Posted on 09/20/2005 6:25:39 PM PDT by 4mor3
September 20, 2005 Pentagon Blocks Testimony at Senate Hearing on Terrorist By PHILIP SHENON WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 - The Pentagon said today that it had blocked a group of military officers and intelligence analysts from testifying at an open Congressional hearing about a highly classified military intelligence program that, the officers have said, identified a ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks as a potential terrorist more than a year before the attacks.
The announcement came a day before the officers and intelligence analysts had been scheduled to testify about the program, known as Able Danger, at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Bryan Whitman, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement that open testimony about the program "would not be appropriate - we have expressed our security concerns and believe it is simply not possible to discuss Able Danger in any great detail in an open public forum." He offered no other detail on the Pentagon's reasoning in blocking the testimony.
Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the committee, said he was surprised by the Pentagon's decision because "so much of this has already been in the public domain, and I think that the American people need to know what happened here."
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
"If you expose one person now for political reasons, you think the Dems or someone else wouldn't do the same?"
Heheheh. That doesn't sound like much of an inhibiting factor to me. Rats will be rats. They don't merely 'blow the whistle'. There is no line they wouldn't cross to 'win'.
Keep in mind, it is just a gut feeling I got reading the early reports....
http://www.nypost.com/news/worldnews/51648.htm
"..... "I'll tell you how stupid it was — they put stickies [like Post-it notes] on the faces of Mohamed Atta on the chart that the military intelligence unit had completed and they said you can't talk to Atta because he's here" legally, Weldon charged....."
That stickie thing strikes me as strange. It is overkill for "No". Go to the Atta link above and read the earlier articles. Once again, my sense is that they may very well have been worried about lawsuits, but they were also protecting Atta's identity as well. Why would they do that? Because he may have been doing business with us, but in the end he double crossed us.
That stickie was strange. It seems like overkill.
cool. Thanks
Andrew McCarthy has some good comments over at The Corner -- I, too don't understand why they can't have both classified hearings and public hearings, as is done with a variety of other highly sensititve intel subjects..... apparently the DoD is trying squash the thing entirely, which stinks. Of course, with people like "leaky Leahy" the concept of a classified hearing may be just about useless.......
WHY IS THE PENTAGON BARRING ITS WITNESSES FROM TESTIFYING ABOUT ABLE DANGER? [Andy McCarthy]
http://corner.nationalreview.com/
The NYTimes confirms this morning what we noted here late yesterday: the Defense Department is preventing its military officers and intelligence analysts from testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning about the Able Danger intelligence program – from which five participants have now come forward and indicated that top suicide hijacker Mohamed Atta – and perhaps other hijackers – was identified as a likely al Qaeda operative long before the 9/11 attacks.
This is very difficult to understand. Of course we do not want needlessly to expose intelligence methods and sources. But the historical fact of whether Atta was identified as a terrorist before the attacks is highly significant, and it is simply not necessary to get into the sensitive nuts and bolts of the program’s data-mining techniques in order to get a straight answer to that question. We deal with this kind of dilemma all the time in the criminal justice system, and Sen. Specter, the Judiciary Committee Chairman and a highly experienced prosecutor, is uniquely well qualified to conduct a hearing that can get to the facts the public is entitled to know without compromising our intelligence capabilities.
Moreover, the sensitive stuff can always be shared with senators who have appropriate clearances in closed session. The Pentagon is not even permitting that. Why?
Remember the vaunted 9/11 Commission hearings? We were told that it was so urgently important that the public understand accurately the history of government counter-terrorism activities prior to the attacks that all manner of classified information was declassified – including, famously, a presidential daily brief from the intelligence community (among the most sensitive documents generated by the government) outlining the al Qaeda threat circa August 2001. Indeed, under great political and media pressure, the president’s then-National Security Adviser Condi Rice was compelled to give hours of sworn public testimony about everything she and the administration did from January 2001 through 9/11.
Why is it that this was important enough for the National Security Adviser but somehow not important enough for a group of intelligence operatives in connection with a program that hasn’t existed anymore for years?
Posted at 11:29 AM
I think this is another rope-a-dope. Bush is saying, "Don't throw me in that briar patch." DOD blocking witnesses. Oh, it's a 'coverup'. And then "Whack!" Gorelick better fasten her seat belt, buddy.
That's what I'm HOPING for..... let the Demo-lemmings think that it's a Bush administration cover-up, let them start clamoring for, demanding the info, then it turns out to blow the Clintonistas to Kingdom come......
That's an interesting article, Enchante, and filled with good questions.
What I don't understand is why we were able to have the 9/11 Commission hold hearinags, both public and private, and no one on this forum or other places fretted too much about exposure of national security issues.
But now, because this might come back to bite Rumsfeld and others within the Bush administration, we're not supposed to have hearings into information that was obtained through open sources?
The Bush administration has done a yeomans task in dealing with the war on terror and it's no secret that I personally adore the president, but if there is something they did wrong that could have prevented 9/11, then we need to know about it and I don't care where the chips fall.
I'll be disappointed if we can't paint Clinton for the disgusting human being he is and blame the majority of this on him directly, but at this point, we have 3,000 dead Americans and untold number of dead beloved soldiers and if 9/11 could have been prevented, then I don't care who falls on their sword.
Rumsfeld absolutely should NOT be preventing these Able Danger folks from testifying, either openly or in private session.
End of rant
Kudos my friend. You're one of the very few people here who gets it.
You need to quit drinking Koolaid. And open your eyes. People who were involved need to loss their jobs, their pensions. You DO NOT HAVE TO release detailed information about a program. JUST GIVE ME THE NAMES
right but it still wouldn't be right for the Republicans to do it either...
very possibly...
and as long as they don't violate the security rules, I am for it.
The names could very well expose that person.
If you are going to name names, then you will find pictures out there somewhere.
That could endanger people.
NOT a good idea.
"But Able Danger was apparently a highly sophisticated software/data analysis program that merited the highest security classification."
Huh?
The information gathered was done from commerical open-source databases.
Just existence of the program was classified not the method.
I ranted last night about the government keeping information from us and I still mean every word of it.
OTOH, I understand protecting classified info and the spooks. I do not care how or why the information was gathered. I do not care what agencies were involved. I do not want to know the details.
What I do care about is why (and by whose hand) this information did not find it's way to the 9/11 commission.
We now know there may have been an advanced warning/knowledge/educated guess/whatever about the USS Cole.
At the funeral of one of the men killed a man stood over the grave of his dead son. This father was retired Navy. He had his uniform on and stood at the grave, saluting the casket holding the remains of his dead son. He then collapsed in tears.
That broke my heart then and breaks my heart now. We sometimes forget these are not just brave souls who make the ultimate sacrifice. They have familes, and in that case a father who showed his pride and grief at the same time.
I don't want this country put at risk by classified information being made public. But at the same time, if this War on Terror could have been fought before 9/11, I want to know who dropped the ball.
I don't know what the answer to how this is handled. We need to stay secure, but we also have a right to know who may have dropped the ball with any intelligence regarding possible attacks.
I find my resentment grows each time a major issue disappears. I hate the feeling I get when the DC elite act as if there is not one working brain outside the beltway.
Give it a chance.
If they can do it without putting out Classified info, they will, if they can't, there is a certain set of rules pertaining to it.
If I were Jamie Gorelick, I would be peeing my pants right now.
Eventually this stuff can and will come up. There is no statute of limitations on crimes involving national security.
Once again we should ask ourselves:"What has Hillary got on Bush or others from the stolen FBI files?"
I think the problem here is we created a process using some form of Artificial Intelligence that works very well. Probably too well and people in both congress and the military are scared. While we figured out how to track people, we figured out HOW TO TRACK PEOPLE.
What is probably frightening, especially for the Clintons, is that whatever we have here definitely violates our civil rights and is something that the ACLU and even us on the other side would scream about. Even if this was designed and implemented under Reagan or Bush Sr., Clinton knew about it and shut it down knowing ful well what was going to happen.
Problem is he shut it down and because he did, 3,000 Americans died on 9/11. Go a step further, the 9/11 commission covered it up and they are going to lay the blame on Kean as he was the head of it.
Kean was appointed by Bush. I am not much on conspiracy theories, but I think that what Weldon is doing is exactly what the RATS want him to do. The MSM is going to have a field day with this. Just like how they covered up Sandy Berger, they will figure out how to burn the administration on this.
And it will all come out right before the 2006 election.
It looks as if you said it first and better than I did and it is time for the Filegate issue to be brought up again and really dealt with this time. I can dream, right?
The principle of having a hearing only on accountability is fine, but the problem is that even a general public discussion of how Able Danger identified Atta would give future terrorists some knowledge of how they can be discovered through data processing methods. Terrorists will use every little piece of information that we give them to change the way they operate so that they're more difficult for us to discover. Just one sentence spoken in a public hearing about how Able Danger operates could give terrorists the knowledge they need to avoid disovery by the CIA or DIA. A public hearing does not have to get into the "minutia of technology" to be highly damaging to our intelligence gathering methods. (You'll notice that I'm not talking about any of the technology that Able Danger used because I don't want to put that information out on the internet.)
This thead has a group of people on it who remind me of an emotionally-charged lynch mob that wants to take down the Clintons and gives no thought to the consequences of public hearings into this issue. I too would love to nail the Clintons and wreck Hillary's presidential campaign, but this is not the way to do that. Well fortunately for all of us (including DTOM888), Rumsfeld and Myers and their staffers are staying calmly logical and they will make sure that this subject stays in closed hearings where it belongs
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