|
|
|
Jewish World Review August 15, 2005 / 10 Av, 5765 Able Danger — now they tell us By Jack Kelly
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The report of the 9/11 Commission, once a best seller and hailed by the news
media as the definitive word on the subject, must now be moved to the
fiction shelves.
The commission concluded, you'll recall, that the attacks on the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon couldn't have been prevented, and that if there was
negligence, it was as much the fault of the Bush administration (for moving
slowly on the recommendations of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard
Clarke) than of the Clinton administration.
Able Danger has changed all of that.
Able Danger was a military intelligence unit set up by Special Operations
Command in 1999. A year before the 9/11 attacks, Able Danger identified
hijack leader Mohammed Atta and the other members of his cell. But Clinton
administration officials stopped them — three times — from sharing this
information with the FBI.
The problem was the order Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick
made forbidding intelligence operatives from sharing information with
criminal investigators.
"They were stopped because the lawyers at that time in 2000 told them
Mohammed Atta had a green card (he didn't) and they could not go after
someone with a green card," said Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa), who brought the
existence of Able Danger to light.
The military spooks knew only that Atta and his confederates had links to
al Qaida. They hadn't unearthed their mission. But if the FBI had kept
tabs on them (a big if, given the nature of the FBI at the time), 9/11
almost certainly could have been prevented.
What may be a bigger scandal is that the staff of the 9/11 Commission knew
of Able Danger and what it had found, but made no mention of it in its
report. This is as if the commission which investigated the attack on Pearl
Harbor had written its final report without mentioning the Japanese.
Weldon unveiled Able Danger in a speech on the House floor June 27th, but
his remarks didn't attract attention until the New York Times reported on
them Tuesday.
When the story broke, former Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Ind), co-chairman of the
9/11 Commission, at first denied the commission had ever been informed of
what Able Danger had found, and took a swipe at Weldon's credibility:
"The Sept. 11th Commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge
prior to 9/11 of the surveillance of Mohammed Atta or his cell," Hamilton
said. "Had we learned of it obviously it would have been a major focus of
our investigation."
Hamilton changed his tune after the New York Times reported Thursday, and
the Associated Press confirmed, that commission staff had been briefed on
Able Danger in October of 2003 and again in July of 2004.
It was in October of 2003 that Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy
Berger stole classified documents from the National Archives and destroyed
some. Berger allegedly was studying documents in the archives to help
prepare Clinton officials to testify before the 9/11 Commission. Was he
removing references to Able Danger? Someone should ask him before he is
sentenced next month.
After having first denied that staff had been briefed on Able Danger,
commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said no reference was made to it in the
final report because "it was not consistent with what the commission knew
about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks," the AP reported.
The CIA, and the 9/11 Commission, say Atta wasn't in Prague April 9th,
because his cell phone was used in Florida that day. But there is no
evidence of who used the phone. Atta could have lent it to a confederate.
(It wouldn't have worked in Europe anyway.)
But acknowledging that possibility would leave open the likelihood that
Saddam's regime was involved in, or at least had foreknowledge of, the 9/11
attacks. And that would have been as uncomfortable for Democrats as the
revelation that 9/11 could have been prevented if it hadn't been for the
Clinton administration's wall of separation.
The 9/11 Commission wrote history as it wanted it to be, not as it was. The
real history of what happened that terrible September day has yet to be
written.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
© 2005, Jack Kelly |
Columnists
Toons
Lifestyles | |||||||||||
>
