ping
Podhoretz things he knows more than he does. Go visit Captains Quarters blog.com
unless Weldon totally invented this, totally made it up - it warrants further investigation. if this story is to get more traction, there will have to be more "revelations" and details forthcoming.
Sounds like someone who has received his talking points and has been told to kill the story and discredit Weldon.
This should be added to the mix:
NO APOLOGY, BUT A DEMAND FOR FACTS [Andy McCarthy]
I don’t think an apology is or will be owed to the 9/11 Commission. Most of us who have asked questions about the Able Danger controversy were careful to note that nothing untoward had been proved yet. But the Commission has a dubious track record, having closed ranks around Jamie Gorelick when it was obvious that she had a blatant conflict of interest, having whitewashed the significance of “the wall” to pre-9/11 intelligence failure, and having gone out of its way – in the absence of any meaningful investigation – to deny Iraq/Qaeda ties. It was – and it remains – sensible to ask questions here, and the Commission’s initial reaction last week only gave more cause for concern.
Remember, the Commissioners who spoke out said initially that there was no way the Commission had been told about U.S. officials making an Atta identification prior to 9/11, and acknowledged that if the Commission had been told such a thing it would have been a big deal, requiring further inquiry. Within 72 hours, they had changed their tune, saying: what do you know, we did hear such a thing, but we decided the U.S. naval intelligence officer who told us about it was not reliable, and that the program he cited to us was not historically significant.
The Commission’s new memo is indeed an impressive piece of rebuttal, but it’s not a show-stopper. Two things – if only two things – are clear. First, Rep. Weldon has some answering to do. If he has answers, he should provide them promptly.
On this score, it is noteworthy that he is not on his own in these startling allegations. He has said he is in contact with knowledgeable witnesses who are in a position to testify. Further, the New York Times’ account last Thursday reported that both Weldon “and a former defense intelligence official who was interviewed on Monday have said that the Able Danger team sought but failed in the summer of 2000 to persuade the military's Special Operations Command, in Tampa, Fla., to pass on to the Federal Bureau of Investigation the information they had gathered about Mr. Atta and the three other men.” (Emphasis added.) It’s high time for these sources to come forward and explain themselves.
Second, as noted above, in their initial public denials last week, Commission members opined that evidence of an Atta identification would have been significant if the Commission had learned about it. It turns out the Commission did learn about such evidence (viz., the naval intelligence officer’s account) but was not persuaded by it. Well, that’s why God made footnotes. If, as the Commissioners concede, government awareness of Atta was a highly important topic, and if, as the new memo indicates, there were good reasons to be skeptical about the naval officer’s version of events, the simple solution was to mention his allegation in a footnote and knock it down with the rebutting information.
The Commission's task, as the first sentence of its final report reflects, was to submit a report for the government and the country's consideration. It was fine for the Commission to make judgments about the weight of the evidence as long as it was comprehensively reporting what the evidence was. It was not fine to withhold conflicting evidence on significant topics so that others would not know there was an alternative to be considered. There are hundreds of footnotes in the report, some of which are, in fact, efforts to explain how the Commission resolved conflicting evidence on various topics. There is no good reason not to have handled the naval officer’s claims this way – so that Congress could have asked follow-up questions and Weldon and others could have come forward with their conflicting contentions a year ago.
Posted at 04:54 PM
All along, we've been assuming that Weldon has the goods. But where did HE get this stuff from? What's his evidence?
Maybe in our rush to blame it all on Clinton and Gorelick we just agreed with something that's simply too good to be true because we WANTED it to be true?
I have no special knowledge, but I'm saying this looks like Weldon (who some here were proposing should run for president based on this alone!) is stretching the truth to sell books.
I hope he's got the goods to back this up, or he's made us all look like asses.
Via Time magazine...
In a particularly dramatic scene in Weldon’s book, Countdown to Terror, the Pennsylvania Republican described personally handing to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley, just after Sept. 11, an Able Danger chart produced in 1999 identifying Atta. But Weldon told TIME he’s no longer certain Atta’s name was on that original document. The congressman says he handed Hadley his only copy. Still, last week he referred reporters to a recently reconstructed version of the chart in his office where, among dozens of names and photos of terrorists from around the world, there was a color mug shot of Mohammad Atta, circled in black marker.
Pentagon officials are playing down any controversy. They say they can find nothing produced by the Able Danger program, which involved fewer than half a dozen intelligence analysts, mentioning Atta’s name. A senior Pentagon official briefed on the program told TIME, “This is much ado about nothing.” a source close to the former 9/11 commission aides who chased down the story last week said they had been led to believe the Pentagon would issue a statement along these lines on Friday. But as of Sunday, this had not occurred. "We have been working with the 9/11 public discourse project to gain more clarity into this issue," said a Pentagon spokeswoman, Air Force Lieut. Col. Ellen Krenke. "Clearly there was information that was developed through this program, but it is unclear what was provided to the 9/11 Commission." Krenke said she did not know about any statement planned that would say no information had been developed about Atta before the Sept. 11 attacks.
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/003255.htm
Uhhh . . , let me rephrase that.
I saw Weldon on FoxNews this morning, and he was a whole lot more persuasive. He pointed out that the Commission at first admitted that it'd been briefed on this, but concluded that it was not credible. Now they've reversed themselves and say they never heard it.
He also stated that there are 12 respected military men, including officers, who will testify in front of Congress that they ID'd Atta when they were assigned to Able Danger. He also stated that there are 15 boxes of documents that the Commission did not see, and that the reason they did not see the documents is that they did not follow up on the information given to them in connection with the Able Danger briefing.
If these documents exist, and they mention Atta, then that pretty much blows the Commission's claims to hell. They can't really expect us to believe that someone briefed them on Able Danger, but forgot to mention the most important fact about it--that it ID'd Atta as an al Qaeda operative.
Also, even assuming that they did not get briefed on this, I've gotta ask why not? It was their job to investigate. If they did not discover this info, then they did not do a thorough job of investigating.
These are not "selections from NRO," as if everyone over there is on the same page. This is Podhoretz raising a question in his first post, then proceeding as if he had proven his case by merely raising the question.
JPOD is ticked at the rest of the folks at The Corner for not bowing down and kissing his backside when he declared his Truth about stem cell research the other day. He spoke, ex cathedra, and nobody applauded. Well, he'll show them.
Lots of folks are suddenly questioning Rep Weldons credibility because... get this... several people have questioned his credibility! Case closed. Raise a question and you have all the evidence that you need!
I want hearings with people under oath. I want Gorelick, Clinton, Reno, Clinton, Clarke and all the rest of the Clintonoids to answer questions under penalty of imprisonnment for lying. And the first one that takes the Fifth we get out the firing squad gear.
OK. OK. That's a bit extreme. A rope will do.
I am not obsessing over the details of Able Danger at the moment. We'll see how it progresses..
My point is simply this:
The 9/11 Commission was damaged goods from the get-go because of the presence of Jamie Gorlick. Period.
Why did Sandy Berger steal those documents??
And YOU can't recall the image of his face - kinda gruesome, ain't it?
His pic really stands out against the doe-eyed, effeminate Saudi boys who did 9/11.
Every one of us remembers these pics.
Of course the Navy intel officer remembered it.
ALL OF US WOULD HAVE REMEMBERED ATTA'S PICTURE.
ping
They cast aspersions on Weldon because he's trying to sell a book. Of course, the Commission has a motive to lie inasmuch as they are trying to save their plummeting reputations.
I guess the question I have is why the let the Commission staff go back over their notes if the Commission had been dissolved. It would have been very easy to pull a Sandy Berger.
comment -- still think Gorelick, her bosses and associates are *ssholes. /comment.
Can someone comment?
How about, certain serial criminals at large remain active--and active in covering their tracks, until proven guilty and imprisoned....
This NRO piece by JP was included as part of another thread this AM and discussed at length. No new information has emerged since then.
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.
Back in my wire service days, I used to cover Washington for the Bergen Record. I never dealt with Kelly, but my understanding is that he’s been at the paper for nearly three decades, and been a columnist about half that time. He’s no green rookie. And I can say from my experience with the Record that the editors were not lackadaisical. The North Jersey communities they cover were hard hit by 9/11. I doubt the editors would permit a columnist to quote an unnamed source, throwing out allegations as explosive as this, if they didn’t find him credible. If he gave off any whiff of nuttiness, I have a feeling this column would have been written quite differently.
In my previous post, I had stated that the accounts of Weldon’s guy and the 9/11 Commission were so different that this can’t be a simple misunderstanding – somebody’s lying. And an account with a lot of details (like the Commission’s Friday release) tends to seem more plausible than a vague one. Well, this account offers a lot of details. Anybody in North Jersey want to contact the Wayne Inn? They remember anybody who looked like Atta staying a year? Do they still have their pre-2001 guest records?
It still would be helpful if any one of these eleven guys in Able Danger could come forward and answer these questions publicly, not just with print reporters. I realize they have careers to think of, but as the tag line for “Patriot Games” said, “Truth needs a soldier.”
[Posted 08/14 05:52 PM]
I note the above was posted after John Podhoretz's piece. I can't say if he was aware of it.
After 9/12/2001? Absolutely! His name and image should have caught the full and undivided attention of anyone in the intelligence community and certainly the commission members investigating 9/11.