No [Guts], No Glory

When last we visited the Able Danger disaster, the 9/11 Commission was reeling, its credibility disintegrating like the face of Walter Donovan after drinking from the wrong grail, and the Clintonoids' deflection of their culpability for allowing the 9/11 attacks onto George Bush was in tatters.

Then, in the space of a single weekend, the tables are completely turned? And by elements of the same center-right blogosphere that had those Clinton-ass-covers on the run? I wish somebody had warned me about that looking glass through which I obviously must have taken a wrong turn, because I don't know if I can find my way back to the quantum reality I somehow left.

This chickenheartedness can be traced to a defiant about-face by the 9/11 Commission that was little more than a reiteration of their original conclusions - which, as John Podhoretz (one of the most overeager tent-folders of the past few days) pointed out late last week, were specifically designed to debunk the connections between Mohammed Atta (and, by extention, al Qaeda) and Saddam Hussein, an objective into which the Able Danger revelations threw a big, fat monkey wrench by screwing up their preferred pre-9/11 timeline.

In essence, Tom Kean, Lee Hamiliton & Co. halted their retreat, raised Representative Curt Weldon's bet, pushed all their chips into the pot, and, with the enthusiastic assistance of Time magazine, sneered, "You're bluffing!"

This is itself a huge bluff, a massive piece of obfuscation attempting to muddy the waters by burying the issue in redundant paper without actually refuting Congressman Weldon's allegations.

Weldon is still in the game. But it is (parts of) the right side of the blogosphere that are trying to fold the hand.

The ordinarily sensible Jim Geraghty provides a comprehensive example of this puzzling phenomenon:

Thank you, Congressman Weldon, for getting just enough of this story right (the existence of Able Danger and its mission) to get folks like myself and lot of others to take you seriously. Those others weren't just bloggers, by the way - I'm talking about the New York Times, the AP, the Bergen Record...

And thanks a [really bad word] heap for getting more than enough wrong that we look like idiots for trusting you.

You know, like that rather key element that Able Danger had picked out four of the 9/11 hijackers and recommended they be picked up by the FBI. I can see how you could mix up that pesky little detail.

Thank you for making all of these stunning allegations without any supporting evidence. Thank you for not having any documents, memos, or anything beyond allegations from an anonymous former defense intelligence guy who is unwilling to come forward and speak on the record.

Thanks for using us to goose your book sales this month.

Wow. From "these guys [i.e. the 9/11 commission] stink" to taking cheap shots at Weldon's book, all in the space of a hundred hours. Way to go, Jim. Your flight to the tall grass couldn't have been any more ignominious if Richard Ben Veniste had been operating your keyboard by wireless remote.

I dunno. I'm not a big-time pundit like J-Pod or J-Ger. I'm just a lunchpail-toting, polo-shirted, bean-counting (and -eating) working man sitting in an upper corner of the country who hacks away at this stuff for fun. And maybe that's to my advantage, since I don't have to fret about upholding a "professional reputation," for which, it should be emphasized, neither Podhoretz nor Geraghty did any favors by their full-bore linear panics.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not discounting the perfectly legit criticism of Weldon for going public with these allegations before having all his ducks in a row. This is the political big-leagues, the game is hardball, and before you venture onto the battlefield it is simple prudence to have all your armor donned and fastened securely in place. Leave the slightest chink, the smallest opening, and the other side can blunt your attack and throw you on the defensive in a heartbeat.

My problem with Podhoretz and Geraghty is their obsequious alacrity. Rather than saying, in essence, "Okay, Congressman Weldon, the ball's back in your court" - the point at which the TKS master was Sunday morning - and waiting to see additional evidence and/or testimony, they just categorically, and prematurely, dismiss the whole thing out of hand.

And, may I add, with this preamble to the aforelinked screed....

Just heard from a guy I trust that the Pentagon will be releasing information regarding Able Danger in the not too distant future. The short version: Don't expect any bombshells. [emphasis added]

....roaringly hypocritically as well? "I just heard from my unnamed source that Weldon's unnamed source is full of baloney" (almost, BTW, a verbatim quote of Podhoretz in an unusually disapprobious exchange in the Corner with Andrew McCarthy)? How long have they had glass houses in Ankara, Jim?

Cripes, in the very same post, as well as this one, Geraghty is forced to sheepishly backpedal from the excesses of his "frustration with the congressman," including a quasi-Durbinesque apology for the book crack. All of which he could have avoided if he, and J-Pod, had just bided their time for a few days and given Weldon a chance to either put up or shut up.

We appear to be getting the former:

Representative Curt Weldon said Monday that one or more members of an elite team of military intelligence officers who had identified al Qaeda hijacker Mohamed Atta as a terrorist threat two years before he led the 9/11 attacks are prepared to go public.

"I can guarantee you that you will be able to have one on your show," Weldon told ABC Radio host Sean Hannity. "You might want to go with your TV show with this, because it will be a major story," the Pennsylvania Republican urged. "And you can interview him directly."...

"We even now have located the FBI liaison officer who they talked to about setting up the meetings [with the FBI]," he told Hannity. "That person acknowledged that there was a request made to formally bring the FBI in.

"But they couldn't do it because they were told, no," he explained.

This Able Danger intelligence officer is Lieutenant-Colonel Tony Shaffer, who will be interviewed on Fox tonight.

The Washington Times threw this contribution into the cauldron (via CQ):

Pentagon lawyers, fearing a public-relations "blow back," blocked a military intelligence unit from sharing information with the FBI that four suspected al Qaeda terrorists were in the country prior to the September 11 attacks, after determining they were here legally, a former Defense Department intelligence official says.

Members of an intelligence unit known as Able Danger were shut out of the September 11 commission investigation and final report, the official said, despite briefing commission staff members on two occasions about the Mohamed Atta-led terrorist cell and telling them of a lockdown of information between the Defense Department and the FBI.

The intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Pentagon lawyers "were afraid of a blow back" - similar to the public's response to the FBI-led assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which left more than 70 people dead - and decided to withhold the information from the FBI.

Curiouser and curiouser. I know I'm curious. If Geraghty and Podhoretz (and, apparently, Charles Krauthammer as well) are truly "journalists," why aren't they?

Rush Limbaugh discussed that on his radio program today. And as usual, he agreed with me:

You know, I've been reading the conservative blogs on this. One of the things I've noticed on conservative blogs - this is Rush here out to make big friends in the movement. I have noticed in these conservative blogs, and not just in this story, but I think there's so many pseudo-intellectuals out there on these blogs. Some of them are very good and some of them are really nice guys, but some of them have just got caught up in the blog chatter and they're trying to be the smartest people in the room, and I've also noticed this about some - not just bloggers; I shouldn't just limit it to them - but some of the people in the conservative movement are doing their best to avoid being considered part of what they think is the kook fringe of the
right wing, and I gather from reading Geraghty's note here to me today that that's one of the things that bothers him. He's afraid that we jumped to the conspiracy theory on the word of a congressman that it can't be backed up and can't be proven and they all look like idiots, so now I think this might have been what Krauthammer was doing to run to the middle here to make sure you don't get tarred much as Cindy Sheehan is getting tarred, or some of the left-wing kooks are getting tarred....

If you look at the conservative movement now it's a bunch of competitors. The conservative movement has changed drastically." I mean, it's grown. This is not a complaint. I'm just illustrating. It's gotten big, and there's so many people in it that they all think they're the leaders, they all think they run it or they all think they're the smartest of the movement or whatever - and so there's competition in the movement now, and there isn't a singular source that will welcome any new conservative arrival in and anoint them, if you will, and say welcome to the team and have them join the team. There is no team now, despite what you people may think, there is no conservative team. There's conservative competition. There are conservative beliefs, and there are conservative principles and those are hard and fast and they are true. But there's also mass competition. You've got half the conservative movement that lives and dies to be invited on cable television shows that nobody watches. Half of them live and die just to be on TV. Half of them live and die to have their names published there or mentioned there or whatever. It's sort of comical to watch because I've been through it myself many, many, many moons ago, but what it all adds up to is that that's why you're going to have factions, as you've noticed, in the conservative movement because there are elements of the conservative movement that, frankly, embarrass other elements. I will tell you for a fact that many of the intellectual, pseudo-intellectuals hate talk radio. They despise the conservatives of talk radio. They don't like them; they think they give conservatives a bad name. They think this because of what the [Extreme] press writes about talk radio. These are people that want to be accepted by the [Extreme] press, they want to be quoted by the [Extreme] press, and yet they're conservatives, and there's also a branch of the conservative movement which does not want to be tied at all to any element of the conservative movement that can't get over Bill Clinton.

So I think that when this Able Danger thing came up, Sean, and when what Weldon was saying made the focus of the Clinton administration, there are a lot of onservatives, "I'm not going there. We have not been able to nail Clinton and I'm not going to look like all I've got is Bill Clinton on my mind. I'm going forward. I don't care about Bill Clinton. He's past history. It doesn't make any difference to me and I don't want to be lumped in with those neophyte conservatives who can't get over Bill Clinton." I think that's why you get some separation and distance on this story....But now you've got factions of the conservative movement just like you've got factions of the liberal movement, and I think that's why when you get a story like this, these various factions anchor their positions and in many cases some of these positions are anchored so as not to get disfavor from the [Extreme] press. I hate to say it but here's a Washington, DC culture and it exists and it affects to one degree or another virtually everybody who lives there, liberal, conservative, atheist, Catholic, Jewish, doesn't matter, affects them all. [emphases added]

Some conservative pundits conflate professional reputation with what the other side says and thinks about them, and when the going gets the slightest bit bumpy they bail because they are unable to distinguish between the two. And since I do not inhabit the Beltway habitat, I do not lug around that emotional (and sometimes mental) disability. In a nutshell.

Ditto Ed Morrissey, who, throughout the past week, has urged two things: patience and a congressional investigation to get to the bottom of what the 9/11 commission was supposed to have gotten to the bottom of in the first place. His latest post provides an excellent synopsis of the current stage of this controversy:

The Commission has a big problem now. As long as Weldon's sources remained anonymous, they could easily dismiss them as a figment of Weldon's imagination or worse, phantoms created to help him sell a book. Now we have at least one American officer risking his career to tell the public what we should have already known about 9/11, and what the Commission failed to tell us.

It appears that the source of J-Ger's frustration is about to call and force the commission to show its cards. And then we'll see which side ends up with egg on its face.

UPDATE: Here's the gist of Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer's interview:

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview that the small, highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger had identified by name the terrorist ringleader, Mohammed Atta, as well three of the other future hijackers by mid-2000, and had tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the F.B.I.'s Washington field office to share the information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the September 11 plot was still being planned.

"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.

He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Defense Department's Special Operations Command had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States. "It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.

Hmm. Just like Representative Weldon said. I'd say the chicken-twats are taking a lean in Mermaid Man's and Barnacle Boy's direction.

As a bonus, the Cap'n throws in this non-Weldonian bombshell, via the suddenly muckraking "Grey Lady":

State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.

In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan.

The declassified documents, obtained by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and provided to the New York Times, shed light on a murky and controversial chapter in Mr. bin Laden's history: his relocation from Sudan to Afghanistan as the Clinton administration was striving to understand the threat he posed and explore ways of confronting him.

Before 1996, Mr. bin Laden was regarded more as a financier of terrorism than a mastermind. But the State Department assessment, which came a year before he ublicly urged Muslims to attack the United States, indicated that officials suspected he was taking a more active role, including in the bombings in June 1996 that killed 19 members American soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. [emphasis added]

This would be the same Bill Clinton who, once again this very week, pretended to wail and gnash his teeth that he didn't get a chance to "attack" bin Laden after the USS Cole bombing, just as he denied before the 9/11 Commission sixteen months ago ever having had a chance to take OBL off the Sudan's hands in 1996 despite being caught admitting it on tape in a February 2002 speech.

And, curiously, these State Department documents are not even hinted at in the supposedly authoritative, "final word" 9/11 commission report.

This is outgrowing Curt Weldon and the boys from NRO. The unraveling of the cover-up that was the 9/11 commission is gaining a life and momentum of its own, and as Mr. Morrissey suggests, "[b]y this time next week, the narrative of this report will demonstrate nothing but an attempt by the bureaucrats to hang the blame on the operatives that actually had it right all along."

And maybe, just maybe, a significant, if not mortal, blow will have been dealt to the aura of inevitability of the Clinton restoration.

UPDATE 8/17: Judging by Jim Geraghty's posts thus far today (here, here, here, annnnnnd here), in which the name of Curt Weldon isn't mentioned even indirectly, it appears that the TKS master is taking the "Emily Latella" approach. You know, "Never mind..."

Also, he trots out another anonymous source again ("a former Department of Justice aide under former Attorney General John Ashcroft:). Whereas at last count at least two of Representative Weldon's sources have come forward publicly, with more to come.

If you plan on writing a book, Jim, I would advise you to put it off for a while. Some of us have long memories.

UPDATE II: As goes Barnacle Boy, so goes Mermaid Man.... [Here's the reference for those appellations, BTW, along with pics. Yes, I have grade school-age children - how'd ya guess?]

UPDATE III: Greetings and salutations, Galvin Opinion readers!