Congress Critter Billy Bob, perhaps you can lend you fine analysis to this thread and what are the chances of a "real" investigation by Congress into this matter.
These are the salient facts regarding the intelligence collected by “Able Danger”. What remains is the also overlooked Congressional oversight of intelligence activities as delineated in EO 12333. The now defunct blue-ribbon 9/11 Commission having dropped the ball once is excused from further inquiry, and we call for a full-scale Congressional investigation which must reveal the truth of the matter to the American people. This is what we taxpayers pay them to do. It what our tax dollars paid “Able Danger” to do, and what EO-12333 signed by President Ronald Reagan in December 1981 directed them to do on our behalf
Abxolutely. We need a full congressional investigation of all matters related to intelligence about Al Queda and other matters not reported in the 9/11 Commission Report.
This is a post I made on the Net in response to an article in Time magazine:
Was Mohammed Atta Overlooked? TIME ^ | Sunday, Aug. 14, 2005 | BRIAN BENNETT, TIMOTHY J. BURGER AND DOUGLAS WALLER
Here's the Net addy for that story: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1093694,00.html
Here's my take on this story:
Here's part of the spin in this story. It says that "the Able Danger program,... involved fewer than half a dozen intelligence analysts...." Given how Able Danger was conducted, it could have been done by one computer geek and an unlimited supply of pizza and coffee.
Time does not bother to explain how Able Danger was conducted. So, I will:
The researchers in this project never had to leave their cubicles. They gathered "open source" information, meaning publicly available speeches, articles, broadcasts, from many nations and in many languages. They entered all this data into a huge computer (perhaps a Cray or a Cray clone), and asked the computer to identify and quantify all connections between data points.
The results of this were the identification of five of the hijackers (including the 20th one, who was prevented from entering the US at a Florida airport) and the identification of several cells, including one in Brooklyn and one in Hamburg (where we now know the main planning for 9/11 took place).
For anyone in the military to dismiss the value of this breakthrough analysis is as stupid as the Army Air Corps officers who court-martialed Billy Mitchell for his assertions that air power would become essential in warfare. It is as dumb as the Secretary of the Army who referred in his 1933 annual report to "the tried and proven horse."
It is impossible to tell from this Time magazine story whether the three writers had a clue of what Able Danger did, and how it did it. It is clear that they were predisposed to reject this as an important story.
Now, as to your question on whether there will be a no-holds-barred congressional hearing on this subject, that depends in part on how effectively we in the blogosphere can force the issue into the MSM. Think Rather. Think Jordan. Think Gorelick and Berger under oath and under the TV lights.
Congressman Billybob