Posted on 08/14/2005 6:10:27 PM PDT by Stellar Dendrite
BTTT
I did. Saying "I have no special knowledge" and "this LOOKS like" is a smear to you? Oh, wow, sue me for slander, I actually admitted upfront I had no special knowledge of this being the case BUT from that point of view something LOOKED like something.
Wow, yeah, that's slander, I really rolled Weldon in mud with THAT one, lol!
hmmmmmmmm.....
Not as I read the Capt.
good point.
save
Beware, Hillary is in the Senate to block anymore investigation about her Husband's Dirty Deeds. The media seems focused on the Bush Ranch right now.
http://www.wmal.com/listenlive.asp
Talking about Able Danger on WMAL right now.
You should go over and look. He is now questioning Weldon's credibility. Go have a look.
Latest CQ linked to this story:
http://tks.nationalreview.com/archives/072966.asp
DID THE BERGEN RECORD BREAK SOMETHING HERE?
Mike Kelly, a columnist for the Bergen Record of New Jersey, had Curt Weldon’s staff arrange an interview with a member of Able Danger.
He uncovers a few tidbits we haven't heard before:
For a year before the 9/11 attacks, the Wayne Inn was home to Mohammed Atta, the al-Qaida mastermind behind the hijacking plot that killed almost 3,000 people...
A former member of the military intelligence team told me in an interview that it had enough data to raise suspicions. "But we were blocked from passing it to the FBI."
The connect-the-dots tracking by the team was so good that it even knew Atta conducted meetings with the three future hijackers. One of those meetings took place at the Wayne Inn. That's how close all this was - to us and to being solved, if only the information had been passed up the line to FBI agents or even to local cops.
The story begins a year before the attacks. A top-secret team of Pentagon military counter-terror computer sleuths, who worked for a special operations commando group, was well into a project to monitor al-Qaida operations.
The 11-person group called itself "Project Able Danger." Think of them as a super-secret Delta Force or SEAL team. But instead of guns, they relied on advanced math training as their key weapons. And instead of traditional spying methods or bust-down-the-door commando tactics, the Able Danger group booted up a set of high-speed, super-computers and collected vast amounts of data.
The technique is called "data mining." The Able Danger team swept together information from al-Qaida chat rooms, news accounts, Web sites and financial records. Then they connected the dots, comparing the information with visa applications by foreign tourists and other government records.
From there, the computer sleuths noticed four names - Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.
All four turned out to be hijackers. Atta and al-Shehhi took a room at the Wayne Inn. They rented a Wayne mail drop, too, and even went to Willowbrook Mall. Al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi took rooms at a motel on Route 46 in South Hackensack.
What is interesting about this information now is that a CIA team, working separately from the Able Danger Team, had set its sights on al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi. The two were already on a CIA terror watch list and still had managed to obtain U.S. visas.
The CIA feared al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi might try to slip into the United States. But the CIA lost track of them after they left a terror meeting in Malaysia in early 2000 for Bangkok. Worse, the CIA waited until the summer of 2001 to tell the FBI that two suspected terrorists had visas to enter the United States - and might be here…
By mid-2000, the Able Danger team knew it had important information about a possible terrorist plot. Because of a peculiar series of computer links that went through Brooklyn, the team began referring to the four future hijackers as the "Brooklyn cell." Their movements and communications were raising too many suspicions.
But there’s an interesting wrinkle at the end:
Perhaps just as alarming, even the Able Danger team understood its limits. When lawyers blocked Able Danger's request to approach the FBI, the team simply went back to its work and kept quiet - even after the 9/11 attacks occurred.
Why? If the Able Danger team was so concerned about U.S. security, why didn't it approach Congress or even the press to sound an alarm?
When I posed that question in my interview with the Able Danger team member, he fell silent. Listening on a speaker phone, a congressional staffer interrupted: "Have you ever seen what happens to whistleblowers?"
Again, the Able Danger member had no answer.
No. She says--quite rightly--Weldon has the burden of coming forth with his evidence, but notes the Commission's ever changing response calls its credibility into question.
asking for proof is one thing. Dismissing someone and ignoring the questions he has raised because the person has "credibility problems," without any proof or specifics of what the credibility problems might be, is an ad hominem attack.
Lets hold the hearings. Eveyone under oath.
The chorus of naysayers is desperately trying to avoid that very outcome. That gives me BIG PROBLEMS.
It seems extremely odd to me that there is SO much effort underway to discredit what Weldon has brought up, virtually NO effort to thoroughly investigate the screwups who were running the 9/11 Commission, and if Able Danger were nothing at all to be concerned about, why then was Sandy Burglar stealing documents out of the National Archives, and why was Jamie Gorelick strangely silent about the effects of her so-called "Wall"?
John Podhoretz has written some excellent articles in the past, but the right way to get to the bottom of this is to quite frankly appoint a special prosecutor to begin sifting through the records of the 9/11 Commission, from start to finish, and then compare what is found with what Weldon claims to have, and put EVERYONE under Oath and let the chips fall where they may.
Of course THAT approach would possibly end up with the truth being known, something the Clintonistas and their Gorelickers desperately want to avoid.
This reminds me of something I read just recently about Dieter Shnell, an evidence gatherer for the Commission who has his own questionable backround for this job. It was something about him taking only handwritten notes of testimony and apparently not writing down things he didn't find important. Unfortunately, I've read so much in the last few days, I'll never remember where I read it, but Shnell is someone else in the Gorelick vein that all Freepers should check into...
"If Time's account is accurate, Weldon has done something very, very bad with this whole story -- something either knowingly dishonest, unknowingly crazy, or foolishly naive -- and he should be held accountable for it."
"None of this passes the smell test. And an apology is due the 9/11 Commission staff at the very least,"
"As for Curt Weldon, remember that he's trying to sell a book. It's now up to him to put up or shut up.I doubt he can or he would have already."
After another re-read of his columns, this guy seems phony to me. Look at those statements, does that sound like someone who is interested in the truth? It sounds to me like someone who wants to condemn a man before the issue is resolved.
The Smear Weldon crowd needs to read this article:
http://tks.nationalreview.com/archives/072966.asp
I've found myself reading The Corner less and less since JPod came on board.
I like some of his stand alone columns, but he can't debate worth a damn. He's pompous, self aggrandizing and gets all huffy if anyone dares to point out logic holes one can drive an Abrams main battle tank through.
Ah well, PowerLine has added a nice new news / blog collection site.
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