Rush Limbaugh: Clinton Administration's Gorelick Wall Prevented Arrest of Mohammed Atta

RushLimbaugh.com ^ | 8/10/05 | Rush Limbaugh

[wagglebee]

RUSH: All right, now to this 9/11 business. We have some audio sound bites here from Congressman Curt Weldon to go along with this story. I've got two versions of the story, one is by the Associated Press, the other is in the New York Times. I wanted to give you highlights of both. The AP story: "The Sept. 11 commission will investigate a claim that U.S. defense intelligence officials identified ringleader Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as a likely part of an al-Qaeda cell more than a year before the hijackings but didn't forward the information to law enforcement." Now, knowing what you already know about this, what does that lead sentence say to you? That lead sentence could possibly say to you, "Why, those scum at the Pentagon, why didn't they tell anybody? They knew it. They sat on it! And this was the Clinton administration, or somebody trying to sabotage Clinton? That's what it was, they were trying to sabotage Clinton. The defense department, they didn't like Clinton because he was--" I'm predicting this will be the spin from the left.

This is totally untrue, but this lead is totally incorrect. They didn't forward the information to law enforcement is not the correct way to say it. They couldn't forward the information to law enforcement because there was a wall which prevented them from doing so, erected by Jamie Gorelick who ran the justice department while Janet Reno was the face of that department. "Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. and vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, said Tuesday the men were identified in 1999 by a classified military intelligence unit known as 'Able Danger.' If true, that's an earlier link to al-Qaeda than any previously disclosed intelligence about Atta. Sept. 11 commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton said Tuesday that Weldon's information, which the congressman said came from multiple intelligence sources, warrants a review. He said he hoped the panel could issue a statement on its findings by the end of the week. 'The 9/11 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.'"

Now, that is not true. That is not true, folks, that is simply not true. They were told about it and they didn't do anything about it because Jamie Gorelick was on the committee. "The Sept. 11 commission's final report, issued last year, recounted numerous government mistakes that allowed the hijackers to succeed. Among them was a failure to share intelligence within and among agencies. According to Weldon, Able Danger identified Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi as members of a cell the unit code-named 'Brooklyn' because of some loose connections to New York City. Weldon said that in September 2000--" And who was president then? Bill Clinton. "--Able Danger recommended that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI 'so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists.' However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because they said Atta and the others were in the country legally so information on them could not be shared with law enforcement. Weldon did not provide details on how the intelligence officials identified the future hijackers and determined they might be part of a cell."

That's the AP version, let's see how the New York Times treats this. This is by Philip Shenon and Douglas Jehl, headline: 9/11 panel members asked Congress to learn if Pentagon withheld files on hijackers in 2000. So along with the AP, the New York Times is now bending over backwards to blame the Pentagon and not the Clinton administration for these screw-ups. "Members of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks called on Congress to determine whether the Pentagon withheld intelligence information showing that a secret American military unit had identified Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as potential threats more than a year before the attacks. John Lehman, a Republican member of the commission, said, 'I think this is a big deal. The issue is whether there was in fact surveillance before 9/11 of Atta and, if so, why weren't we told about it? Who made the decision not to brief the commission's staff or the commissioners?' Mr. Lehman and other commissioners said that because the panel had been formally disbanded for a year, the investigation would need to be taken up by Congress, possibly by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Thomas H. Kean, the commission chairman, said, 'If this is true, somebody should be looking into it.' Spokesmen for the commission members said this week that although the staff was informed by the Pentagon in late 2003 about the existence of a so-called data-mining operation called Able Danger, the panel was never told that it had identified Mr. Atta and the others as threats."

So, they were told about Able Danger. They were told the Pentagon was digging deep. They were told that the Defense Intelligence Agency, the DIA, had come up with this information, just didn't specify what it was. "In a final report released last summer called the authoritative history of the attacks, the commission of five Democrats and five Republicans made no mention of the secret program or the possibility that a government agency had detected Mr. Atta's terrorist activities before Sept. 11. The Pentagon has had no comment on the credibility of the accounts from Mr. Weldon and the intelligence official. The official said in an interview Monday that the Able Danger team was created in 1999 under a directive signed by Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about Al Qaeda networks around the world. The official said the information was also not shared with the C.I.A. or other civilian intelligence agencies. 'This was a highly compartmented program with very limited distribution.'" Yeah, well, this needs to be said again, they weren't allowed to share the information. Again, what we are being told here is that, well, Atta was here legally. Really? Well, how many driver's licenses did he have? How many different visas did he have?

It's strange that we knew everything about this guy the day of these attacks. We knew everything about him. We knew where he was, we knew where he trained, we knew where he lived in Florida. We knew how he recruited the members, we knew how they bought those airline tickets on the morning of September 11th to go get on these airplanes to hijack them. We knew everything we wanted to know about Mohammed Atta the day of and the day after 9/11. So we had to know a lot about him before then. There's a reason that this information was not shared with law enforcement above and beyond the fact that he was here legally and it couldn't be shared. If he was here legally, how did we have such a dossier on this guy and we were able to identify practically what he had for breakfast that day? There's a lot more known about this guy than anybody is willing to let on because it was released that day and the day after. And the real question here is, those who knew it didn't pass it on. Why? And this all happened during the administration of Bill Clinton and Richard Clarke. Let's not forget that, folks. Richard Clarke who said they gave the Bush administration everything, turned over everything that they knew, and the Bush administration didn't take it seriously. Really? Look at what we're now learning.

RUSH: Okay, we'll go to CNN. Yesterday afternoon, Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer. This is a bite here in which Congressman Weldon explains how he found out about the Gorelick wall and how it prevented the sharing of information about the 9/11 hijackers in the Clinton administration. This question from Wolf is a long one. Let me just paraphrase the question. "Congressman, you've got all this from a former DIA, Defense Intelligence Agency official, is that right?"

WELDON: One, I've got about a dozen that I've been working with, and, Wolf, this goes back to '99 and 2000 when as the chairman of the defense research subcommittee I was pushing money in for the increasing use of data collaboration and data mining. The prototype for that was being used by Special Forces command in the army on this project called Able Danger. Now, I wasn't aware of the specifics of what they did until two weeks after 9/11 when they brought me a chart that I took down to the White House and gave to the Steve Hadley, that actually showed Al-Qaeda cells.

RUSH: So Wolf says, well, "What's most shocking here is that if in fact elements of the DIA were tracking Atta and three of the future hijackers, they decided they couldn't share this information with the FBI, because, what, these guys were in the US legally, and it would be inappropriate to let the FBI know to watch what they were doing?"

WELDON: What we now know is that lawyers within the administration, we don't know whether they were DOD lawyers or White House lawyers, lawyers within the administration told the Special Forces folks three times, you cannot share this information with the FBI. They even put stickies over top of the faces of Mohammed Atta saying they're here legally, they have green cards, you can't give anything to the FBI. The second reason they gave them was, were concerned about the political fallout that occurred after Waco so we didn't want Special Forces command giving information of this type to the FBI. That stopped it dead in its tracks.

RUSH: This is unbelievable! This is unbelievable. With this kind of thinking we're going to lose this country. We may as well open the borders and let everybody in no matter what we know about them so as we don't offend anybody or upset our political legacy because of what happened at Waco, we couldn't afford another raid there on these guys up in Brooklyn where they were hanging out because we had our legacy to worry about, so you can't tell anybody about this. We got two more to go. Blitzer says another shocking element of the story is that the 9/11 Commission say they never knew about this. Al Felzenberg, the former commission spokesman tells the New York Times that the 9/11 Commission staffers were not told a thing about the Brooklyn cell, they were told about the Pentagon operation, they were not told about the Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefer had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten to their attention, the Brooklyn cell referring to Mohammed Atta and his cohorts.

WELDON: Let's put the intelligence folks under oath and let them be cross-examined, and let's put the staffers on the 9/11 Commission under oath and let those under oath tell what information they gave. The intelligence officials I've been talking to, and it's well more than one, have told me they identified this cell and they mention the Mohammed Atta. That's not one person, that's several people. The question the American people deserve to have answered is why did the 9/11 Commission staff decide this wasn't worth pursuing? I've talked to two commissioners, Democrat Tim Roemer, a good friend of mine, John Lehman, Republican, good friend of mine. Over the past two months each of them separately told me they were never briefed on Able Danger. How could the 9/11 commissioners never be briefed on a secret task force that was designed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Shelton and carried out by General Schoomaker? To me that's just unexplainable.

RUSH: Fox News this morning, Fox and Friends, the question from Brian Kilmeade to Curt Weldon, "Do you think this is under the same guise as to why Sandy Burger would go into the national archives and stuff everything into his pockets and seemingly have to hide some records?"

WELDON: I would hope that's not the case, but it needs to be looked at. Why did the staff of the 9/11 Commission, who were briefed by Able Danger intelligence officers, not brief the commissioners themselves? And why was there no mention in the extensive volumes of the 9/11 Commission, why was there no mention of Able Danger?

RUSH: To put this in context, Weldon is saying defense officials told the people they talked to, the staff members of the 9/11 Commission, who conducted a lot of the interviews, "We told them all about Able Danger, we told them all about Mohammed Atta, we told them we had this, we told them we could not share the information, we were told not to share the information with anybody at the FBI because they were here legally or the wall that existed." And the staffers didn't tell the 9/11 Commissioners because you got Kean and Hamilton saying, "We didn't know about this," and you've got Lehman saying, "We didn't know about this." But Weldon says the staffers knew all about it. You cannot erase a simple fact, and that is that Jamie Gorelick, the author of the wall preventing the sharing of such information was a commissioner on this panel and that right there might provide some staffers a roadblock to imparting that information. But I'm not sure that they all weren't told anyway. I'm not sure I believe it.

[keysguy]

Great stuff. It starts to make sense out of what went on under the Clintonistas. They are either traitors or so PC they will let the country go to hell. Either way we don't need Hillary in that would be a disaster.

[Stellar Dendrite]

You mean the law-yuhs from hah-vad. ;)