Able Danger Hearings, Round 2

Or maybe that should read, "Able Danger hearing [singular] #2." Generally speaking, when you hear about a congressional committee convening hearings, you think of more than one day of them, which was all that the Senate Judiciary Committee gave to the Able Danger matter last week.

Of course, you generally don't see hearings targets who aren't Clintonoids withdraw all their designated witnesses on the eve of the hearing [singular], either. But apparently the testimony that was offered by Eric Kleinstadt on the orders he received in 2000 to erase the Able Danger database was enough for Chairman Arlen Specter to schedule a second day of hearings for early next week. And the bipartisanly negative reaction to the Pentagon's abrupt gag order was enough to prompt them to do another about-face [h/t CQ]:

The Defense Department on Friday reversed its earlier decision to bar key witnesses from testifying about just how much information the U.S. government had on the September 11 hijackers before they led the attacks that killed 3,000 people.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has therefore scheduled a second hearing for next week on the formerly secret Pentagon intelligence unit called "Able Danger". ...

The Senate Judiciary Committee said in a statement Friday that the Pentagon now will allow five witnesses to testify. Among those are Army Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, Navy Captain Scott Phillpott and defense contractor John Smith.

Annnnnnd clearly the Exteme Media is fearful that the testimony of the Pentagon's witnesses has the potential to destroy any chance of Bill Clinton having a non-liquid legacy - or his wife ever getting back to the White House:

The Washington Post is challenging the credibility of five members of the Army's elite Able Danger intelligence unit, saying there's no evidence they ever produced a chart identifying lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a terrorist threat.

The paper declined, however, to dispute the authenticity of a videotape showing a copy of the Able Danger chart, which was displayed by Representative Curt Weldon during a May 2002 speech to the Heritage Foundation.

And what they do dispute relies upon smears, unsubstantiated allegations of "changing stories," and sheer brain-dead skepticism that smacks far more of wishful thinking than debunkment. Even the supposed demurral offered by Bush National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley is far more Clintillian than it is unequivocal:

"Mr. Hadley does not recall any chart bearing the name or photo of Mohamed Atta," Frederick L. Jones II told the paper. "NSC staff reviewed the files of Mr. Hadley as well as of all NSC personnel. That search has turned up no chart."

However, the videotape of Congressman Weldon's speech to the Heritage Foundation revealing the Able Danger scandal shows not only that said chart did exist, but that Weldon gave it to Hadley in November 2001 - and that Hadley exclaimed, "I've got to show this to the man" - meaning President Bush. And one of the now ungagged witnesses, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, confirms that the chart Weldon gave to Hadley featured a photo of Mohamed Atta.

That Bush may have known about Able Danger that long ago is raising red flags among his base that he can ill-afford right now:

How stupid do they think we are? Don’t they realize they are creating more suspicion, not less? Why do Bush people keep protecting Clinton people from public scrutiny?

For a life-long conservative Republican and Bush voter in 2000 and 2004 like yours truly, that last question is especially galling. It was bad enough early in Bush’s first term when he signed an executive order keeping the truth about Bill Clinton’s midnight pardon spree behind closed doors. I swallowed hard and accepted the White House’s executive privilege claim on that one.

But the Able Danger hearing capped a long series of troubling decisions that tortured credulity such as Bush increasing federal spending twice as fast as Clinton, expanding entitlements at a pace only Lyndon Johnson could match, signing a campaign finance law that limits political speech and refusing to veto even the most outrageous examples of congressional pork barreling.

The last straw came the day before William Dugan, an assistant to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said to the Senate panel “I don’t know” when asked if Able Danger had identified Atta. That’s when the Pentagon barred testimony by the five officials who have said they worked on the program and recall seeing the terrorist’s name on a chart during the Clinton administration.

Either the powers-that-be think most people are too stupid to figure out that a whitewash is in process or they assume most people aren’t paying attention and there is little to fear from the Senate. They will be proven right if Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate panel, doesn’t quickly start issuing subpoenas to get to the bottom of this scandal.

Mr. Tapscott concludes by lamenting that, "[I]t's clear the Washington Establishment takes care of its own no matter which party happens to be in power. Call them Republicrats."

The last time I heard conservative grassroots grumbling like this was...after the Bush41 tax increase in late 1990.

And it's far from isolated grumbling, either. NRO's Andrew McCarthy considers the purging of the Able Danger database to be as big or bigger a scandal than whether they had successfully ID'd Mohammed Atta, and wants to know why the Pentagon is still defending those actions five years later:

Regardless of the ultimate resolution of the controversy over whether Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers were identified by Able Danger long before the attacks, there is no defending the destruction of valuable data. Nonetheless, that's just what DoD is trying to do. And central to this dismaying effort, four years out from 9/11, is the revival — as if it ever really went away — of the spirit (or, better, dispirit) that pervaded the Justice Department in the bad old days of "the wall."

Specifically, to justify what happened in 2000, DoD is today reading regulations that readily permit effective intelligence analysis as if acquiring information and, God forbid, sharing it, are the gravest of sins. I use "reading" with hesitation. For it's hard to understand how anyone literate in the English language could read the governing regulations to say what the Pentagon is reading them to say.

McCarthy calls this the "suicide ethos":

The culture, the message to our forces, could not be more patent: protecting American lives is secondary to not being vexed by the ACLU and its fellow travelers. Even if proving our hearts are pure means gratuitously and utterly unnecessarily expunging goo-gobs of critical intelligence about our enemies in the middle of a war in which we know they are trying to kill us.

That this culture can possibly still be in place in the agencies that are charged with defending us against such attacks under a President whose raison d'etre has been the GWOT for the past four years is flat-out unbelievable. But I suppose it does help explain quite a few things - why Bush agreed to creation of the 9/11 Commission after initially resisting it; why the Republicans let the Democrats completely hijack it into an all-out Bush-bashfest; why the White House never uttered a word in its own self-defense (doing so would have necessarily cast blame upon the Clintonoids); and why the Bushies were so quick to implement the now-discredited 9/11 Commission's bureaucratic reshuffling recommendations almost verbatim (and, for that matter, the earlier such reshuffling that gave us the halcyon Department of Homeland Security whose FEMA was the recent target of such public acclimation).

Problems cannot be fixed until one knows what went wrong. And part of determining went wrong necessarily involves affixing blame. Dubya has never been willing to do that, and as a result it appears increasingly obvious that the problems that led to 9/11 have not been fixed. And that, in turn, makes it increasingly likely that when the next big attack hits, that blame will land squarely on his shoulders - and even if he was inclined to deflect it, he wouldn't be able to credibly do so.

There's a reason why nice guys finish last. However George Bush managed to get around that dynamic, and whether by Specter's hearings or a big bang someplace we really don't want one, its piper is going to collect sooner or later. And that price tag is going to be steep, indeed.

In more ways than one.