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
1) Following the Waco debacle, Clinton was unnerved about revelations detailing coordination between US military (under Wesley Clark's command?) and domestic Ops. Thus he ordered Gorelick (a Hillary hire) to create the intelligence "wall".
2) Even prior to Waco, Clinton ordered Gorelick to create the intelligence "wall" in order to obfuscate potential investigation into his "Chinagate" dealings.
It sure seems as though the 9-11 Commission had been manipulated so as to steer far clear of "the wall" -- which is probably the most significant root cause of our lack of successfully preventing the 9-11 attack. Therefore, the Democrats installed Gorelick on the committee and Berger purged national archive files as necessary to hide their culpability. Given the the public already perceives the democrats as weak on national security, such a revelation would practically cripple them (especially had it been revealed during the 2004 election year.
Do you think either of these theories is likely?
PS: I got a laugh from ex-SOD Cohen's interview on the Sunday talk circuit today, where he ended up pleading the "Sergeant Shultz" defense to Able Danger and their findings. A man of his stature should have done much better than "I don't recall...".