Unlike many other commentators, I'm going to restrain my partisanship in accusing former Clinton administration officials in covering up the "Able Danger" information, which the Associated Press now appears to have confirmed the particulars of. If they did in fact try to cover things up for political purposes, then it's just more shame on them and yet more evidence of just how politicized things became during the course of the 9/11 Commission.
As long-time readers are aware, I have long been skeptical of accepting the Commission and its claims as the sum total of dogmatic proof as it relates to terrorism and a whole host of other issues. If one desires a decent example of this, the lack of any substantive discussion of the convergence between Western, Iranian, and Saudi intelligence services in the Balkans during the 1990s alongside al-Qaeda is Exhibit #1 that somebody decided that some things are best left unsaid despite an enormous amount of documentation to the contrary. In all fairness, this topic is touched upon by Richard Clarke (whose media blitz was one of the first signs that any objectivity that had beforehand existed in the Commission was being thrown aside in the interests of the commissioners' egos and their PR machine) in Against All Enemies, which is cited extensively in the final report.
If one accepts like me that there are likely a number of significant factual errors in the Commission's final report then you can probably see why I think demystifying it is a good thing. If information was in fact suppressed, incidentally, then I think someone also needs to take a look into the other accusations (coming from one of the 9/11 commissioners themselves, no less!) of evidence suppression contained in Ken Timmerman's book to see whether or not they pan out or not since the idea that such suppression could have occurred is now moving from the speculative into the factual.
The other bit of information that I find particularly satisfying to see coming out of these revelations is the fact that it was Curt Weldon, a man who has been most unfairly slandered by his critics as a know-nothing and a dupe when it comes to intelligence matters, who is single-handedly responsible for this story getting any traction whatsoever. I would strongly suggest to his critics that they might at the very least grant the congressman a little more credit as far as both his intellect and his credulity are concerned, as he has now brought forth information that we as Americans ought to be extremely grateful for.
We should appoint a commission to study the commission.
There was a lot more intell data available than has ever been discussed in the media (d'oh!).
Those who know the facts are prohibited by security regulations from telling them, or even identifying themselves as being knowledgable. Such folks must be very pleased to see even a few more facts enter the ideology-driven discussions.
" . . .which the Associated Press now appears to have confirmed. . ."
Dan, can you provide a link to this? Don't see it in the AP headlines.
Thanks
Oh, that's the source of the NYT piece. Sorry!
Dan,
"What did the 9/11 Commissioners and Staffers know about Able Danger and when did they know it!"
Snicker.
God, that felt good to write.
I'm going to restrain my partisanship in accusing former Clinton administration officials in covering up the "Able Danger" information ...
Yeah, I noticed that you're not calling for a subpoena of Sandy Berger's pants. That's more restraint than I could manage.
I'd say all the information currently available about Able Danger is frankly, useless without some important context.
Mainly, how many names were on the list?
Get an answer to that question and we will most likely know whether it even warrants discussion.
Doesn't the terror watch list have at minimum several thousand names on it?
Most of the concrete, relevant information would have to be VERY classified. I mean the kind of thing where the name of the classification level is itself classified.
Even something as simple as 'how many got IDed?' For example, if we said the list was N names, while the AQ leadership knew there were M people, that would give them an idea of the effectiveness of the techniques that were used. Further, if M > N, they could look at what those N did, versus what the other M-N did, and figure out what failed and what worked, respectively. If M < N, then they can look at the N-M folks to figure out how to generate false positives and mislead our intell folks.
Now maybe that will all come out. But it would take a person with either a real desire to get imprisoned or a really powerful coterie of friends to step forward and reveal it. And operational intell folks don't seem likely to fit in either category.
Dan,
I'd say the terror watch lists has tens of thousands of names on it. And as I found leaving Schippol last year, mine is among them.
And of course it is growing every day. Mainly because the TSA refuses to take any names off the list regardless of evidence provided.
Davebo:
Congradulations! My point is that we are clearly capable of keeping track of thousands of names, why not Atta's? There's also all this talk about a chart with Atta and several other hijackers on it, in which case it seems as though there is quite a bit to go on in this instance.
Of course we can keep track of millions of names. The question is of what use is it?
When KLM modifies it's software to speed up the process of generating the required documentation to allow one to fly despite being on the list I'd say the list has become next to useless.
Even if there were a million names on the list, it warranted discussion in the 9/11 report.
Even IF the list Able Danger provided had thousands of names on it; that's simply a matter of resources.
Throwing up your hands and saying you can't take action means that the Clinton Administration, despite it's rhetoric, did not CARE about Terrorism at all.
This runs counter to various Presidential Directives labeling terror the #1 priority for the Administration, so pick one or the other; the Administration despite all that didn't care at all; or there was a massive goof somewhere by various Clinton appointed idiots.
Suppose you have say, 5,000 names on the list. Spread around the Country. Simply request local PD co-operation to assist the FBI in questioning these people and their neighbors, associates, etc to determine if anything is there. Explain to the PDs (through personal liason by Louis J. Freeh) that their co-operation is needed to avert a possible terrorist strike in the US. That secrecy is essential.
If you are the Mayor and/or PD Chief, and the head of the FBI calls you asking for your help like this, how do you say no?
This was IMHO a political decision to blow off the data because it would have required action when none was desired.
What I heard reported about Able Danger was that the 9/11 commission or its staff was briefed on Able Danger during a trip to Afghanistan, but only that it had identified some al-Qaeda cells in the US and the names of the 9/11 hijackers were not mentioned at that time. Then about 2 weeks before the commission released its report, there was a meeting with the 9/11 commission staff at which they were told that Able Danger had identified Mohamed Atta as a member of an al-Qaeda cell in the US in 1999, but did not pass the information on to the State Department or FBI. The 9/11 staff discounted this report as not believable because Mohamed Atta did not enter the US until June 2000, at least that is what the 9/11 commission believes. It was not clear if the 9/11 commission staff passed this later information on to the members of the commission.
The hearings devolved into a political circus with Condoleezza Rice being targeted for skewering. We don't know if the Clinton Admin. could have done anything about Atta but for the walls set up between agencies- that's sheer speculation. The point is that the 9/11 hearings should have remained impartial and pragmatic. It's sad that they were used for grandstanding and fingerpointing.
Laura Rozen has text of a “press release”:http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002364.html from the 9/11 commission on Able Danger. It has a lot of details. Short summary, 9/11 commission were given a lot of documents from Able Danger and allowed to review more documents at DOD. None of those documents mention Mohamed Atta or any of the other 9/11 hijackers. On July 12, 2004 9/11 staff interviewed a Navy officer who claimed sometime between February 2000 and April 2000 he saw Mohamed Atta’s name and picture in another officers briefing book on a suspected al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn. The officer claimed that the information about this Brooklyn cell was later destroyed because DOD lawyers thought DOD should not be collecting intelligence on people who were legally in the US.
The 9/11 commission staff doubted his story because Mohamed Atta did not obtain a vias to enter the US until May 18, 2000 and did not enter the US until June 3, 2000. The officer could not explain how the Able Danger project could have identified Mohamed Atta in February-April 2000 as part of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell. The 9/11 commission says that in the February-April 2000 time frame essentially no US government agency had any information about Mohamed Atta that the 9/11 commission has been made aware of, so it is hard to see what data would have been mined to come to this conclusion. Because of lack of documents to back this up, and because it was based on the memory of single individual, and no one else came forword to support this claim, they discounted it.
I'm not necessarily doubting this, but doesn't that contradict what various folks have said at a number of points this week concerning the program?
Folks,
What would you say if someone came forward and said that the august Senators did not just get briefing books, but had been taken on multiple tours of the facility (one per senator)? That they spent days going over what was being done? That far more data was given to them, through more channels, over a longer period of time, than any blogger or MSM person has even hinted?
Yet none it made it into the report, and those senators who got the tour but were not on the commission never spoke up?
Just hypothetically, what would that imply to you?
OF COURSE, it is only hypothetical. I know our representatives would never do such a thing, and I personally would not have been involved even if anything like that had happened.
But what would it imply?