"So it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the commission ignored White's memo because it was a potential embarrassment to the woman to whom it was addressed: commission member Jamie Gorelick...."
It's not only hard to avoid, but derelict if we do!
THREE POSTS FROM http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/
Able Danger: CNN And Shaffer
CNN conducted an interview with Col. Tony Shaffer, the DIA liaison officer to the Able Danger operation who has gone public to tell what he knows about the identification of Mohammed Atta as an al-Qaeda terrorist more than a year before 9/11. TKS points out the transcript and some interesting parts of the interview. Shaffer again drives home the point, this time explicitly, that the Commission's response to the story on August 12th was at least wrong, and probably untruthful:
S. O'BRIEN: And his [Atta] name pops up?
SHAFFER: Well, yes, because terrorists live in the real world. As we recognize from the London bombings, there's a picture of the terrorist in a whitewater rafting trip. They live in the real world just like we do. They plan in the real world. ...
S. O'BRIEN: The 9/11 commissioners says they don't recall Mohamed [sic] Atta's name coming up in their discussion. They also say that his name does not appear in any of the briefings they had before they filed their report.
SHAFFER: Right.
S. O'BRIEN: Are they -- are they -- you say you've talked to them specifically with that name. Are they lying?
SHAFFER: I can't -- I can't answer that question. What I know is that their statement on the 12th of August is wrong.
I never mentioned anything about a human asset network being turned off by the (INAUDIBLE). That's one of their statements that they claim I made. I never said that.
And the other thing they say that I said was that I talked about Able Danger being a project in Afghanistan. I never said that.
So if they got those two points wrong, I don't know what else they got wrong. The only thing they got right, basically, was that -- that there was information about this network that related to the fact that they were interested in it. And they -- Mr. Zelicow's (ph) own admission, the next paragraph of their 12 August statement, says they called back immediately after talking to me, which would mean they heard something that I said which resonated.
The other thing is Mr. Zelicow (ph) himself gave me his card and asked me to contact him upon my return from the deployment. And I did contact him in January of '04. That's where I was essentially blown off.
I called him. They said they wanted to talk to me. I waited a week, called him back. And they said, "No, we don't need to talk to you now."
Shaffer also said that the Commission followed up with the wrong agency, which could explain why they never got the data or documentation Shaffer thought they would receive. The DIA did not run Able Danger directly. Shaffer provided liaison to the project, but it ran under a different command structure. Instead of the cartons of documentation they should have received, the Commission only got two briefcase-sized boxes, which Shaffer estimates amounted to less than 5% of the overall data produced by Able Danger.
Soledad O'Brien asked one other interesting question of Shaffer -- why it took him a year to come forward on Able Danger. The Commission report came out just over a year ago and clearly did not include the information he knew he provided to the staffers. Why wait?
To be totally honest with you, we believed that there may have been a classified annex [to the report]. Not being on the commission, not being -- not working at that level, I had no way of knowing. I had to believe that there must have been some reason that that information was not provided to the public, either by follow-on information -- operations of some sort that related to this or something else.
In other words, Shaffer expected that a secret codicil had been published for high-ranking government officials explaining what he had told the Commission, and presumably other sensitive data as well. It took him a while to determine that never happened, and that the final report had been considered definitive.
Clearly this leaves very little wiggle room now. We have two sources, one public and one anonymous, that both say they told Commission on two occasions about identifying Mohammed Atta as a potential AQ terrorist in the US long before 9/11. Either they lied then, are lying now, or the Commission and their staff have lied. Shaffer's determination to go public and essentially end his career in intelligence ops to tell this story at least strongly indicates a high degree of credibility on his part. The Commission's constantly changing story over the last seven days after the revelation of Able Danger demonstrates the opposite about their credibility.
UPDATE: John Podhoretz' sources vouch for Shaffer's credibility.
UPDATE II: Voice of the Taciturn knows Shaffer and also endorses his credibility:
This story about State’s late-90s assessment about al-Qaida and LTC Shaffer's revelations have knocked the lid off of a long-simmering pot of disdain I have had for people who don't have the stones to bring up issues when they have a chance to do something about it. Instead they stall and cover and obfuscate and otherwise come up with excuses not to act and nip things in the bud. Boy, wouldn't a strategy to contain or otherwise negate the efforts of UBL in the late 90s been a neat thing to have? ...
Guys like Tony Shaffer (who I am proud to say was a colleague of mine for a time) are NOT the focus of my vitriol. He did what he could without becoming a martyr for a cause no one would have heard of. Truth be told (and few shoot straighter than Tony - don't just take my word for it) he's been suffering for his acts of "near insubordination" for some time. We should all hope that if he falls on his sword now, it won't be in vain.
I have also heard from an inside source that Shaffer has worked in analysis assignments for the DIA and fully understands the information he tried to bring to the Commission. He's trustworthy and knowledgeable, which so far beats anything the Commission has going for it.
Posted by Captain Ed at 10:00 AM
Germans Uncovered Iraqi Spy Ring During 9/11 Planning
The Daily Standard has just published my latest column, which reveals to those who missed my earlier post on the arrests of two Iraqi spies in Heidelberg during February 2001. The discovery of these agents, especially given the time frame, should set off warning bells about potentially devastating connections to the 9/11 plot:
In the years following the 9/11 attacks, there has been much argument about the nature of Saddam Hussein's connections to terror. How could the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission fail to consider this, given the other activity occurring in Germany during this period:
* Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh meet in Berlin in January 2001 for a progress meeting, around the same time German counterintelligence claimed that they picked up the Iraqi trail.
* Ziad Jarrah, another of the crucial al Qaeda pilots, transits between Beirut and Florida through Germany twice during the 2000-2001 holiday season, flying back to the United States at the end of February.
* Marwan al-Shehhi disappears in Casablanca, then constructs a cover story about living in Hamburg.
In fact, the Commission report notes that three of the four al Qaeda team leaders (excepting Hani Hanjour, who had at that time just begun his pilot training) interrupted their planning to take foreign trips (page 244). Why would these men interrupt their preparations in this manner? Traveling in and out of the United States presented a risk--a manageable risk, as events proved--but having three of the four team leaders outside of their established cells at the same time looks unnecessarily foolhardy from al Qaeda's point of view. It also appears to be the only time after their first entry into the United States that this travel occurred. All three had some German connection to their trips. In fact, Jarrah left Germany the same week that the Germans captured the Iraqi agents.
The 9/11 Commission never mentions these arrests, nor the discovery of an Iraqi espionage operation involving several German cities during the same weeks that most of the 9/11 plotters traveled into or through Germany. In fact, no one has followed up on the arrests at all.
For a commission that chided two administrations about failing to connect dots, the Omission Commission appears to have left more than a few dots off the map. We need to find out whether the CIA and/or the FBI knew about this, as reported by al-Watan al-Arabi later in March, whether they gave that information to the Commission -- and if they did, why they never mention it once in their report. At best, it leaves the final report with yet another crippling gap in its credibility. At worst, it looks like someone has something to hide.
BUMP: To top, 7:30 am.
UPDATE: Austin Bay wants a presidential statement, hopefully announcing a White House inquiry into Able Danger. I agree; it would help to have George Bush in front of this issue, since I doubt Congress will do it unless forced into it.
Posted by Captain Ed at 07:30 AM
The Second White Memo
Deborah Orin and the New York Post have the second memo from Mary Jo White to the Department of Justice, urging them to reconsider the policies put in place by Janet Reno and her deputy Jamie S. Gorelick that effectively barred law enforcement and intelligence operations from sharing data and analyses. White's second missive strongly warned of dire consequences if the US blocked cooperation on national-security issues, a subject with which White had some expertise:
PRESIDENT Bill Clinton's team ignored dire warnings that its approach to terrorism was "very dangerous" and could have "deadly results," according to a blistering memo just obtained by The Post. ...
"This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities," wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.
"The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary. Excessive conservatism . . . can have deadly results."
She added: "We must face the reality that the way we are proceeding now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous."
Tragically, events proved White correct. As the 9/11 Commission pointed out both in its report and in repeated assertions during the public hearings, US intelligence and law-enforcement agencies failed to "connect the dots" and find the terrorist conspiracy. The report itself only mentions the wall a few times, mostly to underscore how "misunderstood" it was (page 271):
“Jane” sent an email to the Cole case agent explaining that according to the NSLU, the case could be opened only as an intelligence matter, and that if Mihdhar was found, only designated intelligence agents could conduct or even be present at any interview. She appears to have misunderstood the complex rules that could apply to this situation.
The FBI agent angrily responded:
Whatever has happened to this—someday someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not more effective
and throwing every resource we had at certain “problems.” Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL, is getting
the most “protection.”
“Jane” replied that she was not making up the rules; she claimed that they were in the relevant manual and “ordered by the [FISA] Court and every office of the FBI is required to follow them including FBI NY.”
It is now clear that everyone involved was confused about the rules governing the sharing and use of information gathered in intelligence channels.
Two issues are apparent in this passage. First, not everyone was "confused"; Mary Jo White had a good understanding of the consequences of the 1995 policy change. She predicted this outcome five years before it happened. Second, if the policy was indeed misunderstood, who had responsibility for implementing it correctly and ensuring that the FBI understood it properly? The Department of Justice, of which the FBI is a part, and its leadership -- Janet Reno and Jamie S. Gorelick.
Instead, Gorelick sat on the Commission and said nothing about the second White memo. Like so much other evidence -- Able Danger, the Heidelberg arrests of two Iraqi spies, the 1996 State Department warnings -- the second White memo appears nowhere in the Commission's final report. One cannot help but draw the conclusion, especially in this case, that the Commission deliberately excluded it from their report. Gorelick, at least, had firsthand knowledge of it.
Once again, the 9/11 Commission gets exposed as a dangerous cover-your-ass effort by bureaucrats who made national security an almost impossible task for operational units. Again, we ask: what else got left out of the report? And again, we expect to see another answer tomorrow, if not sooner.
Posted by Captain Ed, at 06:56 AM
