Posted on 08/10/2005 5:43:03 AM PDT by OESY
...Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), the No. 2 man on both the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, revealed that an elite military-intelligence unit known as Able Danger identified Atta and three other hijackers as likely members of a terror cell in this country as early as 1999.
The spies wanted to turn the info over to the FBI in 2000, Weldon said, "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists."
He claimed Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because they mistakenly believed that since Atta and the others were in the country legally on visas, they could not be investigated.
In fact, U.S. law bars such intelligence investigations only of American citizens and immigrant "green card" holders but visa-holders such as Atta and the other hijackers are fair game. ...
Another reason for the Pentagon lawyers' actions, Weldon said, was a pre-Sept. 11 barrier that prevented the FBI and U.S. spy agencies from sharing intelligence a practice the 9/11 commission criticized last year in its final report.
Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general under former President Bill Clinton and a commission member, codified the separation between investigative and intelligence agencies in a 1995 memo.
Weldon first made his allegations in an unnoticed floor speech in June.
The issue heated up Monday after a story ran in the bimonthly Government Security News, which covers national-security matters....
But Weldon suggested Able Danger's explosive findings had been hidden from commission members.
"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," Weldon said.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Bump for am - thanks! :-)
"The farcical "outing" of Valerie Plame therefore raises a genuinely frightening monster from the swamp: A subversive alliance between the intelligence bureaucracy, the Democratic Party and the media."
You say that as if it's something new...
"She has however been given an opportunity to show the fire in her belly and her push for the new UN Ambassador and some of the things she his doing at state she's gone up a few notches in my book."
Like what, insisting that we "rearm" the Palestinians?
Don't those savages have enough guns???
Gorelick was the person on the committee who decided which documents would be perused by the committee. I remember hearing one of the supposed Republican committee leaders saying, with smiling confidence, how great it was to have a person with her expertise in charge of such a task. I thought, you have been rolled.
Yet, she sat there on the 9/11 Commission in judgment of others, when she was perhaps the most guilty.
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Not only sat on the commission, but was "tasked" by the perfumed-prince former senators and governor with deciding which papers and persons would be brought before the committee.
I saw one of them on a TV interview say how fortunate the committee was to have someone like Jamie with so much "background" in the events that the commission was going to study.
They were put on that committee for one reason: to toe the Toon party line. They weren't rolled. They were either in on it or were willing to acquiesce.
Let's put Gorelick under oath. And Sandy Berger, too.
Perhaps if they need protection from Syria. But I'll have to admit just about everyone we've armed in the last 20 years has turned around and bit us in the ass.
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