Posted on 08/14/2005 4:32:45 PM PDT by Forgiven_Sinner
If you want to know everything wrong with the 9/11 Commission in a single sound bite, consider this from Al Felzenberg, its official spokesman, speaking Wednesday:
''There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report. This information was not meshing with the other information that we had.''
In fairness to Felzenberg, he was having a bad week, and a hard time staying on top of the commission's ever-shifting version of events. It emerged that the U.S. military had fingered Mohammed Atta -- the guy who plowed Flight 11 into the first World Trade Center tower -- well over a year before before 9/11. Or as the Associated Press puts it:
"A classified military intelligence unit called 'Able Danger' identified Atta and three other hijackers in 1999 as potential members of a terrorist cell in New York City."
At first, the commission denied that it knew anything about "Able Danger": "The Sept. 11 Commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," insisted Lee Hamilton, the Democratic co-chair. "Had we learned of it, obviously, it would've been a major focus of our investigation."
But within 48 hours this version was non-operative. As the AP subsequently reported: "The Sept. 11 Commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday."
So, far from being a "major focus" that they just happened to miss -- coulda happened to anyone -- it turns out they knew about it but "decided not to include" it.
How'd that happen? Well, as Felzenberg says so disarmingly, "this information was not meshing with the other information.'' As a glimpse into the mindset of the commission, that's astonishing. Sept. 11 happened, in part, because the various federal bureaucracies involved were unable to process information that didn't "mesh" with conventional wisdom. Now we find that the official commission intended to identify those problems and ensure they don't recur is, in fact, guilty of the very same fatal flaw. The new information didn't "mesh" with the old information, so they disregarded it.
But, hey, let's not have a philosophical discussion, let's keep it practical: There was "no way" that Atta could have been in the United States except when the official INS record says he was? No INS paper trail, "no way" he could have got in?
Here's one way just for a start. Forget the southern border, insofar as there is such a thing. Fact: On America's northern border, no record is kept of individual visitors to the United States. All that happens is that a photo scanner snaps your rear license plate. The scanner is said to be state-of-the-art, which is to say, as one Customs & Border official told me, it's "officially" 75 percent accurate. On the one occasion my own license plate was queried, it turned out the scanner had misread it. So, just for a start, without any particular difficulty, a friend of Mohammed Atta could have rented a car for him in Montreal and driven him down to New York -- and there would be never be any record to connect him to the vehicle anywhere in the United States or Canada.
Would al-Qaida types have such contacts in Montreal? Absolutely. The city's a hotbed of Islamist cells and sympathizers.
Fact: The only Islamist terrorist attack prevented by the U.S. government in the period before 9/11 was the attempt to blow up LAX by Ahmed Ressam, a Montrealer caught on the Washington/British Columbia frontier by an alert official who happened to notice he seemed to be a little sweaty. A different guard, a cooler Islamist, and it might just have been yet another routine unrecorded border crossing.
So, when the 9/11 Commission starts saying that there's "no way" something can happen when it happens every single day of the week, you start to wonder what exactly is the point of an official investigation so locked in to pre-set conclusions.
For example, they seemed oddly determined to fix June 3, 2000, as the official date of Atta's first landing on American soil -- even though there were several alleged sightings of him before that date, including a bizarre story that he'd trained at Maxwell/Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. Atta was a very mobile guy in the years before 9/11, shuttling between Germany, Spain, Afghanistan, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the Philippines with effortless ease. I've no hard evidence of where he was in, say, April 2000. The period between late 1999 and May 2000 is, in many ways, a big blur. He might have been in Germany, he might have been in Florida, attempting to get a U.S. Farm Service Agency loan for the world's biggest cropduster, as reported by USDA official Johnell Bryant.
But I do know it's absurd to suggest he was never in the United States until June 3, 2000, simply because that's what the INS says -- especially when U.S. military intelligence says something quite different.
Sept. 11 was a total government fiasco: CIA, FBI, INS, FAA, all the hot shot acronyms failed spectacularly. But appoint an official commission and let them issue an official report and suddenly everyone says, oh, well, this is the official version of 9/11; if they say something didn't happen, it can't possibly have happened.
Readers may recall that I never cared for the commission. There were too many showboating partisan hacks -- Richard ben Veniste, Bob Kerrey -- who seemed more interested in playing to the rhythms of election season. There was at least one person with an outrageous conflict of interest: Clinton Justice Department honcho Jamie Gorelick, who shouldn't have been on the commission but instead a key witness appearing in front of it. And there were far too many areas where the members appeared to be interested only in facts that supported a predetermined outcome.
Maybe we need a 9/11 Commission Commission to investigate the 9/11 Commission. A body intended to reassure Americans that the lessons of that terrible day had been learned instead engaged in what at best was transparent politicking and collusion in posterior-covering and at worst was something a whole lot darker and more disturbing.
The problem pre-9/11 was always political: that's to say, no matter how savvy individual operatives in various agencies may have been, the political culture of the day meant that nothing would happen except a memo would get typed up and shoveled into a filing cabinet. Together with other never fully explained episodes -- like Sandy Berger's pants-stuffing at the national archives -- the Able Danger story makes one thing plain: The problem is still political.
Jamie Gorelick MUST be questioned UNDER OATH!
It is Clinton's turn.
Maybe Hillary is engaged in damage control within the Senate for her husband's legacy.
WHO are Colon and Wiriadnata?
You signed up just today to tell us you think the Bush administration needs to be investigated? Get lost.
Hillary is there to road block any finger pointing to Slick.
She protected him with his girl friends. Why not help him and Sandy Berger get off the hook?
Both are wanted on outstanding criminal warrants.
Charlie opened up a kosher fish Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood for several years ~ just like the one he'd had in Little Rock.
This is one thing that's never been pursued ~ did the crowd based in Indonesia have an entre to AlQaida intrigue?
The FBI has all the information it needs to check out where all these people lived ~ although, as usual, it hasn't occurred to anyone over there to notice they all lived in the same neighborhood during a very critical period of time ~ namely the two years when AlQaida was developing its attack on the WTC!
THere's an AlQaida agent in FBI that frustrates such basic research. Most likely it's some woman who was sleeping with these guys.
I have a suggestion. We need a new 9/11 commision and it should really be bi-partisan. I suggest they take volunteers who must have a decent IQ and have never held elective office or worked for the Federal Government. I think there are a lot of Freepers who would qualify but I don't know that they'd be able to fill the quota on the Dim side.
The 9-11 omission from the commies on the commission and their pompous non-admission, leads to one conclusion...they were part of the collusion meant to perpetuate this illusion called the 9-11 Commission.
"This story will not go away. The issue is, will President Bush set Atty Gen. Ashcroft on Jaime Gorelick, to investigate her for treason?"
Probably not. But he may sic Attorney General Gonzalez on Groelick.
Communist MO. IF there is no paper, no communication, or chaos, there is no crime nor possibility that crime occured.
Communist MO. IF there is no paper, no communication, or chaos, there is no crime nor possibility that crime occured.
The MSN, by keeping silence hopes to make this revelation go away.
Just wait till the first book comes out and these MSM secretive agents, pardon journalists, will turn into experts to discredit the writer.
There's a concern about the non-response from the Bush administration re Able Danger. I think they are strategizing and just waiting on the sidelines for the 9/11 panel to self-destruct in front of the American people
and then they'll go in.
What has always given me pause is former SECNAV Lehman on the commission. Was he there for window dressing, or what?
bump for later read
"What has always given me pause is former SECNAV Lehman on the commission. Was he there for window dressing, or what?"
don't know...don't care...
as soon as I heard Gorelick was on the 9/11 commission, I didn't give it another thought...more taxpayer's dollars flushed down the toilet!
Kind of like having Al Capone on the Banking Commission. LMAO
Agreed. It really pissed me off to see her questioning Rice and Ashcroft the way she did, when SHE should have been getting grilled in the hot seat.
yet, Americans elect morons like Richardson to governorships and crooks like Clinton to the Senate...and slap criminals like Fat Sandy Burglar with a fine and a misdemeanor for stealing and destroying classified documents.
you figure it out!
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