9:11 Commission's "Schutzie" defense

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Kean-Hamilton Statement on ABLE DANGER
9:11 PDP.org, August 12th

The above link is the official 9:11 Commission's response to recent info brought to light INRE 9:11 suicide jihadist Mohammed Atta and what was known about the Brooklyn AQ cell prior to 9:11.

Reading thru the 4 page PDF document reveals the typical "Schultzie defense" (ala the famous "I know noth'zeen" line from the old TV sitcom, Hogan's Heroes). While staffers prepared memorandums and requests for full documentation from the ABLE DANGER operation, apparently nothing of consequence made it to the Commission in their original report. After the fact, the Commission is quick to point fingers elsewhere for their failure to view all the facts involved.

Today the spin tries to shift from the existance of such intel to Rep. Weldon's conflicting statements of when he knew of this information.

There can be no doubt that the larger story is... what happened to the documentation that no one seems to be able to locate. Who took it? And why, with Congressional members and WH staffers well aware of the increasing threat from AQ over the past decade, was ABLE DANGER disbanded? Under who's authority was the information on the Brooklyn cell "redacted" from the files?

Those willing to give the Commission a pass for overlooking this key data say this statement shows they give it their best effort to investigate. As is usual with our government officials, "we have a failure to communicate".

I am less likely to give anyone a pass on this. Not only could the 9:11 Commission have deduced that incomplete info on a government operation dedicated solely to terrorists cells in the US should have been a huge "heads up", the import of this could not have escaped anyone with knowledge of ABLE DANGER. In light of the attack on our shores and the innocent lives lost, it was their patriotic duty to speak up.

As wisely pointed out by Alia in her post of August 10th, Jamie Gorelick, Clinton, Berger, Albright and the FBI and CIA all have some serious accounting due not only to the Commission, but to the American public as well.

A brief excerpt is provided below. Read in full at link above.

A senior staff member also made verbal inquiries to the HPSCI and CIA staff for any information regarding the ABLE DANGER operation. Neither organization produced any documents about the operation, or displayed any knowledge of it.

In 2004, Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) and his staff contacted the Commission to call the Commission’s attention to the Congressman’s critique of the U.S. intelligence community. No mention was made in these conversations of a claim that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers had been identified by DOD employees before 9/11.

In early July 2004, the Commission’s point of contact at DOD called the Commission’s attention to the existence of a U.S. Navy officer employed at DOD who was seeking to be interviewed by Commission staff in connection with a data mining project on which he had worked. The DOD point of contact indicated that the prospective witness was claiming that the project had linked Atta to an al Qaeda cell located in New York in the 1999-2000 time frame. Shortly after receiving this information, the Commission staff’s front office assigned two staff members with knowledge of the 9/11 plot and the ABLE DANGER operation to interview the witness at one of the Commission’s Washington, D.C. offices.

On July 12, 2004, as the drafting and editing process for the Report was coming to an end (the Report was released on July 22, and editing continued to occur through July 17), a senior staff member, Dieter Snell, accompanied by another staff member, met with the officer at one of the Commission’s Washington, D.C. offices. A representative of the DOD also attended the interview.

According to the memorandum for the record on this meeting, prepared the next day by Mr. Snell, the officer said that ABLE DANGER included work on “link analysis,” mapping links among various people involved in terrorist networks. According to this record, the officer recalled seeing the name and photo of Mohamed Atta on an “analyst notebook chart” assembled by another officer (who he said had retired and was now working as a DOD contractor).

The officer being interviewed said he saw this material only briefly, that the relevant material dated from February through April 2000, and that it showed Mohamed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn. The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document (“redacted”) because DOD lawyers were concerned about the propriety of DOD intelligence efforts that might be focused inside the United States. The officer referred to these as “posse comitatus” restrictions. Believing the law was being wrongly interpreted, he said he had complained about these restrictions up his chain of command in the U.S. Special Operations Command, to no avail.

The officer then described the remainder of his work on link analysis efforts, until he was eventually transferred to other work. The officer complained about how these methods were being used by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and mentioned other concerns about U.S. officials and foreign governments.