Friday, August 12, 2005
The 9/11 commission whitewash
But the Commission may be worse than I suspected. I'm referring to the Able Danger scandal. As AP reports, the Commission has confirmed that it "knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks, but decided not to include that in its final report." The admission that it had this information comes on the heels of its claim that, to the contrary, the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. That position became "inoperative" after Rep. Curt Weldon exposed it as false.
What's the significance of the Commission's admission that it had the information on Atta? Primarily, it has to do with the Gorelick intelligence "wall" I referred to above that prevented intelligence agents from comparing notes with criminal investigators. As John Podhoretz and Andrew McCarthy at NRO's Corner note, that wall, essentially a footnote in the Commission's report, may well have caused the linchpin of the 9/11 attacks to evade capture by American law enforcement. The exclusion of the information about Atta, and the subsequent claim that the Commission never received this information, would make sense in the context of a whitewash of the wall.
This developing story adds fuel to the argument that Jamie Gorelick, a primary architect of "the wall," should have been testifying under oath before the commission, rather than sitting as a member of it. Weldon, by the way, minced no words in blowing the whistle on the commission.
"The 9/11 commission took a very high-profile role in critiquing
intelligence agencies that refused to listen to outside information. The commissioners very publicly expressed their disapproval of agencies and departments that would not entertain ideas that did not originate in-house," Weldon wrote in his letter Wednesday night."Therefore it is no small irony," Weldon pointed out, "that the commission would in the end prove to be guilty of the very same offense when information of potentially critical importance was brought to its attention."
UPDATE: Powerline points us to a nice Jim Geraghty summary of important links, and a synopsis of what we do and do not know about the Able Danger situation.
He also includes the following speculation:
The 9/11 Commission staffers who felt the information about Able Danger wasn’t worth mentioning to their bosses could, conceivably, be imbeciles. Perhaps, more plausible, is that they had a particular view they wished the report to express, and the Able Danger revelations contradicted that view. Another possibility: These staffers in question didn’t tell Kean, Hamilton, Roemer, or Lehman, but they did tell another member or other members of the Commission, who instructed them to leave it out of the briefings, summaries, and reports given to Kean, Hamilton, Roemer, Lehman, and/or other members. (COUGHgorelickCOUGH)
No one has concretely tied this new information to the strange, felonious behavior of Sandy Berger, smuggling documents out of the National Archives. But boy, if the document in question related to Able Danger’s warning and the decision to not act upon it, his actions would make a lot more sense, wouldn’t they?
2 Comments:
By 
cakreiz, at
Fri Aug 12, 10:12:00 AM:
I was just getting ready to email you about this. I've noticed a complete dirth of commentary on centrist blogs (I consider myself a centrist). Presumably there's nothing on dailykos either! The lack of widespread coverage on this story is amazing. I recall the media's glee when certain commissioners were hammering C. Rice for the Administration's alleged failure to follow leads. Now this- and the predictable silence by the MSM. It's front-page news on the Right... but that's about it.
By TigerHawk, at
Fri Aug 12, 12:06:00 PM:
Had Clinton administration culpability in 9/11 been properly discussed during the presidential campaign, it would have been extremely difficult for the likes of Richard Clarke and other hangers on to criticize the Bush administration's tactics against the jihad.
