Ground Zero Of The Able Danger Fan-Hitting

I was going to write this post last night, but my self-imposed sleep deprivation of the previous few days decided otherwise.

You know how when you shake up a bottle of soda you can watch it fizz briefly but it doesn't spray in all directions until you remove the lid? When I was a boy my friends and I shook up a can of Pepsi the same way. In fact, we did all manner of things to it - threw it up in the air, played catch with it, attached it to one of those vibrating paint-mixing machines. When we finally pulled the tab in the backyard, the contents shot in a parabolic arc clear over the neighbor's six-foot fence and cleared their azalia bushes by a good five yards. After the eruption ended, we looked in the can, and there was maybe half a swallow of cola left in the bottom.

That's what "Attagate" is reminding me of.

Let's briefly review, shall we?

First we heard that the 9/11 Commission was never briefed on Able Danger. Then the Commission said a meeting might have occurred in October 2003 but that no one remembered it. Then they admitted that there had been two meetings where they heard about Able Danger and its identification of Mohammed Atta, including one just before they completed their report. Then, last Friday, they blew the whole thing off as "irrelevant," reiterated their original findings, and dared Representative Curt Weldon and his intelligence sources to prove otherwise.

Earlier this week, the latter did just that.

The Commission's reaction? Don't blame us, blame the Pentagon:

The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, offered no judgment about the accuracy of the officers' accounts. But he said in an interview that if the accounts were true, it suggested that detailed information about the intelligence program, known as Able Danger, was withheld from the commission and that the program and its findings should have been mentioned prominently in the panel's final report last year.

"If they identified Atta and any of the other terrorists, of course it was an important program," Mr. Kean said, referring to Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian ringleader of the attacks. "Obviously, if there were materials that weren't given to us, information that wasn't given to us, we're disappointed. It's up to the Pentagon to clear up any misunderstanding."

Even Barnacle Boy - er, Jim Geraghty - wasn't buying this bob & weave:

Oh, come on, governor.

If [Lieutenant Colonel Tony] Shaffer's information checks out, then it seems highly unlikely that he would have withheld this information in his October 2003 meeting with the 9/11 Commission staff. And this would more or less verify the comments of the Navy officer from July 2004 — the ones that you said you deemed not credible.

In other words, a preponderance of the evidence (remember Dan Rather's use of that term? Means 50.1%) will suggest that the commission was told about Able Danger and its findings twice, and didn't follow up either time.

Cap'n Ed adds (with crackling sarcasm):

It's nice to see Kean acknowledge that any data that identified Atta prior to the attacks is self-evidently an important line of investigation to follow. Why didn't anyone believe that before all of this became public?

Today he elaborates further:

Having heard this from two separate sources, one would expect that the Commission would insist on getting the data from the Pentagon themselves. When people call in tips to investigators on criminal cases, do police refuse to follow up because they didn't provide video and fingerprint evidence when they called? Kean says that the Commission requested the data three times from the Pentagon and didn't get the documentation they wanted, but that statement should be evaluated in light of the initial denial from Kean and Hamilton last week of any knowledge of Able Danger's existence at all. Also, given the highly partisan nature of the public hearings in the spring of 2004 (and the presidential election), I don't recall any Commissioner that was too shy to say that the Administration tried to withhold key information from the panel. In fact, panel members made that allegation repeatedly, especially in demanding public testimony from Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.

If the Pentagon had been that difficult about delivering documentation at the time, believe me, we would have heard about it.

Pointing the finger at the Pentagon is a clear concession by Kean, Hamilton, & Co. that the Commission can no longer credibly deny the Able Danger allegations and the uncomfortable questions that come with them.

Or the fallout:

The families of 9/11 victims are outraged that military spies were blocked from sharing key intelligence they believe could have averted the terrorist attacks – and are calling for a new commission to investigate.

"I’m angry that my son's death could have been prevented," Diana Horning, whose son was killed at the World Trade Center, told the New York Post. "It outrages me because it's taken four years to come out."

Horning and other family members of 9/11 victims are up in arms over the disclosure that the elite military intelligence unit "Able Danger" had identified Mohamed Atta and three other September 11 hijackers more than a year before the attacks, but military lawyers stopped the unit from sharing that information with the FBI.

"I don't think you can understate the significance here," Mindy Kleinberg, a member of the September 11 Advocates, a coalition of family members, told the Post.

"You're talking about the four lead hijackers. If we shared information and did surveillance on them, there is no telling what we could have uncovered and what we could have thwarted.

"I think we do need a new commission, and that's really sad."

Or the scrutiny:

The military intelligence official who first spoke publicly about Able Danger, the pre-September 11 task force looking for terror threats to the United States, went to Capitol Hill Thursday to brief staffers who work for Senator Arlen Specter, R-PA, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

A congressional source told Fox News that hearings could be in the cards this fall over Able Danger's findings and its omission from the September 11 commission's report issued last year.

This means - assuming "Snarlin' Arlen" doesn't allow the usual Donk suspects on his Committee to hijack the proceedings, always a big "if" - that all the attention on Sick Willie's foreign policy negligence as it relates to the facilitation of the rise of al Qaeda to the level of national security threat that was deflected and obfuscated by the 9/11 Commission will come boomeranging home with a vengeance.

Want a sneak preview? Try the newest revelation from Foggy Bottom:

A year before the September 11 attacks, a U.S. diplomat assured a top official of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban regime that international sanctions on that country would be lifted if it expelled Osama bin Laden, newly declassified documents show. ...

"The ambassador added that the U.S. was not against the Taliban, per se," and "was not out to destroy the Taliban," Ambassador William B. Milam wrote in the secret cable to Washington. Milam told the Taliban official, whose name is excised from the declassified document, that bin Laden was the main impediment to better relations between the Taliban and the United States.

"If the U.S. and the Taliban could get past bin Laden, we would have a different kind of relationship," Milam said he told the official.

This was insane. bin Laden was the Taliban, and vice versa - why the hell else did the al Qaeda chieftain go there in the first place? Distinguishing between OBL and the Taliban was not legalistic hair-splitting, it was sheer mental dysfunction. Why on Earth would we have wanted "better relations" with a regime that did not differ from the man we wanted them to turn over to us - and which we could have had from the Sudanese, his previous hosts, on three separate occasions just three years earlier - one jot or tittle? Why weren't the Clintonoids issuing an ultimatum to Mullah Omar and friends instead - "Give us Osama or we'll send you to your seventy-two virgins early, and they'll all look like Cindy Sheehan"?

That is the sort of questioning against which the 9/11 Commission served as a shield instead of as its vehicle. And that's why its credibility, and the Bill Clinton legacy - and perhaps the presidential ambitions of his dragon wife - are acquiring the stench of a two-month-old cabbage.