Posted on 08/14/2005 6:10:27 PM PDT by Stellar Dendrite
They cast aspersions on Weldon because he's trying to sell a book. Of course, the Commission has a motive to lie inasmuch as they are trying to save their plummeting reputations.
I guess the question I have is why the let the Commission staff go back over their notes if the Commission had been dissolved. It would have been very easy to pull a Sandy Berger.
When did I smear Weldon? I'm asking if his facts are true, and hoping he'll reveal all. Sorry if that's a smear to you, but tough. And how do YOU know about my opinion about the action of the 9/11 committee heads?
If you're telepathic and know all the facts about this case the way you seem to know my private thoughts, lay it all out. Until then, I'm simply asking for all the facts. I didn't know some FReepers were so sensitive to the truth about this commission being brought out as opposed to wishful thinking, but again, tough.
Dan Rather?
comment -- still think Gorelick, her bosses and associates are *ssholes. /comment.
Can someone comment?
How about, certain serial criminals at large remain active--and active in covering their tracks, until proven guilty and imprisoned....
Funny how Podhoertz isn't interested in finding out what's in those 15 boxes of Able Danger documents...
No, if he got this from Rather it would have proven Bush plotted 9-11 back in the seventies. And it would have been written on Dukes of Hazard stationary
I see I'm not the only one who thought his slipshod stemcell debate made him look like a punk.
If you notice, he's posting more than anyone these days. I'm not the biggest Ponnoru fan, but I suspect , given his seniority at the magazine, that he's a little irked that Pod has come in and tried to throw his impressive girth around Naional Review.
This NRO piece by JP was included as part of another thread this AM and discussed at length. No new information has emerged since then.
CQ seems to be agreeing with him now.
John is usually very thorough and he is on our side. But I still want answers. I still want Jamie Gorelick raising her right hand. This wall was created shortly after OKC. It was when the Clintons needed to stonewall on Chinese money. We need answers. Yes, Jack Nicholson, we can handle the truth. I'll let you know when I see it.
Well, to be fair, The Wall has been known, but what hasn't been known is that intelligence had detected these people in advance and then got shut down by The Wall on flimsy grounds. Up until now, it had seemed that The Wall simply left us blind to anything, not deliberately suicidal.
That's not fair--how is it saying "case closed" to ask for proof of Weldon's claims? Don't you want the facts in hand so we can charge Gorelick and company?
I don't know Podhoretz's deal--thanks for the backstory on the stem cell thing--but it's a legit point to make that Weldon hasn't come across with any smoking gun, merely stated that he found this out. So let's just see his information. What is wrong with that? Better to ask these questions now so Gorelick and crew can't try to muddy the water later.
Right away we are to believe this is all about selling a book? I don't believe that is the case. Weldon seems to speak credibly. Let's have a congressional hearing now.
Who said this?
"I have no special knowledge, but I'm saying this looks like Weldon (who some here were proposing should run for president based on this alone!) is stretching the truth to sell books."
That's a good point, I think. You'd think that an assemblage of facts, however tangental to the 9/11 emission's thesis, would at least be warranted -- if only in the form of an appendixed outline in the back of the book.
DID THE BERGEN RECORD BREAK SOMETHING HERE?
Mike Kelly, a columnist for the Bergen Record of New Jersey, had Curt Weldon’s staff arrange an interview with a member of Able Danger. He uncovers a few tidbits we haven't heard before: 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...
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.
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…
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.
But there’s an interesting wrinkle at the end:
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.
Back in my wire service days, I used to cover Washington for the Bergen Record. I never dealt with Kelly, but my understanding is that he’s been at the paper for nearly three decades, and been a columnist about half that time. He’s no green rookie. And I can say from my experience with the Record that the editors were not lackadaisical. The North Jersey communities they cover were hard hit by 9/11. I doubt the editors would permit a columnist to quote an unnamed source, throwing out allegations as explosive as this, if they didn’t find him credible. If he gave off any whiff of nuttiness, I have a feeling this column would have been written quite differently.
In my previous post, I had stated that the accounts of Weldon’s guy and the 9/11 Commission were so different that this can’t be a simple misunderstanding – somebody’s lying. And an account with a lot of details (like the Commission’s Friday release) tends to seem more plausible than a vague one. Well, this account offers a lot of details. Anybody in North Jersey want to contact the Wayne Inn? They remember anybody who looked like Atta staying a year? Do they still have their pre-2001 guest records?
It still would be helpful if any one of these eleven guys in Able Danger could come forward and answer these questions publicly, not just with print reporters. I realize they have careers to think of, but as the tag line for “Patriot Games” said, “Truth needs a soldier.”
[Posted 08/14 05:52 PM]
I note the above was posted after John Podhoretz's piece. I can't say if he was aware of it.
One good thing about this is that even if Podhoretz's position is correct, and I don't say it is, it pushes the story into more than one yes-or-no area. There's a lot to look at here. I just think it's better to get all the facts together and THEN attack Gorelick and company, rather than wanting to get her so bad and then cobbling together some facts with half-truths.
That's Pod himself. He sounds alot like Kristol...They seem to have the same opinion too...Both hail from the Standard....both hang on Fox News.
Yeah, I think there's something suspcious here...but that's just me and my tinfoil hat talking.
After 9/12/2001? Absolutely! His name and image should have caught the full and undivided attention of anyone in the intelligence community and certainly the commission members investigating 9/11.
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