Able Danger-gate

Wow. Sometimes you fire off a post in passing and never look back, and sometimes you find yourself on the leading edge of a veritable tempest. Little did li'l (little...?) cynical ol' I know when I posted about fresh evidence emerging of the Clinton administration's inexcusable negligence in allowing the 9/11 attacks to happen that it would burgeon into the (potential) scandal that we veteran Clintophobes could only dream of "back in the day":

Representative Curt Weldon, R-PA, [Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees] is vowing to find out who in the Clinton administration ordered a group of military intelligence officers not to tell the FBI about critical information on two 9/11 hijackers that was obtained two years before they destroyed the World Trade Center.

"What bothers me is two things," Weldon told WABC Radio's Mark Levin late Wednesday. "I'm told that that they couldn't share this information with the FBI? How far up the chain [of command] did it go? Did it go to the White House? And if so, who ordered it?"

Asked about reports that restrictions on intelligence sharing implemented by Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick played a role in the disastrous intelligence breakdown, Weldon said: "I think that needs to be investigated."

Damn right it does. Let's do a little redundant reiterating:

Representative Weldon said that the Able Danger team urged that the FBI be briefed on their intelligence on Atta and al-Shehhi on three separate occasions - only to be turned down. [emphasis added]

What bitter symmetry with the three separate offers of custody over Osama bin Laden to the Clinton White House by Sudan in 1996-97, also turned down.

Angry yet? I'd advise pacing yourself, because we've only gotten started:

"I do know that one of the military intelligence officers I'm talking to had led me to believe that some of his documents have been destroyed," he revealed, adding he has yet to confirm the allegation. [emphasis added]

This takes us back to the infamous Sandy Berger and his pants-stuffing escapade at the National Archives. That always did look, sound, feel, smell, and taste like a trademark Clinton cover-up. Now we have one more hum-dinger of an idea of what they had to hide.

Namely, hide from the so-called 9/11 commission, which in the space of a few days has plummeted from Bushophobic partisan joke to accessory to a massive Clintonoid CYA (HT: TKS):

The September 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer ten days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.

The officials said that the information had not been included in the report because aspects of the officer's account had sounded inconsistent with what the commission knew about that Qaeda member, Mohammed Atta, the plot's leader. ...

The briefing by the military officer is the second known instance in which people on the commission's staff were told by members of the military team about the secret program, called Able Danger.

The meeting, on July 12, 2004, has not been previously disclosed. That it occurred, and that the officer identified Mr. Atta there, were acknowledged by officials of the commission after the congressman, Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, provided information about it. ...

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.

Cap'n Ed "connects the dots":

First we hear that no such meeting occurred. After that, the Commission says one might have occurred in October 2003 but that no one remembered it. Now we find out that the Commission had two meetings where the heard about Able Danger and its identification of Mohammed Atta, including one just before they completed their report. Instead of saying to themselves, "Hey, wait a minute — this changes the picture substantially," and postponing the report until they could look further into Able Danger, they simply shrugged their shoulders and published what they had.

Why? Able Danger proved that at least some of the intelligence work done by the US provided the information that could have helped prevent or at least reduce the attacks on 9/11. They had identified the ringleader of the conspiracy as a terrorist agent, even if they didn't know what mission he had at the time.

What does that mean for the Commission's findings? It meant that the cornerstone of their conclusions no longer fit the facts. Able Danger showed that the US had enough intelligence to take action — if the government had allowed law enforcement and intelligence operations to cooperate with each other. It also showed that data mining could effectively identify terrorist agents.

So what did the Commission do? It ignored those facts which did not fit within its predetermined conclusions. It never bothered to mention Able Danger even one time in its final report, even though that absolutely refuted the notion that the government had no awareness that Atta constituted a terrorist threat. It endorsed the idea of data mining (which would die in Congress as the Total Information Awareness program) without ever explaining why. And while the Clinton policy of enforcing a quarantine between law enforcement and intelligence operations came under general criticism, their report never included the fact that the "wall" for which Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick had so much responsibility specifically contributed to Atta's ability to come and go as he pleased, building the teams that would kill almost 3,000 Americans.

And when confronted with this revelation this week, the Commission lied about their knowledge of the program and attempted to impugn Representative Weldon's integrity instead.

Not to sound like the guy in the Verizon Wireless commercial, but, "Are you pissed yet?"

Good. Because today the 9/11 commission finally came clean:

The September 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.

Al Felzenberg, who had been the commission's chief spokesman, said Tuesday the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence. ...

Felzenberg said an unidentified person working with Weldon came forward Wednesday and described a meeting 10 days before the panel's report was issued last July. During it, a military official urged commission staffers to include a reference to the intelligence on Atta in the final report.

Felzenberg said checks were made and the details of the July 12, 2004, meeting were confirmed. Previous to that, Felzenberg said it was believed commission staffers knew about Able Danger from a meeting with military officials inAfghanistan during which no mention was made of Atta or the other three hijackers.

Staff members now are searching documents in the National Archives to look for notes from the meeting in Afghanistan and any other possible references to Atta and Able Danger, Felzenberg said.

In plain non-Vulcan English, they buried it. And who stood to benefit the most from this summary interment? Jamie Gorelick, who constructed that artificial wall between intelligence and law enforcement; Bill Clinton, whose legacy would shift from even lower from pecker tracks on a gap dress to the blood of three thousand Americans; and (drumroll, please) Hillary Clinton, who insisted that Gorelick be appointed to that top Justice Department post and whose own presidential ambitions would clinch her husband's aforementioned spot in history.

I guess that's why I cynically shrugged this uproar off yesterday. The Clinton scandal life cycle is so ingrained after all these years that I just don't think in terms of them actually being damaged or even brought down by any of their serial iniquities. But this one has nothing whatsoever to do with sex, or even political corruption, but the very achilles heel of the Democrat party to this day: credibility on national security.

The Gorelick wall was, as Jim Geraghty aptly puts it, a "suicide pact." Since that wall has been torn down, we have not, somewhat less than entirely coincidentally, been hit again.

And as a lot of us thought and said at the time, Jamie Gorelick should never have been on that commission but, as the principle architect of the self-inflicted obstruction that precipitated the worst attack ever on American soil, she should have been a witness getting grilled like a ball park frank. That she was not, and at the same time as good people like Condi Rice were harangued for supposed Bush Administration "failures" in star chamber fashion, is, as we can now see, just as big an outrage as it appeared.

Mr. Geraghty concludes:

And as for the 9/11 Commission, after all that patting themselves on the back, all that gushing praise from left, right, and center, after their work was called "miraculous" by Newsday, and the nomination for a National Book Award, and calling their own work "extraordinary"... man, these guys stink.

And if, as Representative Weldon told Mark Levin, three current members of the Able Danger team have already come forward to talk to him, and eleven more are willing to testify, the spectre of President Hillary may acquire a stench that not even her spin machine can scrub away.