Posted on 08/14/2005 6:10:27 PM PDT by Stellar Dendrite
WE MAY OWE THEM A BIG APOLOGY [John Podhoretz] A day or two ago, I posted a note of caution about the Able Danger scandal, and that note of caution has now turned into a full-fledged symphony -- and some of us on the Right who have been making a big stink about this may have been had.
The 9/11 Commission has put out a very detailed memo defending itself that basically says Rep. Curt Weldon and the unnamed Navy officers who have made a big stink about Able Danger are stretching it bigtime. The basis of their charge is two-fold:
First, that 9/11 staffers met with folks in Afghanistan in 2003 who told them about Able Danger and that Mohammed Atta had been identified by that military-intelligence operation. Here's what the commission says: "As with their other meetings, Commission staff promptly prepared a memorandum for the record. That memorandum, prepared at the time, does not record any mention of Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers, or any suggestion that their identities were known to anyone at DOD before 9/11. Nor do any of the three Commission staffers who participated in the interview, or the executive branch lawyer, recall hearing any such allegation."
What's more, in February 2004, commission staff members read Able Danger documents at the Pentagon: "None of the documents turned over to the Commission mention Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers. Nor do any of the staff notes on documents reviewed in the DOD reading room indicate that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers were mentioned in any of those documents."
That's about as strong a denial as there can be, and it sounds credible to me.
The second part of the charge is that in July 2004, the Commission met with the unnamed Naval officer. Here's its description of what happened: " In early July 2004...the prospective witness was claiming that the project had linked Atta to an al Qaeda cell located in New York in the 1999-2000 time frame. Shortly after receiving this information, the Commission staff’s front office assigned two staff members with knowledge of the 9/11 plot and the ABLE DANGER operation to interview the witness at one of the Commission’s Washington, D.C. offices....
"According to the memorandum for the record on this meeting, prepared the next day..., the officer said that ABLE DANGER included work on 'link analysis,' mapping links among various people involved in terrorist networks. According to this record, the officer recalled seeing the name and photo of Mohamed Atta on an 'analyst notebook chart'....The officer being interviewed said he saw this material only briefly, that the relevant material dated from February through April 2000, and that it showed Mohamed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn."
We now know that there were 60-odd names on that chart. Is it really plausible that this Navy officer specifically recalled the name "Mohammed Atta" and the image of his face? Especially since there is no documentary record to support his charge in Defense Department files, at least not in the files shown to the 9/11 Commission?
I submit there is good reason to believe the Navy officer may have been extrapolating because he was so upset to discover that the "data mining" operation he found out about wasn't being properly shared with domestic law-enforcement agencies. And without more proof than a four-year-old memory that may have been faulty, the Commission was right to be skeptical about the value of this testimony.
As for Curt Weldon, remember that he's trying to sell a book. It's now up to him to put up or shut up. Can he or anyone else supply evidence stronger than the evidence presented to date about this that the Pentagon was in possession of Mohammed Atta's name a year before the attacks? I doubt he can or he would have already.
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WHAT HATH CURT WELDON WROUGHT? [John Podhoretz] From tomorrow's Time Magazine about Rep. Curt Weldon and his Able Danger claims, which arose out of a soon-to-be-published book: "In a particularly dramatic scene in Weldon’s book, Countdown to Terror, the Pennsylvania Republican described personally handing to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley, just after Sept. 11, an Able Danger chart produced in 1999 identifying Atta. But Weldon told TIME he’s no longer certain Atta’s name was on that original document. The congressman says he handed Hadley his only copy. Still, last week he referred reporters to a recently reconstructed version of the chart in his office where, among dozens of names and photos of terrorists from around the world, there was a color mug shot of Mohammad Atta, circled in black marker."
If Time's account is accurate, Weldon has done something very, very bad with this whole story -- something either knowingly dishonest, unknowingly crazy, or foolishly naive -- and he should be held accountable for it. Posted at 02:40 PM
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THE RECORD SHOWS I'M NO FAN OF THE 9/11 COMMISSION... [John Podhoretz] ...in fact, I've written innumerable columns and scores of thousands of words against it, some of them in this space. The commission was intellectually corrupt and corrupted. But Andy, consider this: The commission hears, in July 2004, from a guy who says that four years earlier he saw, on a chart with 60 other people on it, the face and name of Mohammed Atta. He has no proof of this, and the commission itself examined documents at the Pentagon months earlier from the same operation and found nothing there. With nothing else to go on, this isn't even worthy of a footnote. It's just blather and palaver, and let's be honest here -- would you have remembered a specific name like "Mohammed Atta" from a list of 60 names in 2000? We didn't know it was 60 names when this first came out. Weldon and the Naval officer guy made it sound like there were only five names.
Now, as my earlier item on Time magazine noted, Weldon is backing off his contention in his book that he had given the Bush NSC a chart with Atta's name on it just after the attacks in 2001.
None of this passes the smell test. And an apology is due the 9/11 Commission staff at the very least, I think, because some of us were in effect contending that they were sloppy or dishonest or covering something up. Sounds like they were being professional to me.
Boy did you nail him perfectly. I could not think of any other words that could describe the creep better.
Good observation. He does seem a bit touchy when someone dares debate him or merely point out a point not made as perfectly as he might have thought. But there is no one pundit I rely on regularly for this same reason, they ALL have blind spots.
"..She says--quite rightly--Weldon has the burden of coming forth with his evidence, but notes the Commission's ever changing response calls its credibility into question."
Excerpt: "...There was a wall there. But, folks, this will drive you nuts if you spend too much time on this. This is clearly leftist spin. They are trying to cover their own rear ends, and don't be affected by the spin. It's clear information was available; it's clear there was a wall that prevented the transferring of this information anywhere. The question is why. And we've now learned, by the way, that the information was not gleaned as a result of an investigation, a criminal investigation. There was no proscription, prohibition on sharing this information as a result. It came from mining technical data, a bunch of guys sitting around reading words. They were free to pass it on to anybody. They were told to shelve it. This was the Clinton administration Pentagon, the Clinton administration National Security Council. Why didn't they want to know?"
Why Didn't They Want To Know?
August 12, 2005
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Roger in New Fallujah, Michigan, welcome to the program. Great to have you with us.
CALLER: Thank you, sir. Thank you very much. It's an incredible honor to speak to you. I've been a devoted follower since Gore tried to steal the election in 2000.
RUSH: Thank you, sir.
CALLER: I do have a comment about Jamie Gorelick. I think it's a little odd that the one key player in this whole fiasco is actually assigned to the commission to investigate all this.
RUSH: Yeees.
CALLER: I mean, what better place to hide somebody than in plain sight.
RUSH: Exactly right. And remember, the Democrats in Congress got to choose the Democrats on the committee; the Republicans in Congress got to choose the Republicans. And, uh, I take it you don't think it's a coincidence that Ms. Gorelick is on this commission?
CALLER: I think it's an incredible coincidence, you know, that she magically shows up on this commission. What better way to protect her, what better way to shield her because eventually the truth will come out like it has and now they can say, well, wait a minute you can't question her, why, she's on the very commission.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: And it protects those who appointed her. And I think they knew in advance that she was guilty, and I think every death as a result, including the 3,000 people in the World Trade Center, should be attributed to them for accessory to murder. They should all be charged.
RUSH: I think that there's no question that they put her on this commission in order to help hide this wall business. Because by virtue of having her on the commission, the commission says, "Why, we're not going to attack one of our own, why, we're an independently construed and constructed commission. Why, who do you think we are? We're not going to go after one of our own," blah, blah, blah. And so you're right, she does get a measure of protection. Speaking of all this, you mentioned the 3,000 people dead in the World Trade Center. I'm just looking here, ladies and gentlemen, at the sound bite roster. Mike, grab cuts 15 and 16. Last night on television we had Kristen Breitweiser who is one of the leaders of the Jersey Girls. She lost her husband on 9/11. And she was one of the group applauding every time the Bush administration took a hit during the 9/11 Commission hearings. So people are bringing her back in light of this story. And her answers to questions are quite telling in that she's still seeking an opportunity to blame all this on Bush. Her points are roughly that, "Well, hey, you know, these members of Able Danger, why, they didn't turn the information over, and they're still there, and Bush promoted them, Bush should be fired." She claims she's not partisan at the same time. So that doesn't hold a whole lot of credibility for me.
So we've got two sound bites here with Hardball last night with David Gregory. He's talking to Kristin Breitweiser and Roger Cressey. Cressey was the director, excuse me, of Transnational Threats on the National Security Council staff, and David Gregory says, "Roger, given how thorough the 9/11 Commission was on both sides of the aisle there's certainly agreement on that that they were right to be cautious about this; if they had other intelligence, other information, didn't square with something as simple is where Atta was that period of time, that may have been sourced back to Able Danger…" That question is just absurd. Talking about taking up the cause of the commission. Mr. Gregory, you ought to be ashamed to call yourself a journalist. You're just helping to spread the agenda. "Oh, yeah, very credible, they never did anything, they were right to reject all this." They were dead wrong to reject all this, especially having heard information about it twice. Anyway here's Cressey's answer.
CRESSEY: The 9/11 Commission report is the definitive report on what happened. So they had to be careful that whatever they put in there was sourced, was corroborated, and they weren't taking individual strands of data. David, some of what's coming out of Capitol Hill right now is, frankly, a load crap and we need to get down to square it to the bottom truth here and not jump to conclusions, and more importantly, David, put this episode in the context of other examples where there was a lack of information sharing because there were far more significant ones in the course of the 9/11 Commission report that's been documented than this one right now.
RUSH: I'd like to show Mr. Cressey the memos and letters from Mary Jo White, 1995, to Gorelick and Reno saying, "This wall is hurting us, we cannot share information here." Now, folks, this guy is in pure, unadulterated spin control because he's probably been nabbed a little bit in this himself, calling all this a load of crap. What's a load of crap is that report that the 9/11 Commission put out. They didn't do the job. Here was a committee that was put together to connect the dots, and it couldn't even connect its own dots. And scant attention was paid to the wall in the first place. So then, Breitweiser shoots back at Cressey with this.
BREITWEISER: If I could just jump in for a second. I particularly would like to ask Roger directly if he had known about this operation, clearly he and Richard Clarke were in a position at the time that this operation would have been put in place to know of such a thing, and Roger, I'm just wondering, did you know of this?
CRESSEY: No, not at all, this was not shared with the National Security Council staff. And Kristin, let me say that if this information is correct, the central issue is why was it not shared with the counterterrorism policy community.
RUSH: We know why it wasn't shared and that was because the defense intelligence people at Able Danger were told they didn't have the legal right to share it. We know why it wasn't shared. The Clinton administration didn't want to know this kind of stuff. We know why it wasn't shared because there was a wall that prevented it from being shared. Cressey follows up with this.
CRESSEY: If this was an internal DOD effort and it was being done by SOCOM then it would be up to the Pentagon itself to determine what came into the policy making realm. And if this is accurate, then that's a case where it wasn't shared.
RUSH: Yeah, well why? Now, Breitweiser and Cressey sound like they've arranged their appearance here, rehearsed it, if you will. "Roger, did you know anything about this?"
"No, I didn't know anything about it, and I'll tell you this, nobody shared it with the National Security Council." Of course they didn't share it with the National Security Council staff. There was a wall there. But, folks, this will drive you nuts if you spend too much time on this. This is clearly leftist spin. They are trying to cover their own rear ends, and don't be affected by the spin. It's clear information was available; it's clear there was a wall that prevented the transferring of this information anywhere. The question is why. And we've now learned, by the way, that the information was not gleaned as a result of an investigation, a criminal investigation. There was no proscription, prohibition on sharing this information as a result. It came from mining technical data, a bunch of guys sitting around reading words. They were free to pass it on to anybody. They were told to shelve it. This was the Clinton administration Pentagon, the Clinton administration National Security Council. Why didn't they want to know?
END TRANSCRIPT
Read the Article...
(Washington Post: September 11th Panel Explores Allegations About Atta)
(AP: 9/11 Panel Decided to Omit a Reference to Atta)
(Deborah Orin: Commission Cover-Up?)
(F. Lee Levin: Millennial Mistake -- Jamie Gorelick’s dangerous “wall of separation”)
(MRC: Media Rally for Anti-War-Protesting Mom)
(Ledeen: What would James Jesus Angleton think about “Able Danger”?)
(Byron York: Cindy Sheehan worries about a U.S. “fascist state.”)
(TAS: Crocodile Tears: Outrageous Cindy Sheehan)
(New York Sun: Atta Report Hints Solons May Have Acted Too Quickly)
" He is a Mccain loving PUTZ,"
That says it all!!
http://curtweldon.house.gov/Biography/
Congressman Curt Weldon represents the Seventh Congressional District of Pennsylvania. Currently serving his tenth term, Congressman Weldon is the most senior Republican in the Pennsylvania Delegation. A Member of the House of Representatives since 1987, Weldon has taken leadership roles on a wide variety of issues, ranging from national security to the environment.
A senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, Weldon served six years as the Chairman of the Military Research and Development Subcommittee, overseeing the development and testing of key military systems, weapons programs, and technologies that fulfill military needs. Weldon has used that position to become the leading House supporter of a national missile defense to protect America's families and communities. Weldon now serves as the Vice Chairman of the full Committee as well as Chairman of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee. His role will ensure that our service men and women are adequately prepared for duty in the high-tech world of the 21st century.
Weldon, a major in Russian Studies, has made improving relations with Russia one of his major efforts in the House. He has worked with Russian leaders on a variety of issues, including efforts to improve Russia's energy supply, correct environmental damage, and protect both nations from ballistic missile attack. Weldon is the co-founder of the Duma-Congress Study Group, the official parliamentary exchange between the two legislative bodies. This bilateral relationship coordinates legislative efforts in the Russian Duma and the Congress to foster a better working relationship between the two nations. Recently, Congressman Weldon created a comprehensive framework designed to improve the state of relations between the two countries. Titled “A New Time, A New Beginning,” his proposal makes recommendations for cooperative efforts in eleven different areas ranging from defense and national security to space exploration and scientific research.
As a member of the Science Committee, Weldon is one of the most outspoken advocates for the environment and protection of our oceans. Weldon's "Oceans Agenda" legislation passed the Congress in 1995, increasing funding for oceanographic research projects. Weldon is a champion of environmental concerns as the only House Republican on the Migratory Bird Conservation Commission which approves funding for our wildlife refuges and wetlands preservation. Congressman Weldon is a member of Global Legislators for a Balanced Environment (GLOBE) where he serves as Honorary Chairman of the Oceans Protection Task Force. Weldon also serves as the honorary United States Vice President on the Advisory Committee on the Protection of the Sea (ACOPS).
Born and raised in a blue-collar family, Weldon understands the issues that affect America's working men and women. In Congress, Weldon has been a tireless advocate of issues important to working class families. He co-authored the Family Medical Leave Act, pushed for the extension of unemployment benefits, has consistently supported raising the minimum wage, opposed the North American Free Trade Agreement and voted for historic across-the-board tax cuts.
Weldon was born in Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania on July 22, 1947, and is the youngest of nine children. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from West Chester University in 1969.
Prior to becoming a Member of Congress, Weldon worked as an educator at local schools in Delaware County and volunteered as a firefighter in Marcus Hook. As mayor of the Marcus Hook Borough, in which he was nominated twice on both Republican and Democratic ballots, Weldon led the fight to revive the small town that was home to the violent and destructive Pagan motorcycle gang. Utilizing his teaching and public safety skills, Weldon moved on to serve as the Director of Training and Manpower Development for a large corporation.
Prior to the terrorist attacks on America, Congressman Weldon was an outspoken advocate of bolstering defenses, assisting first responders, and improving intelligence gathering capabilities. As Vice Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee and founder of the Homeland Security Caucus, Congressman Weldon is a frequent keynote speaker at various defense and national security conferences across the country. He is a regular guest on national news and television programs, is the author of letters and opinion papers for various news sources, and teaches advanced courses at local colleges and universities.
Married in 1975, Weldon resides with his wife Mary Gallagher Weldon and their five children in Thornbury Township, Pennsylvania.
How could someone reasonably be against a complete investigation of the "wall" issue? (The key word is reasonably.)
Anyone who would suggest that the 9/11 Commission deserves an apology, you got to wonder about that person too.
If the whole Able Danger thing is an elaborate rat hoax, it would be a hoax to head something off because the 9/11 commission happened a long time ago, it was history...unless there was fear of something that might hurt its credibility coming up in the near future.
"The New York Times on Al Felzenberg, Aug 9: Al Felzenberg, who served as the commission's chief spokesman, said earlier this week that staff members who were briefed about Able Danger at a first meeting, in October 2003, did not remember hearing anything about Mr. Atta or an American terrorist cell. On Wednesday, however, Mr. Felzenberg said the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members in July 2004 had indeed mentioned Mr. Atta."
Source:
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/
Able Danger: Commission Response Doesn't Add Up
Bottom line: For the memory of 3000+ citizens who perished on Sept 11, 2001, either Weldon ought to go to jail for being so wrong or Clinton and Gorelick ought to be behind bars!
Pick one.......But this time let's have an honest investigation?
Makes sense. Maybe it's time to wait and see what happens next.
John Podhoretz wrote the above around 5:00; this is what he's written since then:
THE 9/11 COMMISSION IN MORTAL DANGER [John Podhoretz]
It behaved disgracefully and in a nakedly partisan fashion, with former officials of the Clinton administration attempting to use the platform to damage the president's reelection chances. Then, after months of ludicrous conduct, out of nowhere came the brilliantly conceived and written report that set a new standard of eloquence and coherence for government documents, became a major bestseller and redeemed the commission's reputation.
Well, that didn't last long.
In a story filed at 7:10 PM, the Associated Press is now confirming all the particulars of what will now forever be called the Able Danger disaster. The 9/11 Commission staff did hear about intelligence-gathering efforts that hit pay dirt on the whereabouts of Mohammed Atta -- in 1999 -- and deliberately chose to omit word of those efforts.
And why? Because to do so might upset the timeline the Commission had established on Atta.
And why is that significant? Because the Mohammed Atta timeline established by the Commission pointedly insisted Atta did not meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.
And why is that significant? Because debunking the Atta-Iraq connection was of vital importance to Democrats, who had become focused almost obsessively on the preposterous notion that there was no relation whatever between Al Qaeda and Iraq -- that Al Qaeda and Iraq might even have been enemies.
I was very skeptical of this Able Danger stuff about Atta, thought it was just sme way Rep. Curt Weldon was trying to sell a book. No longer. This is clearly becoming the biggest story of the summer -- the fact that, as Andy McCarthy alluded to, the "intelligence wall" set up by 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick when she was in the Justice Department did, in fact, cause the linchpin of the 9/11 attacks to evade capture by American law enforcement.
So was the staff a) protecting the Atta timeline or b) Jamie Gorelick or c) the Clinton administration or d) itself, because it got hold of the information relatively late and the staff was lazy?
More important, what will co-chairmen Tom (pound his fist on the table) Kean and Lee (look sorrowful) Hamilton do and say in the next 36 hours about this calamity?
Posted at 08:07 PM
Peach, that was from Thursday night. The posts I added were from today.
Oh, thanks ... I hadn't seen the date, just the times.
I'm at a loss about his present position then.
Yeah, I'll comment on it. Screw this, I'm tired of politics and wasting my time writing about stuff that turns out to be a lie. I wasted a hell of a lot of time on this story. If America is run by idiots, so be it, I'm not going to waste any more of my time worrying about this stuff. The country seems so survive despite the idiots.
I have no doubt that Weldon is a stand up guy, I just hope he gets some support otherwise it's lights out on this story and cover up.
Disinformation. Cover-up to follow,
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