More and more questions are arising over the 9/11 Commission's deliberate omission of the Able Danger group's information and intelligence form the Commission's report. The repeated initial denials by Commission members of having any knowledge of the Able Danger group's existence, raises more questions of what are they trying to hide. Finally, they did admit to knowing of the group, but have been trying to paint the data provided by Able Danger as insignificant. Ben Johnson and Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu have some interesting analysis of all of this in their commentary. '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 code named (and codenamed "Brooklyn") in 1999. We can only surmise that a gold mine of information lies yet unrevealed.'
Indeed Rep. Weldon has done a fine job of getting the Able Danger data into the public eye. Hopefully, his efforts will lead to a further investigation into the failure of the 9/11 Commission to properly look into this data.
'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?"'
Why was Rep.Weldon initially called a liar, as if that would be enough to surpress this data from becoming public? It will be interesting to see if the MSM and the NY Times will continue to follow up on this story and put the light oalso that it deserves. Some one also needs to answer the questions that John Podhoretz has posed. One can only imagine what impact the Able Danger data would have had during the last Presidential election. Clearly, an established link between Atta and Iraq, would have silenced the critics that had bellowed on and on that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11.
'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." '
Strikes me that Flzenberg and company have missed a good deal here. The arrogance of Flzenbeg's statement indicates to me,that any thing that did not fit into his and the Commission's pre-conceived time-line, would not be considered for investigation. The Czech information should have been properly followed up, which it was not, based on a call from Atta's cell phone and a credit card receipt. It would be prudent to presume that Atta had some one use his cell and credit card as a cover for his actual whereabouts. No one, the FBI or other agency, except for Czech Intelligence and perhaps an operative from Able Danger, had an actual eyeball on Atta at the time of the Prague meeting
'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. '
The Clinton Admisitration was woefully inept at retaliating for all of the terrorist attacks on US interests and the first WTC bombing. Then there are the allegations that Clinton refused an offer to have Osama bin Laden taken into US custody. There is even an audio tape of Cliton admitting this, though the leftist MSM refused to persue that any further.
All in all, this commentary raises some serious allegations, allegations that need the full light of public scrutiny. This is a must read! - Sailor
