Able Danger Roundup

I was meaning to do this, and was way behind on it, even before all this Katrina business. But as the hurricane recovery on the Gulf Coast proceeds briskly and the stock-issue Bushophobic hysteria lashed to its backside slowly recedes along with the traction it never really had, the Able Danger scandal needs to be brought back front & center where it belongs.

We'll focus on Cap'n Ed's compilation in the Weekly Standard:

The birth of the [9/11] Commission can trace itself to the mistrust of Congress, which had tried - and failed - to effectively investigate the circumstances of 9/11 and the al Qaeda threat through a joint inquiry between the House and Senate Intelligence Committees prior to forming this commission.

In other words, the Democrats couldn't hijack that inquiry into a Bush-bashing expedition that would divert from and cover up the Clinton administration's criminal negligence in letting al Qaeda rise to the level of serious national security threat. This provides damning context for Crazy Nancy's eerily similar demand vis-a-vie FEMA and Katrina relief yesterday.

The vestiges of the rancor in which the Commission was forged shows clearly in the language of the Act itself, which demands an exact method of selection for the panel members. The Act authorized ten commissioners, no more than five of which could have the same party affiliation. None could currently work in federal, state, or local governments. Republicans and Democrats got five selections each, and only one of those selections came from the White House, Commission chair Thomas Kean. [emphasis added]

Now why would the Bushies have agreed to such an arrangement when they had to know that a combination of five rabid Democrats - including the architect of the policy that made us most vulnerable to the 9/11 attacks (Jamie Gorelick) - and, depending on your RINO threshold, at least three and perhaps four 'Pubbies who could be counted on for their utter partian uselessness, was guaranteed to turn that "commission" into a dry run at an impeachment inquiry? And in an f'ing election year to boot! What the hell was the President thinking?

In July 22, 2004, the Commission delivered its final report. In its triumphant press release, the panel proclaimed its unanimity in its investigation and conclusions. The second paragraph stakes its claim a claim to being the definitive and final word on the 9/11 plot and recommendations for reorganizing the bureaucracy of intelligence agencies to prevent future terrorist attacks.

The report met with overwhelming political approval. Politicians fell over themselves to endorse not just the fact-finding results of the book but also its complete slate of recommendations.

Naturally. Not only is that the general hubristic, self-congratulatory nature of such bureaucratic entities, but the Donks had a great deal to hide for the sake of Sick Willie's legacy quest, most Republicans are still scared to death of the man to this day and wouldn't take him on when he was in office and at his lowest ebb (think the 1995 budget ambush), and for statists of both parties this was an opportunity to engage in their fondest pasttime, bureaucracy-building. I guess the rush from all the organizational remodeling that gave us the Department of Homeland Security (and its crown jewel, FEMA....) a year and change earlier was starting to wear off.

So they published the conclusion that sanitized and absolved and exonerated Bill Clinton, hung all the blame on George Bush (eight months trmping eight years), and also denied any connection, 9/11-related or otherwise, between al Qaeda and any of the "terror master" regimes in Iran, Syria, or Iraq in order to undermine the central premise and justification for the GWOT.

It would be the perfect cover for burying inconvenient facts like Able Danger like the corpse of Jimmy Hoffa was (rumoredly) buried under Giants Stadium.

Happily, that effort didn't quite succeed.

The Special Operations Command data-mining program, which according to three public witnesses identified Mohammed Atta as a potential terrorist 18 months before September 11, wasn't included in the final report and was apparently ignored by the Commission's staff on at least two occasions. When confronted by this new evidence, the Commission changed its story several times over one week, eventually settling on a rebuttal which hinged on discrediting the one witness who had come forward. By the time another week had gone by, two more witnesses had appeared - and further damaged the Commission's credibility.

As a result, the "triumphant report" has fallen to pieces, as for some "mysterious" reason, all of the following items "somehow" got omitted from it:

* The target=_blank>trial and conviction of Mohammed Afroze in India, for his part in a conspiracy to use airplanes to bomb four overseas targets on 9/11/01 using commercial flights out of Heathrow Airport in London.

* The second memo from U.S. District Attorney Mary Jo White in response to the notorious memo from Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick, warning that the implications of the memo will create insurmountable obstacles for prevention of terrorist attacks in the United States. In fact, the report barely mentions the Gorelick memo at all.... [my emphasis]

That discredits the entire 9/11 Commission all by itself, and exposes it as the Clintonoid coverup it was from day one and remains to this day.

* A July 21, 2001 editorial in a state-run Iraqi newspaper, al-Nasiriyah, which predicted the three targets of the September 11 attacks two months beforehand. This editorial read was read into the Congressional record by Senator Fritz Hollings on September 12, 2002.

* On July 26, 2001, an Iranian espionage agent told CIA agents in Baku, Azerbaijan, that Osama bin Laden would attack the United States on 9/11 using six men who had already entered the country via Iran. When pressed for his sources, the agent told them that Iranian intelligence knew all about the plot.

* The discovery and arrest of two Iraqi spies in Germany in February 2001, which the Germans claimed at the time exposed an extensive Iraqi espionage network operating in several German cities - at the same time three of the four 9/11 lead hijackers traveled to or through Germany, the only time it ever happened after their successful entry into the United States. Almost six months to the day before the 9/11 attacks, an Arabic newspaper in Paris described the arrests as relating to the suspicion that radical Islamists, and specifically Osama bin Laden, had started working with the Iraqis to target American interests around the world.

* A memo from the State Department warned Bill Clinton in 1996 that its intelligence services had determined that the United States had to stop Osama bin Laden from relocating to Afghanistan, or al Qaeda would grow into an even more dangerous threat. The report also fails to mention a later Clinton administration effort to offer the Taliban official recognition if they handed bin Laden over to our custody.

* German intelligence analysts concluded in 2002 that radical Islamist terrorists such as al Qaeda worked with Iraqi intelligence services through contacts in the
German neo-Nazi community.

* As Stephen Hayes points out, the Commission failed to include Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and Abdul Rahman Yasin - despite their connections to the first World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 hijackers.

The bottom line is that, whether from ideological blindness, sheer stupidity, or outright treason, or some combination of the three, the Clinton administration allowed the plot that ended up wiping out three thousand American civilian lives on September 11th, 2001. Rather than own up to it and accept the disgrace they had richly earned, Bill Clinton's defenders embarked instead on a campaign of audacious and frenzied buck-passing, finger-pointing, and scapegoating against which the Bush White House offered up no defense (sound familiar after the past ten days...?).

Well, sometimes the truth can be a stubborn thing, as we're all going to get the chance to see for ourselves (via CQ - but then you probably knew that...):

The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Wednesday [August 31st] that it was investigating reports from two military officers that a highly classified Pentagon intelligence program identified the September 11 ringleader as a potential terrorist more than a year before the attacks.

The committee's chairman, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in an interview that he was scheduling a public hearing on September 14th "to get to the bottom of this" and that the military officers "appear to have credibility."

The senator said his staff had confirmed reports from the two officers that employees of the intelligence program tried to contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2000 to discuss the work of the program, known as Able Danger.

I don't know if these hearings have been rescheduled to accommodate the John Roberts hearings, which were deferred by the passing of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, but either way you can be sure that Judiciary Donks like Chucky, the Massachusetts Manatee, Leaky, and Ali Dickbar al-Durbini will be in full partisan Rambo mode. I hope Messrs. Shaffer and Phillpott, and private contractor J.D. Smith, are prepared for the crucible into which they'll be stepping, and that Committee Republicans will at long last engage their character assassins in like-kind.

Both the truth and American national security demand it.