WHAT DID the 9/11 Commission know and when did they know it? That's what I want somebody with subpoena power to ask about Operation Able Danger. Or, as ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh said to me this week, "Why is the 9/11 Commission talking about hurricanes and tunnels and all these other things when it looks like they may have missed the single most important fact with respect to Sept. 11?"
Freeh was answering my request for a response to comments made by Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean on "Meet the Press" last weekend.
Operation Able Danger was an intelligence data-mining process that, according to several participants, identified Mohamed Atta well in advance of 9/11 as a potential bad guy. One of those individuals, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, has told me that in the summer of 2000, government lawyers prevented Able Danger representatives from getting the information about Atta to the FBI.
"We didn't make it to the FBI, and that was the problem," he told me. "We had information initiated by the Army. It was what they call 'open source' information which suggested that some of those bad guys, including Atta and three of his associates, were themselves associated with the Brooklyn cell. That was information that the lawyers said, 'Ah, they are here legally,' and put stickies over their faces."
The response of government lawyers to the identification by Able Danger of Mohamed Atta was to put a Post-it note over his face, literally taking him off the government radar screen.
Fast-forward two years after 9/11. Shaffer is in Afghanistan. His intelligence work would earn him a Bronze Star. While he was in Afghanistan, the word went out that the 9/11 Commission was coming to town and anyone with info about events of significance pre-9/11 should make themselves known. He did, to no less than the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow. He told me that he told Zelikow about Able Danger and Atta. "My bottom line to them was that through a data-processing exercise, we were able to identify two of the cells which conducted the 9/11 attack to include Atta."
You'd think that the Atta revelation would have been one of the most significant aspects of the work of the 9/11 Commission. Instead, it wasn't even mentioned in the 664-page final report.
Rep. Curt Weldon has appropriately been on the warpath asking why the 9/11 Commission was silent about Able Danger. And he wants to know what happened to the chart that was presented in the summer of 2000 - the one that got the "stickies." Weldon is not the only one asking questions. So too is Freeh, who wrote a widely circulated Wall Street Journal article on the subject last month. Tim Russert asked the commission co-chairs to respond to Freeh.
Hamilton told Russert: "Look, we looked at Able Danger very, very carefully. We do not think there was anything there of great significance. Now, something could come out in the future. I don't know. But in Mr. Freeh's article he did not present any new evidence at all. "Our investigators were informed about Able Danger. We requested all of the documents relating to Able Danger. We reviewed these documents. We had investigators meet with some of these people in Afghanistan and other places. The bottom line is that they can furnish no documentary evidence to support their charges that they had a chart, for example, with Mohamed Atta's name on it."
Kean agreed: "We had an awful lot of people coming forward, 50 or 60, saying they saw Mohamed Atta here, they saw Mohamed Atta there; they had this and that. There was absolutely no evidence to back this up.
"There still isn't any evidence to back it up. If people want to look into it, they're welcome to. We still haven't seen the evidence to indicate it. We saw every file. The Pentagon denies it. They say they haven't gotten any information."
Freeh called the response of Hamilton and Kean "silly." He said the Able Danger participants who have come forward "are not informants or criminals who have to prove their case. They are intelligence officers who had that job to perform." "I take exception to this notion that it was fully investigated. The longest period of time they had was 10 days... "How could you fully investigate, with all due respect to Mr. Hamilton who is not an investigator, a fact of that potential significance within 10 days?" Freeh asked.
"As for me reviewing new evidence, that is not my job. It was the 9/11 Commission job to go out and not only find, but to fully and fairly evaluate evidence, and how could they do that in 10 days, it is ridiculous," Freeh said.
While I was interviewing Freeh, Weldon called. He was much more blunt. "Lee Hamilton has just lied to the American people. They did NO investigation."
Posted by: Steve ||
12/08/2005 10:55 ||
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"If people want to look into it, they're welcome to."
But in the meantime...LOOK at this report card thinga-ma-bobbie.
From Eye on the UN (hat top LGF)
As a map of 'Palestine' without the state of Israel is showcased by the United Nations. This even was held at the Un Headquarters - New York, America.
Pictures at link.
This map was prominently displayed by the UN on November 29, 2005 at a public gathering at UN Headquarters, in the presence of all top three UN officials, the Secretary General, and the Presidents of the UN Security Council and the General Assembly. It purports to be a "map of Palestine." Israel, a UN member state for 56 years, is not on the map. Even the UN General Assembly partition lines of November 29, 1947 marking a Jewish and Arab state, which pre-date this 1948 map, do not appear.
As the "map of Palestine" without the state of Israel stands in the background, Secretary-General Kofi Annan addresses the public meeting at UN Headquarters. The anniversary of the UN partition vote that survivors of the concentration camps celebrated, has been described by Secretary-General Annan as "a day of mourning and a day of grief." Palestinians, and Arab citizens more generally, refer to it as part of "Al-Nakba," meaning the "catastrophe" of the creation of the state of Israel.
In a moment which has been crafted to include the commemoration of suicide-bombers (from left to right) Nasser Al-Kidwa, Foreign Minister of the Palestinian Authority, President of the UN Security Council Andrey Denisov, President of the UN General Assembly Jan Eliasson, Chairman of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People Paul Badji, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, (and two others) rise at the outset of the November 29th UN meeting with these words from the Chair. "I invite everyone present to rise and observe a minute of silence in memory of all those who have given their lives for the cause of the Palestinian people and the return of peace between Israel and Palestine."
Kofi is honoring murders and killers. Peace between Israel and Palestine according to this 'meeting' means destruction of Israel - that is plainly shown by the map of Palistine without Israel.
Posted by: ed ||
12/08/2005 14:48 ||
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'Jihad' translates as 'strive hard' or 'struggle.' 'Kampf' translates as 'struggle.' So Oraina's kind of right again - The Koran is not Mien Kampf, but it's got a lot in common.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
