The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Could Reno, Berger, Gorelick...and even Clinton have prevented 9/11? And why did they choose to BURY the Atta-AQ connection evidence?
On Tuesday, I pointed to an Ed Morrissey post indicating that the Clinton Administration appeared to have had knowledge of Mohammed Atta's Al Qaeda cell two years before the 9/11 attacks. But today as I listened to the details of this outrage on successive talk shows, my anger became discernable. Here we have a clear case of a Democratic Administration, recently embarassed by a horrific mistake at Waco, unwilling to share solid intelligence--intelligence whose withholding cost 3000+ lives and an economic catastrophe after 9/11. This should be on every front page in the country.
The thing that makes me even angrier, though, than the burying of key information in the name of political expediency, is the post 9/11 cover up: the inexplicable inclusion of Jamie Gorelick on that Commission, and the even more inexplicable decision of the Commission to bury the story. Why?? There can only be one reason: Democrats on the commission were not about to let "their man" be tarnished by the fact that his administration put up a firewall between the military, the FBI, and the CIA, all to protect loose cannons like Janet Reno from causing political damage to the President. Today's coverage starts with an understated story in the New York Times. But, as usual, Michelle Malkin really cuts to the chase. Read it all, and be sure and follow all the links. You won't believe what you are reading (most of the bold emphases are mine):
The 9/11 Commission was supposed to give the America people a complete, unbiased story of the government failures that led up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. But the Commission now admits its acclaimed Final Report ignored key information provided by a U.S. Army data mining project, Able Danger, which identified Mohammed Atta and several other hijackers as potential terrorists prior to the September 11 attacks. The Able Danger team recommended that Atta and the other suspected terrorists be deported. That recommendation, however, was not shared with law enforcement officials, presumably because of the "wall" between intelligence activities and domestic law enforcement.
According to the New York Times, the 9/11 Commission officials said that Able Danger had not been included in their report because some of the information sounded inconsistent with what they thought they knew about Atta.
In other words, the Commission staffers were told about the project but ignored it because it didn't fit their pre-conceived conclusions.
Fortunately, the Commission has now 'fessed up. But not before trying to avoid blame earlier this week. Lee Hamilton, one of the Commission's co-chairs, said:
The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."
Ed Morrissey, who has been following the story closely, comments on the Commission's blame-avoidance techniques and speculates as to why Able Danger was excluded from the Commission's report:
First we hear that no such [briefing] occurred. After that, the Commission says one might have occurred in October 2003 but that no one remembered it. Now we find out that the Commission had two meetings where [they] heard about Able Danger and its identification of Mohammed Atta, including one just before they completed their report. Instead of saying to themselves, "Hey, wait a minute -- this changes the picture substantially," and postponing the report until they could look further into Able Danger, they simply shrugged their shoulders and published what they had.
Why? Able Danger proved that at least some of the intelligence work done by the US provided the information that could have helped prevent or at least reduce the attacks on 9/11. They had identified the ringleader of the conspiracy as a terrorist agent, even if they didn't know what mission he had at the time.
What does that mean for the Commission's findings? It meant that the cornerstone of their conclusions no longer fit the facts. Able Danger showed that the US had enough intelligence to take action -- if the government had allowed law enforcement and intelligence operations to cooperate with each other. It also showed that data mining could effectively identify terrorist agents.
So what did the Commission do? It ignored those facts which did not fit within its predetermined conclusions. It never bothered to mention Able Danger even one time in its final report, even though that absolutely refuted the notion that the government had no awareness that Atta constituted a terrorist threat. It endorsed the idea of data mining (which would die in Congress as the Total Information Awareness program) without ever explaining why.
And while the Clinton policy of enforcing a quarantine between law enforcement and intelligence operations came under general criticism, their report never included the fact that the "wall" for which Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick had so much responsibility specifically contributed to Atta's ability to come and go as he pleased, building the teams that would kill almost 3,000 Americans.
Morrissey expanded on the latter point in an earlier post:
Why didn't the Commission press harder for military intelligence, and if the Times' source has told the truth, why did they ignore the Able Danger operation in their deliberations? It would emphasize that the problem was not primarily operational, as the Commission made it seem, but primarily political -- and that the biggest problem was the enforced separation between law enforcement and intelligence operations upon which the Clinton Department of Justice insisted. The hatchet person for that policy sat on the Commission itself: Jamie S. Gorelick.
We will be hearing much more about this story. For blogger reactions, check out Morrissey, The Jawa Report, Baldilocks, Just One Minute, and The Anchoress. For more on Gorelick's conflict of interest, see here, here, and here.
***
Updates:
Jim Geraghty says Able Danger may be one of the biggest stories to come down the pike in awhile. He's right. And check out Geraghty's takedown of 9/11 Commission's work:
[A]s for the 9/11 Commission, after all that patting themselves on the back, all that gushing praise from left, right, and center, after their work was called "miraculous" by Newsday, and the nomination for a National Book Award, and calling their own work "extraordinary"... man, these guys stink. Really, if this checks out, and the staffers had information like this and they disregarded it, never believing that we in the public deserved to know that the plot's ringleader was identified, located and recommended to be arrested a year before the attacks... boy, these guys ought to be in stocks in the public square and have rotten fruit thrown at them. What a sham.
More at Villainous Company: "The Farce Continues"
Bryan Preston demands some answers.
Media Matters points out that the "wall" separating intelligence activities from law enforcement was erected in the 1980s, well before Bill Clinton was elected. That's true. But as the Wall Street Journal noted last year, Gorelick bears responsibility too:
[T]he wall was raised even higher in the mid-1990s, in the midst of what was then one of the most important antiterror investigations in American history--into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On Tuesday the Attorney General declassified and read from a March 4, 1995, memo in which Jamie Gorelick--then Deputy Attorney General and now 9/11 Commissioner--instructed then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and United States Attorney Mary Jo White that for the sake of "appearances" they would be required to adhere to an interpretation of the wall far stricter than the law.
This is rising to the level of criminal obstruction of Justice at the highest levels of government. Michelle's mention above of Bryan Preston's take deserves a second look:
By law, the Pentagon's Able Danger group's findings should have filtered up through the executive branch of the government. A Reagan-era executive order demanded that any intelligence the military gleaned within the US was to be handed over to the FBI. We now know that that didn't happen, or at least that if it did, it had no effect whatsoever on US terrorism policy. We further know that the 9-11 commission did not include Able Danger's findings in its own final report, though some members were apparently aware of those findings.
Which commission members knew about Able Danger, and why did they dismiss it? What role did the Gorelick wall play in keeping Able Danger's findings from going where they should have gone. Did anyone above the Pentagon (i.e. on the National Security Council) find out about Able Danger when it was most relevant--summer 2000?
This is not a time for the commission to "dialogue to consensus" as it did last year to avoid the appearance of partisanship. This is a time for getting at the truth. This is a time for demanding some answers.
MORE HERE: The Able Danger teams findings filtered up to some point within the Pentagon, where the Gorelick wall seems to have kicked in to bottle them up. Thus, they never got to the FBI with the team's recommendation that the Brooklyn cell be investigated and taken out. But it's still likely that the findings went higher than the Pentagon for further review, probably to the NSC. That's the logical place they would go. Someone on the NSC--NSA Berger or someone on his staff--would probably have reviewed the findings to see if the Pentagon had acted appropriately, etc.
What the findings didn't seem to have anything to say about was the nature of the threat the cell posed, when they would strike, or anything along those lines. It gave identities and linked them to al Qaeda. That's critical, because in the pre-Patriot Act days if you didn't have specificity as to the attack and if it didn't seem imminent, you couldn't form much of a legal basis to act against it directly. And because of the Gorelick wall, you couldn't pass the intelligence on to the FBI for further review. Pentagon lawyers so ruled based on the administration's 1995 FISA policy, keeping the FBI in the dark. It would probably have taken someone at the level of Berger or Reno to overrule that, and in the post-Waco environment none of them were going to do that.
All of this is said to get us here--Atta was a pilot on 9-11. So was at least one other of the four that Able Danger identified, giving us two pilots. We don't know to this day who the other two pilots were that day. Were they the other two in the Brooklyn cell? If they were, then the wall directly contributed to 9-11. Had the information been shared, the FBI would have acted on it and at the very least started to tail the group. There is a very, very good chance that the tail would have led them to others in on the plot, and to chances to unravel it.
If you're Sandy Berger and this information passed your desk and your post-Waco hangover led you to dismiss it, it would be worth it for you to cover it up any way you can. And if you're Jamie Gorelick and your wall had this horrendous effect, if you wanted to work in Washington again and didn't want history to associate your name with lethal foolishness, you would do what you could to minimize the role your policy played.
I notice that neither one has stepped up to any camera anywhere since Able Danger broke.
It kind of makes one wonder anew just what Sandy Berger was stuffing into his pants and socks and pilfering from the National Archives...curiously enough at the same time the almighty 9/11 Commission was taking center stage. This is not simply a mere scandal, this is a tsunami.
The thing that makes me even angrier, though, than the burying of key information in the name of political expediency, is the post 9/11 cover up: the inexplicable inclusion of Jamie Gorelick on that Commission, and the even more inexplicable decision of the Commission to bury the story. Why?? There can only be one reason: Democrats on the commission were not about to let "their man" be tarnished by the fact that his administration put up a firewall between the military, the FBI, and the CIA, all to protect loose cannons like Janet Reno from causing political damage to the President. Today's coverage starts with an understated story in the New York Times. But, as usual, Michelle Malkin really cuts to the chase. Read it all, and be sure and follow all the links. You won't believe what you are reading (most of the bold emphases are mine):
The 9/11 Commission was supposed to give the America people a complete, unbiased story of the government failures that led up to the September 11 terrorist attacks. But the Commission now admits its acclaimed Final Report ignored key information provided by a U.S. Army data mining project, Able Danger, which identified Mohammed Atta and several other hijackers as potential terrorists prior to the September 11 attacks. The Able Danger team recommended that Atta and the other suspected terrorists be deported. That recommendation, however, was not shared with law enforcement officials, presumably because of the "wall" between intelligence activities and domestic law enforcement.
According to the New York Times, the 9/11 Commission officials said that Able Danger had not been included in their report because some of the information sounded inconsistent with what they thought they knew about Atta.
In other words, the Commission staffers were told about the project but ignored it because it didn't fit their pre-conceived conclusions.
Fortunately, the Commission has now 'fessed up. But not before trying to avoid blame earlier this week. Lee Hamilton, one of the Commission's co-chairs, said:
The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."
Ed Morrissey, who has been following the story closely, comments on the Commission's blame-avoidance techniques and speculates as to why Able Danger was excluded from the Commission's report:
First we hear that no such [briefing] occurred. After that, the Commission says one might have occurred in October 2003 but that no one remembered it. Now we find out that the Commission had two meetings where [they] heard about Able Danger and its identification of Mohammed Atta, including one just before they completed their report. Instead of saying to themselves, "Hey, wait a minute -- this changes the picture substantially," and postponing the report until they could look further into Able Danger, they simply shrugged their shoulders and published what they had.
Why? Able Danger proved that at least some of the intelligence work done by the US provided the information that could have helped prevent or at least reduce the attacks on 9/11. They had identified the ringleader of the conspiracy as a terrorist agent, even if they didn't know what mission he had at the time.
What does that mean for the Commission's findings? It meant that the cornerstone of their conclusions no longer fit the facts. Able Danger showed that the US had enough intelligence to take action -- if the government had allowed law enforcement and intelligence operations to cooperate with each other. It also showed that data mining could effectively identify terrorist agents.
So what did the Commission do? It ignored those facts which did not fit within its predetermined conclusions. It never bothered to mention Able Danger even one time in its final report, even though that absolutely refuted the notion that the government had no awareness that Atta constituted a terrorist threat. It endorsed the idea of data mining (which would die in Congress as the Total Information Awareness program) without ever explaining why.
And while the Clinton policy of enforcing a quarantine between law enforcement and intelligence operations came under general criticism, their report never included the fact that the "wall" for which Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick had so much responsibility specifically contributed to Atta's ability to come and go as he pleased, building the teams that would kill almost 3,000 Americans.
Morrissey expanded on the latter point in an earlier post:
Why didn't the Commission press harder for military intelligence, and if the Times' source has told the truth, why did they ignore the Able Danger operation in their deliberations? It would emphasize that the problem was not primarily operational, as the Commission made it seem, but primarily political -- and that the biggest problem was the enforced separation between law enforcement and intelligence operations upon which the Clinton Department of Justice insisted. The hatchet person for that policy sat on the Commission itself: Jamie S. Gorelick.
We will be hearing much more about this story. For blogger reactions, check out Morrissey, The Jawa Report, Baldilocks, Just One Minute, and The Anchoress. For more on Gorelick's conflict of interest, see here, here, and here.
***
Updates:
Jim Geraghty says Able Danger may be one of the biggest stories to come down the pike in awhile. He's right. And check out Geraghty's takedown of 9/11 Commission's work:
[A]s for the 9/11 Commission, after all that patting themselves on the back, all that gushing praise from left, right, and center, after their work was called "miraculous" by Newsday, and the nomination for a National Book Award, and calling their own work "extraordinary"... man, these guys stink. Really, if this checks out, and the staffers had information like this and they disregarded it, never believing that we in the public deserved to know that the plot's ringleader was identified, located and recommended to be arrested a year before the attacks... boy, these guys ought to be in stocks in the public square and have rotten fruit thrown at them. What a sham.
More at Villainous Company: "The Farce Continues"
Bryan Preston demands some answers.
Media Matters points out that the "wall" separating intelligence activities from law enforcement was erected in the 1980s, well before Bill Clinton was elected. That's true. But as the Wall Street Journal noted last year, Gorelick bears responsibility too:
[T]he wall was raised even higher in the mid-1990s, in the midst of what was then one of the most important antiterror investigations in American history--into the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. On Tuesday the Attorney General declassified and read from a March 4, 1995, memo in which Jamie Gorelick--then Deputy Attorney General and now 9/11 Commissioner--instructed then-FBI Director Louis Freeh and United States Attorney Mary Jo White that for the sake of "appearances" they would be required to adhere to an interpretation of the wall far stricter than the law.
This is rising to the level of criminal obstruction of Justice at the highest levels of government. Michelle's mention above of Bryan Preston's take deserves a second look:
By law, the Pentagon's Able Danger group's findings should have filtered up through the executive branch of the government. A Reagan-era executive order demanded that any intelligence the military gleaned within the US was to be handed over to the FBI. We now know that that didn't happen, or at least that if it did, it had no effect whatsoever on US terrorism policy. We further know that the 9-11 commission did not include Able Danger's findings in its own final report, though some members were apparently aware of those findings.
Which commission members knew about Able Danger, and why did they dismiss it? What role did the Gorelick wall play in keeping Able Danger's findings from going where they should have gone. Did anyone above the Pentagon (i.e. on the National Security Council) find out about Able Danger when it was most relevant--summer 2000?
This is not a time for the commission to "dialogue to consensus" as it did last year to avoid the appearance of partisanship. This is a time for getting at the truth. This is a time for demanding some answers.
MORE HERE: The Able Danger teams findings filtered up to some point within the Pentagon, where the Gorelick wall seems to have kicked in to bottle them up. Thus, they never got to the FBI with the team's recommendation that the Brooklyn cell be investigated and taken out. But it's still likely that the findings went higher than the Pentagon for further review, probably to the NSC. That's the logical place they would go. Someone on the NSC--NSA Berger or someone on his staff--would probably have reviewed the findings to see if the Pentagon had acted appropriately, etc.
What the findings didn't seem to have anything to say about was the nature of the threat the cell posed, when they would strike, or anything along those lines. It gave identities and linked them to al Qaeda. That's critical, because in the pre-Patriot Act days if you didn't have specificity as to the attack and if it didn't seem imminent, you couldn't form much of a legal basis to act against it directly. And because of the Gorelick wall, you couldn't pass the intelligence on to the FBI for further review. Pentagon lawyers so ruled based on the administration's 1995 FISA policy, keeping the FBI in the dark. It would probably have taken someone at the level of Berger or Reno to overrule that, and in the post-Waco environment none of them were going to do that.
All of this is said to get us here--Atta was a pilot on 9-11. So was at least one other of the four that Able Danger identified, giving us two pilots. We don't know to this day who the other two pilots were that day. Were they the other two in the Brooklyn cell? If they were, then the wall directly contributed to 9-11. Had the information been shared, the FBI would have acted on it and at the very least started to tail the group. There is a very, very good chance that the tail would have led them to others in on the plot, and to chances to unravel it.
If you're Sandy Berger and this information passed your desk and your post-Waco hangover led you to dismiss it, it would be worth it for you to cover it up any way you can. And if you're Jamie Gorelick and your wall had this horrendous effect, if you wanted to work in Washington again and didn't want history to associate your name with lethal foolishness, you would do what you could to minimize the role your policy played.
I notice that neither one has stepped up to any camera anywhere since Able Danger broke.
It kind of makes one wonder anew just what Sandy Berger was stuffing into his pants and socks and pilfering from the National Archives...curiously enough at the same time the almighty 9/11 Commission was taking center stage. This is not simply a mere scandal, this is a tsunami.
