'“In April [2004], CNSNews.com staff writer Scott Wheeler reported that a senior U.S. government official and three other sources claimed that the 1995 memo written by Jamie Gorelick, . . . created ‘a roadblock’ to the investigation of illegal Chinese donations to the Democratic National Committee. But the picture is much bigger than that. The Gorelick memo, which blocked intelligence agents from sharing information that could have halted the September 11 hijacking plot, was only the mortar in a much larger maze of bureaucratic walls whose creation Gorelick personally oversaw.”

That maze includes FBI and CIA investigations into the leaking and/or theft of sensitive missile and nuclear information to the Chinese even as illegal donations to the Democratic National Committee were being traced to Bill Clinton’s old Arkansas friend, Johnny Chung. The bureaucratic nightmare created by PDD 24 effectively stalled these investigations until safely after the 1996 Presidential Election, and led to, among others, Wen Ho Lee and the Los Alamos National Laboratory espionage case. As Mary Jo White wrote in her letter of protest regarding the Gorelick directive, PDD 24’s “instructions leave entirely to OIPR [Office of Intelligence and Policy Review] and the (Justice Department) Criminal Division when, if ever, to contact affected U.S. attorneys on investigations including terrorism and espionage.” And whom did Clinton appoint to head up the OIPR? An old friend of Janet Reno’s from Florida, Richard Scruggs. So, as FrontPageMag pointed out, “for the first time in the history of the Justice Department,” a political appointee was “put in charge of the Office of Intelligence and Policy Review (OIPR). OIPR is the Justice Department agency in charge of requesting wiretap and surveillance authority for criminal and intelligence investigations on behalf of investigative agencies from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court.”'

from:
http://www.chronwatch.com/content/contentDisplay.asp?aid=16201

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