The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update VI

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I find it amusing how some on the right are falling over themselves to backtrack and walkback this Able Danger story. All their attention is fixated on Weldon but the real story is these Able Danger guys, not Weldon.

I mean come on, when you have the spokesperson, Al Felzenberg, saying:

There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn’t give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report. This information was not meshing with the other information that we had.

Shouldn’t this put red flags up in the air? There is no way he could of been in the US? Give me a freakin break. This is a well trained and well financed terrorist and the only way this guy could of been in the US is only with an ID that has his real name on it?

Mark Steyn puts it succinctly:

When the story broke, the commissioners denied they knew anything about “Able Danger.” Then they remembered they had known about it but had concluded it was no big deal and “decided not to include that in its final report.”

Why? Well, as Mr. Felzenberg says so disarmingly, “This information was not meshing with the other information.” As a glimpse into the commission mindset, that’s very interesting. September 11 happened, in part, because the various federal bureaucracies involved were unable to process information that didn’t “mesh” with conventional wisdom. Now we find the official commission intended to identify those problems and ensure they don’t recur is, in fact, guilty of the same fatal flaw. The new information didn’t “mesh” with the old information, so the commission disregarded it. But, hey, let’s not have a philosophical discussion; let’s keep it practical:

There was “no way” Atta could have been in the U.S. except when the official Immigration and Naturalization Service record says he was? Actually, there are plenty of ways. Ask the 15 million illegal immigrants: when a population half the size of Canada moves in without filling in a single INS form, why should Mohamed Atta go to all the trouble?

Did al Qaeda know about the illegal immigrant fast-track network? Yes, indeed. Fact: Four of the September 11 killers boarded the plane with identification obtained through activists for the “undocumented” at a 7-Eleven parking lot in Falls Church, Va. Think that was the jihad’s first and only experience with “undocumented” immigration?

Or take the 49th Parallel. Fact: On America’s northern border, no record is kept of individual visitors to the U.S. All that happens is a scanner photos your rear license plate. The scanner is said to be state-of-the-art, which means, as one Customs & Border official told me, it’s “officially” 75 percent accurate. The one time my own license plate was queried it turned out the scanner misread it.

So, just for a start, without any particular difficulty, a friend of Mohamed Atta could have rented a car for him in Montreal and driven him down to New York, and there would be no record to connect Atta to the vehicle anywhere in the U.S. or Canada.

Would al Qaeda types have such Montreal contacts? Absolutely. The city is a hotbed of Islamist cells and sympathizers.

Fact: The only Islamist terrorist attack prevented by the U.S. government prior to September 11, 2001, was the attempt to blow up Los Angeles International Airport by Ahmed Ressam, a Montrealer caught on the Washington/British Columbia frontier by an alert official who happened to notice he seemed a little sweaty. A different guard, a cooler Islamist, and it might just have been yet another routine unrecorded border crossing.

So, when the September 11 Commission starts saying there’s “no way” something can happen when it happens every single day of the week, you start to wonder what exactly is the point of an official investigation so locked-in to pre-set conclusions.

For example, they seemed oddly determined to fix June 3, 2000, as the official date of Atta’s first landing on American soil — though there were several alleged sightings of him before, including a bizarre story he had trained at Maxwell/Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. Atta was a very mobile guy in the years before September 11, shuttling between Germany, Spain, Afghanistan, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, the Philippines with effortless ease. I’ve no hard evidence of where he was in, say, April 2000. The period between late 1999 and May 2000 is, in many ways, a big blur. He might have been in Germany — or in Florida, attempting to get a U.S. Farm Service Agency loan for the world’s biggest crop duster, as reported by Agriculture Department official Johnell Bryant, local bank officials and others.

But I do know it’s absurd to suggest he was never in the United States until June 3, 2000, simply because the INS says so.

September 11 was a total government fiasco: INS, CIA, FBI, Federal Aviation Administration, all the hotshot acronyms failed spectacularly. But appoint an official commission and let them issue an official report and suddenly everyone says, oh, well, this is the official version of September 11. If they say something didn’t happen, it can’t possibly have happened.

Why is it that everyone is ready to throw the whole story away because the Commission say’s “nope, it’s not true”? Because of Weldon? Makes no sense at all, let the investigation play out….we’re all so worried about being portrayed like the leftists that we have all left our backbone at the door.

Something in this story smell’s fishy, too many things add up for it to be a hair brained scheme by Weldon. The one big fact that makes me believe in this story is Sandy Bergers burglary. We still do not know why he took what he took, but it sure does make sense, considered along with the timeline, to consider he took documents that pertain to this Atta intelligence.

Additionally The Washington Times prints today that they have interviewed a second Able Danger operative who confirms the first guy:

Pentagon lawyers, fearing a public-relations “blow back,” blocked a military intelligence unit from sharing information with the FBI that four suspected al Qaeda terrorists were in the country prior to the September 11 attacks, after determining they were here legally, a former Defense Department intelligence official says.

Members of an intelligence unit known as Able Danger were shut out of the September 11 commission investigation and final report, the official said, despite briefing commission staff members on two occasions about the Mohamed Atta-led terrorist cell and telling them of a lockdown of information between the Defense Department and the FBI.

The intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Pentagon lawyers “were afraid of a blow back” — similar to the public’s response to the FBI-led assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which left more than 70 people dead — and decided to withhold the information from the FBI.

The official said the decision was made at the Army’s Special Operations Command (SoCom) headquarters in Tampa, Fla.,which concluded that Atta, the ringleader of the September 11 hijackers, and the others were in the country legally and thus had the same legal protections as U.S. citizens.

“If something went wrong, SoCom felt it could get blamed,” the official said.

But Pentagon officials have said they have uncovered no specific intelligence data from the Able Danger unit concerning an Atta-led terrorist cell, other than a few intelligence analyses that mention his name, and September 11 commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton disputed the source of the information.

Did you read that? They uncovered no specific intelligence on Atta OTHER then a few intelligence analyses! WT holy F! Why weren’t those “few” analyses included in the final report? I mean come on, am I the only one left who smells something rotten here?

Ok, rant off.

Laura Rozen has news on the Anon poster I referred to in my earlier post who commented on Intel Dump. He has apparently come out of the closet:

Delco Times columnist Gil Spencer, who has long covered Curt Weldon’s Pennsylvania district, has just interviewed the Able Danger official who is going public tonight on Fox News. Spencer is the first journalist I am aware of to reveal the identity of the Able Danger official who originally briefed the 9/11 commission staff about Able Danger’s findings back in October 2003 at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. That official is DIA civilian and Army reservist Ltn. Col. Tony Shaffer. He served in a liaison capacity between Able Danger and the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, Florida, and he flew into Afghanistan with special ops in a boots on the ground capacity. (Shaffer confirmed to Spencer that he is indeed the “Anonymous” who has posted some comments about Able Danger over at Inteldump, by the way.) More soon on their interview. It’s still a bit vague as to what exactly on Atta and the “Brooklyn cell” the Able Danger team came up with, but Shaffer did tell Spencer that the Able Danger team briefed then Special Ops commander, now Army Chief of Staff Pete Schoomaker on their findings. Shaffer also told Spencer that he had met with Pentagon intel czar Stephen Cambone in the E-ring today about the Able Danger issue, so clearly the Pentagon is paying attention. Stay tuned.

More from the NYT:

A military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly. The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the F.B.I.

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview that the small, highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger had identified by name the terrorist ringleader, Mohammed Atta, as well three of the other future hijackers by mid-2000, and had tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the F.B.I.’s Washington field office to share the information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 plot was still being planned.

“I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued,” Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.

He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Defense Department’s Special Operations Command had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States. “It was because of the chain of command saying we’re not going to pass on information – if something goes wrong, we’ll get blamed,” he said.

The Defense Department did not dispute the account from Colonel Shaffer, a 42-year-old native of Kansas City, Mo., who is the first military officer associated with the so-called data-mining program to come forward and acknowledge his role.

At the same time, the department said in a statement that it was “working to gain more clarity on this issue” and that “it’s too early to comment on findings related to the program identified as Able Danger.” The F.B.I. referred calls about Colonel Shaffer to the Pentagon.

… Colonel Shaffer said that he had provided information about Able Danger and its identification of Mr. Atta in a private meeting in October 2003 with members of the Sept. 11 commission staff when they visited Afghanistan, where he was then serving. Commission members have disputed that, saying they do not recall hearing Mr. Atta’s name during the briefing and that the terrorist’s name did not appear in documents about Able Danger that were later turned over by the Pentagon.

“I would implore the 9/11 commission to support a follow-on investigation to ascertain what the real truth is,” Colonel Shaffer said in the interview this week. “I do believe the 9/11 commission should have done that job: figuring out what went wrong with Able Danger.”

“This was a good news story because, before 9/11, you had an element of the military – our unit – which was actually out looking for Al Qaeda,” he continued. “I can’t believe the 9/11 commission would somehow believe that the historical value was not relevant.”

…Colonel Shaffer said he assumed that by speaking out publicly this week about Able Danger, he might effectively be ending his military career and limiting his ability to participate in intelligence work in the government. “I’m proud of my operational record and I love what I do,” he said. “But there comes a time – and I believe the time for me is now — to stand for something, to stand for what is right.”

Don’t be too quick to start backtracking on this story. There is something here.

Check out Captain’s Quarters, A Blog For All, JunkYard Blog, Rightwing Nuthouse, Macsmind, Point Five, & Dr. Sanity for more.

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The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update V
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, update IV
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update III
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update II
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger