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.
------
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
---
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.
Bingo. Let's open the 15 boxes and see what they've got.
I have a difficult time believeing that Weldon would do a stroy like this just to sell some books. I WILL say that he is completely frustrated with the old guard CIA. The whole premise of his book is centered on them not giving any credence to his Iranian source because they could not 'own him'. Very simiar to the 'not invented here' syndrome I'm used to in industry. BTW, he (Weldon) says they are listening to his source now.
I have to agree with him re: the CIA. During the election campaign and before Goss took over, there was a leak a day to the NY Times that was unfavorable to the President. It had all the markings of a coup d'etat in my mind.
Time will tell if this story has legs.
When pigs fly John!!!
John may want to read this:
Deadly tale of incompetence (Clinton, Atta, Able Danger)
New Jersey Media ^ | 8/14/05
Deadly tale of incompetence
Sunday, August 14, 2005
By MIKE KELLY
IT STILL SEEMS all so close.
Here, on Route 23, bathed in the August morning sun and only a short drive from Route 80 and the Willowbrook Mall, a roadside motel bears silent witness to a police bust that might have been.
For a year before the 9/11 attacks, the Wayne Inn was home to Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaida mastermind behind the hijacking plot that killed almost 3,000 people.
In those horrific weeks after the attacks, the official story line was that U.S. counterterror officials had no idea who Atta was before that murderous plot unfolded - or where he was before 9/11. Only after the attacks could authorities track Atta's movements.
Now that story seems to be false.
Federal officials confirmed last week that a year before the attacks, a top-secret military intelligence team was following Atta and three suspected terrorists who turned out to be hijackers. The intelligence operatives tried to sound an alarm but were rebuffed by government lawyers who feared possible legal complications of using military spying techniques to keep tabs on foreign visitors in the United States with legal visas even though they might be terrorists.
A former member of the military intelligence team told me in an interview that it had enough data to raise suspicions. "But we were blocked from passing it to the FBI."
The connect-the-dots tracking by the team was so good that it even knew Atta conducted meetings with the three future hijackers. One of those meetings took place at the Wayne Inn. That's how close all this was - to us and to being solved, if only the information had been passed up the line to FBI agents or even to local cops.
This new piece of 9/11 history, revealed only last week by a Pennsylvania congressman and confirmed by two former members of the intelligence team, could turn out to be one of the most explosive revelations since the publication last summer of the 9/11 commission report.
The information not only undermines key commission findings that Atta and others were undetected, but it again raises a question that continues to haunt the 9/11 tragedy:
Why is our government so incompetent?
To understand that question, it's important to understand how close counter-terror officials came to finding Mohammed Atta. And once you understand the closeness, you have to wonder how anyone could mess up so badly with information that was so tangible?
The story begins a year before the attacks. A top-secret team of Pentagon military counter-terror computer sleuths, who worked for a special operations commando group, was well into a project to monitor al-Qaida operations.
The 11-person group called itself "Project Able Danger." Think of them as a super-secret Delta Force or SEAL team. But instead of guns, they relied on advanced math training as their key weapons. And instead of traditional spying methods or bust-down-the-door commando tactics, the Able Danger group booted up a set of high-speed, super-computers and collected vast amounts of data.
The technique is called "data mining." The Able Danger team swept together information from al-Qaida chat rooms, news accounts, Web sites and financial records. Then they connected the dots, comparing the information with visa applications by foreign tourists and other government records.
From there, the computer sleuths noticed four names - Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.
All four turned out to be hijackers. Atta and al-Shehhi took a room at the Wayne Inn. They rented a Wayne mail drop, too, and even went to Willowbrook Mall. Al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi took rooms at a motel on Route 46 in South Hackensack.
What is interesting about this information now is that a CIA team, working separately from the Able Danger Team, had set its sights on al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi. The two were already on a CIA terror watch list and still had managed to obtain U.S. visas.
The CIA feared al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi might try to slip into the United States. But the CIA lost track of them after they left a terror meeting in Malaysia in early 2000 for Bangkok. Worse, the CIA waited until the summer of 2001 to tell the FBI that two suspected terrorists had visas to enter the United States - and might be here.
The story of the lack of cooperation between the CIA and FBI is well-known - and well-documented by the 9/11 commission. But the story is even more troublesome with the revelation that even before the CIA knew of suspected terrorists trying to enter the United States that the Able Danger team had its own set of information.
Imagine what might have happened if Able Danger was cooperating with the CIA and the FBI.
On the phone last week, the former Able Team member I interviewed told a depressing story of that cooperation that never took place.
His story, he says, tells us just how close U.S. officials could have come to breaking up the 9/11 plot before it unfolded. But there was one problem: The U.S. government did not want to hear what this sleuth and his 10 teammates had to say - before and even after the 9/11 plot.
By mid-2000, the Able Danger team knew it had important information about a possible terrorist plot. Because of a peculiar series of computer links that went through Brooklyn, the team began referring to the four future hijackers as the "Brooklyn cell." Their movements and communications were raising too many suspicions.
The Able Danger sleuth, whose interview with me was arranged by the staff of Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., asked that his name not be revealed so he could maintain his top-secret counter-terror role. He emerged from the shadows of spying and intelligence analysis last week because he wanted to set the record straight.
One of his targets is the 9/11 commission. The commission's staff, he says, ignored him when he approached them on two occasions to spell out Able Danger's work.
Another target are Pentagon lawyers. The sleuth says he and other Able Danger team members became so concerned during the summer of 2000 that they asked their superiors in the Pentagon's special operations command for permission to approach the FBI. Their superiors approached Pentagon legal experts. Those experts turned down the request.
Sticking to his partisan, Republican roots, Rep. Weldon singles out the Clinton administration for being too lax. He also blames the 9/11 commission for a possible coverup.
The bipartisan 9/11 commission denies any coverup. But it also went out of its way to avoid pointing fingers at the Clinton or Bush administrations. The deeper question is whether this desire to avoid blame also led the commission to ignore important facts.
"They definitely blew it," Weldon said of the commission's failure to look into the Able Danger's work and the legal issues it raises. "The question is whether it was deliberate."
We may never know. The commission says it may be a victim of the very same problem it sought to expose - that there is not enough sharing of information among federal counterterror officials.
Perhaps just as alarming, even the Able Danger team understood its limits. When lawyers blocked Able Danger's request to approach the FBI, the team simply went back to its work and kept quiet - even after the 9/11 attacks occurred.
Why? If the Able Danger team was so concerned about U.S. security, why didn't it approach Congress or even the press to sound an alarm?
When I posed that question in my interview with the Able Danger team member, he fell silent. Listening on a speaker phone, a congressional staffer interrupted: "Have you ever seen what happens to whistleblowers?"
Again, the Able Danger member had no answer.
Which brings us to this haunting question:
Is silence a form of incompetence or it is just the way things are?
This may help John to "write" the ship as well:
9/11 Coverup Commission
By Ben Johnson and Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu
FrontPageMagazine.com | August 15, 2005
“For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known.” – St. Matthew 10:26
Recent revelations about covert “Able Danger” operations are forcing certain people to deal with subjects that they had thought swept under the rug. Despite apparent attempts to conceal the fact, the 9/11 Commission has had to admit it was informed that government agents knew of Mohammed Atta’s affiliation with al-Qaeda two years before 9/11, that Clinton-era policies prevented intelligence officials from sharing that information with the FBI, that the amended time frame would allow Mohammed Atta to have made contacts with Iraqi intelligence, and – most damningly – that it kept all this out of its final report.
Rep. Curt Weldon, R-PA, has done praiseworthy work in drawing attention to the recently released “Able Danger” report. Former CIA operative and terrorism expert Wayne Simmons has described the “Able Danger” operation as “one of our best covert operations” run by the intelligence community. The operation, he continues, was expert at “using open source intelligence,” including data mining techniques, “to locate and identify Islamic terrorists,” specifically al-Qaeda operatives in the United States. This operation identified 9/11 mastermind Mohammed Atta and three of his fellow hijackers as members of an al-Qaeda cell located in New York City (and codenamed “Brooklyn”) in 1999. We can only surmise that a gold mine of information lies yet unrevealed.
Weldon noted with exasperation that this information had been delivered to the 9/11 Commission in at least two separate briefings, possibly three, proving the incredible ineptitude of the commission. Weldon says staffers of the 9/11 Commission did not share – and Commissioners did not request – information about these “Able Danger” reports. This would have been indispensable to uncovering how 9/11 happened and what could be done to prevent a repeat performance, allegedly the commision's task..
Faced with these revelations, commissioners first claimed Rep. Weldon was not telling the truth, that the 9/11 Commission had never been presented with this vital information. Early last week, commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said, “The name ‘Atta’ or a terrorist cell would have gone to the top of the radar screen if it had been mentioned.” Former Congressman and commissioner Lee Hamilton, D-IN, echoed Felzenberg, saying last Monday: “The September 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell. Had we learned of it obviously it would’ve been a major focus of our investigation.” The New York Times notes that just a few days later, “Mr. Felzenberg said the uniformed officer who briefed two staff members in July 2004 had indeed mentioned Mr. Atta.” Hamilton, too, quickly “readjusted” his initial comments to admit that, indeed, the commissioners heard of Atta after all. Felzenberg acknowledged the commission had been briefed on this information but rejected the testimony of a uniformed officer on the grounds that his evidence did not match their preconceived timeline; it indicates Atta was active from February-April 2000, whereas the commission believed Atta entered the United States for the first time that June.
There are several factors – none flattering to the Commission – that might explain this appalling lapse. John Podhoretz neatly summaries them: “So was the [9/11 Commission] 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?”
The really upsetting issue is contained in Podhoretz's first note. It requires a deeper reading because understanding it fully opens the entire mindset of the hard Left toward terrorism and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Podheretz notes that the Commission was “protecting” its interpretation of Mohammad Atta's international and domestic U.S. travels. Key in this “interpretation” in the minds of Clinton supporters and Bush haters of all stripes is the necessity to deny all ties between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and al-Qaeda. After all, in the endless cacophony of criticism against the Iraq War, the two steady drumbeats have been the failure to find WMDs, and the assertion that there were no links between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the September 11 attacks. Until now the Left has issued a series of deliberate misinterpretations of a series of reports – including that of the 9/11 Commission, and WMD reports by David Kay and Charles Dueffler. However the unimpeachable “Able Danger” report was at first denied by 9/11 spokesman Al Felzenberg, then was reluctantly confirmed to be correct. Felzenberg said that “the information that [the “Able Danger” briefing officer] provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing.” (Emphasis added.)
And here we get to the crux of the matter. The movements of Atta prior to the terrorist attack as detailed by “Able Danger,” if acknowledged, would support statements by the Czech Republic that link Atta, and hence the al-Qaeda attack on America, irrefutably to Saddam's covert intelligence operatives. This is something that surfaced shortly after 9/11. A former Czech deputy foreign minister, later ambassador to the UN, gave statements that he personally expelled a high raking Iraqi embassy official in Prague for being a covert foreign intelligence agent after the latter was discovered to have met with Mohammed Atta in the international lounge at the Prague airport in August 2001. There the Iraqi transferred a large amount of cash to Atta, sufficient to fund the completion of the September 11 attack. Despite cruel pressure from mainstream media, the hard Left, the U.S. State Department, and the CIA, the Czechs insisted that their report was correct. Former Congressman John LeBoutellier was furious at the Bush administration for bowing to CIA pressure to discount the Czech report because it verified a vital deadly connection within the covert terrorist community. Now it appears as if the Czechs – and those who supported their account – were right.
This Atta-Iraqi meeting did not track well with some of the 9/11 Commission's pre-ordained agenda and had to be firmly discounted. They were able to accomplish this through a lame credit card receipt that could have been signed by any of Atta's cell. But a report with the weight of the Department of Defense and highly credible intelligence operatives behind it would expose the flimsy nature of the evidence that Atta was in the States. Hence, as Flzenberg said, with unflappable arrogance, “if we missed anything we will say so, but we doubt that we did.”
The possible motives of protecting Commissioner Jamie Gorelick and her former employer, President Bill Clinton, are also closely related. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft testified at the 9/11 Commission’s grandstanding hearings that one of its own commissioners, former high-ranking Clinton Justice Department appointee Jamie S. Gorelick, had been the prime architect of one of the problems for which the commissioners regularly denounced the Bush administration: the wall between intelligence agencies. Her infamous 1995 “wall” memo produced much of the harmful lack of intelligence coordination that the Commission then used to criticize the Bush administration. As FrontPage Magazine’s Jean Pearce wrote last May, the intelligence wall Deputy Attorney General Gorelick put in place smothered ongoing investigations into Chinese contributions to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns. Specifically the Department of Defense and the CIA were prohibited from exchanging relevant information with the FBI.
Not all were happy at the time with Gorelick's action. Gutsy New York City-based U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White was appalled by the Gorelick directive, sending two of her own memoranda back to Janet Reno and Gorelick protesting, “The most effective way to combat terrorism is with as few labels and walls as possible so that wherever permissible, the right and left hands are communicating.” Her recommendations were ignored. According to the New York Post, White was so incensed by their actions that she wrote a second, scathing memorandum warning that the “wall” hindered law enforcement efforts to combat terrorism. “It will cost lives,” she reportedly warned. This second memo is still kept secret.
Her prophecy proved accurate; in 2000, members of the Department of Defense knew of an al-Qaeda operative in the United States, but the DoD – hands tied by Gorelick’s policy – declined to alert the FBI, a step that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks. At this time, al-Qaeda had already, either directly or through its affiliates, killed American soldiers in Somalia, detonated the Khobar Towers, and bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. In the summer of 2000, they attacked the U.S.S. Cole.
This inaction seemed to fall into line with the Clinton administration’s general disregard for terrorism. Although the discredited former National Security Council staffer Richard Clarke presented President Clinton as an anti-terrorism warrior, former intelligence officer Ralph Peters tells a much different story. “Admitting that [terrorist] threats were real.threatened to destroy the belief system the Clintonites had carried into office,” Peters detailed. In regards to the entire terrorist network, methodology, and ideology, the Clintons were “a textbook case of denial.” It was bad enough, as the “Able Danger” reports indicate, that the Clintons were willfully ignorant of the threat but their criminal negligence was compounded by a sleazy attempt to pass the buck on the Bush administration. Bill Clinton never made any serious retaliation for any of these provocations, nor the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, emboldening these terrorists, assuring through his “intelligence wall” that 9/11 terrorists could not be properly identified and apprehended, and passing the blame for the inevitable outcome of his policies to the nascent Bush administration.
If there was, in fact, covert direction from the top of the Commission to key members of its staff to cloak any link between Saddam and the September 11 attacks, to obfuscate evidence tying the Iraqi regime to al-Qaeda and Mohammed Atta, and to paint the most positive possible picture of the Clintons as implacable terror-warriors, then “Able Danger” had to be ignored and covered up. It fits the pattern of revisionist historical interpretations that seems to be the only authentic legacy from the Clinton years. Further, in Washington staffers tell their bosses what the latter want to hear. They are not rewarded for initiative. As Peters says, when told to think outside the box by a superior, a subordinate knows his job is to “come back with fresh reasons why the in-house position was right all along.”
By acknowledging the Iraq/al-Qaeda ties, not only to terrorism in general but to the September 11 attack, the war becomes completely justifiable as exactly what the Bush administration claimed it was: a defensive, if preemptive, war to protect the United States from a regime with cordial ties to anti-American terrorists. This outcome is so repugnant to the hard Left that it will justify even the most extraordinary suppression of evidence or promulgation of an outright lie in order to achieve its ends.
This is a critically important story that demands public attention. It will not be seriously investigated by many reporters, because the mainstream (read: leftist) media is not interested in exposing how its favorite president in decades enabled terrorists to pull off the worse act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history.
Well said.
Go here for the article.
Go here for the article.
To protect Clinton!!
BINGO!!
WE HAVE A WINNER..!!
Atta way to blow 9/11 panel's credibility [Mark Steyn]
SUN-TIMES ^ | August 14, 2005 | Mark Steyn
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.
bttt
But even after hearing Erwa's testimony about the offer and Clinton's smoking gun audiotape, the 9/11 report declared flatly: "The Commission has found no credible evidence that this was so."
Instead, the panel accepted Clinton's revised testimony, where he told the Commissioners he had misspoken during his February speech - based on media reports about the bin Laden offer that he'd only recently realized were untrue.
I agree, however, I've been taking hits on another thread for expressing the same sentiment. As far as I know, Weldon hasn't blamed the "Wall" but rather he has implied that DOD lawyers wouldn't let the AD contact the FBI because they were worried about being charged with "domestic surveillance" since Atta had a green card. Atta didn't have a green card and even if he had, there is apparently nothing "domestic surveillance of non-citizens.
The "Wall" memo restricted the counterintelligence side of the FBI from relaying information to the criminal side of the FBI. It had no effect on the CIA, DOD, NSA, etc..
.
Re#115 Thanks for the update.
I'm waiting for facts myself. So why not bring Gorelick and company to congress to testify?
All these reports attributed to the FBI were, as it turns out, erroneous. There were no car rental records in Virginia, Florida, or anywhere else in April 2001 for Mohamed Atta, since he had not yet obtained his Florida license.
His international license was at his father's home in Cairo, Egypt (where his roommate Marwan al-Shehhi picked it up in late April). Nor were there other records in the hands of the FBI that put Atta in the United States at the time. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June 2002, "It is possible that Atta traveled under an unknown alias" to "meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague." Clearly, it was not beyond the capabilities of the 9/11 hijackers to use aliases.
The only dispute over Atta's whereabouts is whether he was in Prague on April 9, 2001, to meet with Samir al Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer. Czech intelligence insists he was. Able Danger, apparently, had information supporting the Czechs.
Spanish police last February arrested Algerians Khaled Madani, 33, and Moussa Laour, 36, on suspicion of furnishing phony passports to, among others, al Qaeda operatives Ramzi Binalshibh and Mohamed Atta. According to a February 29 Associated Press dispatch, Binalshibh revealed Madani's identity to interrogators at the American military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Also info on Shakir at that link, which is another connection between 9/11 and Iraq.
January 4, 2001: Atta flies from Miami to Madrid, Spain.
January 10, 2001: Return flight from Madrid to Miami.
This was 4 months before he allegedly went to Prague. IMHO, this is when he picked up the fake passports, which he used to go to Prague.
May 23 — A paid FBI informant told ABCNEWS that three years before Sept. 11, he began providing the FBI with information about a young Saudi who later flew a hijacked passenger plane into the Pentagon.
Aukai Collins, the informant, said he worked for the FBI for four years in Phoenix, monitoring the Arab and Islamic communities there. Hani Hanjour was the hijacker Collins claimed to have told the FBI about while Hanjour was in flight training in Phoenix.
Twenty hours after ABCNEWS first requested a response, the FBI issued an "emphatic denial" that Collins had told the agency anything about Hanjour, though FBI sources acknowledged that Collins had worked for them.
FBI Special Agent Ken Williams wrote a memo last July 10, urging FBI headquarters to investigate Arab students in flight schools nationwide — and helped set off the furor over whether the attacks could have been prevented.
If Collins' claims are true, he would be another source who had advised the FBI to take a closer look at Phoenix, and maybe the first to identify a potential terrorist who later turned out to be one of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
Collins said the FBI knew Hanjour lived in Phoenix, knew his exact address, his phone number and even what car he drove. "They knew everything about the guy," said Collins.
FBI Was Warned of Sept. 11 Hijacker - Informant Says He Provided Facts
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.