I started looking for this thread yesterday. I thought that the finer minds of the SDMBwould surely be examining the facts and engaging in relevant and interesting debate on the issue.
I chose Yahoo news as a source to remove the bias excuse. This is the first paragraph:
“The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday.”
First, commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said the commission had no knowledge of this. Then Wednesday, he changed his tune to “well, yes, it turned out that we did know. But it doesn’t matter because this was just another indication of a communication problem.”
Also from the story:
“According to Pentagon documents, the information was not shared because of concerns about pursuing information on “U.S. persons,” a legal term that includes U.S. citizens as well as foreigners legally admitted to the country.”
Interesting. The question now as I see it…Who made the decision not to share the information and how high up the food chain does it go?
Some people are saying that Clinton Justice Department official Jamie Gorelick is the one that squashed it. Others are saying that this is the reason Sandy Berger stole documents from the National Archives. Since Berger was reported to only take copies and no originals were taken, this should be easy enough to verify. I wonder who, if anyone, is waiting for the sound of another shoe hitting the floor?
I await your input dopers. The political fingerpointing alone should be facinating.
Sorry, I didn’t realize that we are supposed to guess what you want to discuss and launch a thread on that subject for you. We’ll try to do better next time.
What people? Neither of those statements seems to be supported by anything in the linked article. If you’ve got other cites, cite 'em.
Why? Your clumsy attempt at political fingerpointing isn’t very fascinating so far.
Are you actually accusing the membership of this board of not having discussed this subject because it might happen to implicate some former Clinton staffer or another? As I read it, you don’t actually have anything you actually want to discuss here, you just want to make some vague partisan jab purely for the sake of it. No sale.
My point was that I was surprised to see such an interesting and important topic that had been in the news for three days not being broached. I was curious as to why.
We can start with Weldon himself. As the story is still unfolding, allegations are being made in other directions.
Certainly not. I’m sure that if the Bush administration had been in power at the time, the same lack of interest in the topic would still be present. In fact, the crickets would be deafening.
Another one? Didn’t that state have enough cocaine smuggling airstrips already built by the private sector? Damn, just another instance of political pork–MY TAX DOLLARS–going to support an industry that should be profitable enough to take care of itself. It’s enough to turn me Libertarian.
I don’t see anywhere in the article that Weldon is accusing either Jamie Gorelick or Sandy Berger of any wrongdoing here. In fact, other than at Pentagon lawyers, he’s not pointing any fingers yet.
Since your link doesn’t back up the claim that Weldon is the one making the accusations, I have the same basic question as El_Kabong. Who is making these accusations that you referred to in the OP, and what new directions are the allegations taking as the story unfolds, and by whom?
At this point, Weldon seems to be pointing the finger at 9/11 commission staffers, particularly former 9/11 commission Executive Director Phillip Zelikow, for not sharing the information with the commissioners themselves.
The intelligence officer in this story with more background lays the initial blame for not alerting the FBI about Atta and at least three other terrorists at the feet of DoD lawyers.
What I would like to know is who made the call not to alert the FBI. I want a name and I want that person to explain themselves.
Weldon is also saying that the 9/11 commission was briefed on “Able Danger” and it’s findings on twice. Once in October 2003 and again in July 2004. Commission spokesman initially denied that the commission was told anything about “Able Danger”…then recanted and said that it did happen and that they were looking into it. Investigators are looking through the National Archives for a memo to that effect. I would like to know whom within the commission decided that this information wasn’t important enough to pass along and why.
The accusations toward Jamie Gorelick and Sandy Berger are coming from conservative blogs at this point as people begin to theorize about motives for these actions.
Me thinks Evil One forgot to use [irony] [/irony] but I think he does make a valid point. I took a quick look yesterday just to see if I could learn anything new about this story and was also shocked to see nary a mention.
From what I understand, the story basically comes down to Defense Department lawyers refusing to allow information gathered about Atta’s cell by Able Danger to be shared with the FBI due to Atta possessing a green card. I would certainly hope there’s more to their reasoning, but maybe not.
The immediate decision was not hers; I don’t think anyone has said it was. As I understand it, however, she was the author of the policy by which that decsion was made – the “wall” of separation.
Yeesh. Is everyone posting to this thread all that young? Following the Nixon abuses, in which the CIA and FBI were both used to spy on (and harrass) U.S. citizens, Congress passed several (not perfectly worded) laws that prevented agencies with authority over foreign issues from using that information domestically.
Now, with 20/20 hindsight, we can all see that those odd laws should have been crafted much more carefully, but I am not in any way surprised that a lawyer (of any administration) confronted with a request to pass information from an agency with foreign responsibilty to a domestic agency decided to err on the side of caution. (Had the WTC/Pentagon attacks been thwarted by sharing the information and the government was now being sued on some pretense by Atta and his merry men, some of the people now looking to castigate the lawyers would be scorning them for having handed Atta fuel for his lawsuit by violating the law.)
In some ways it is like the hijacking of the planes, themselves. Following a series of rather disastrous hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s it began to dawn on even the most gung ho security type that the hijackings that suffered the fewest casualties and the least loss of property were those in which the hijackers were allowed to simply take the planes to their destination where they would either be deported by the leaders of that country or talked into surrender. (Even Castro sent back hijackers under the threat of the airlines refusing to serve Cuba.) In retrospect, there was always the possibility that someone would use a hijacked plane as a weapon and no plane should have been allowed to be commandeered with a wepaon as innocuous as a boxcutter. But in the ~30 years prior to 2001, we saved a lot of lives and airplanes by not making every hijacking into a firefight at 35,000 feet.
Should someone track down the actual decisions and the paper trail leading to those decisions so that we can be sure that they will not be repeated, despite the new rules for Homeland Security? Sure. Should we be aghast that it happened or look for a person to pillory to make ourselves feel good that we “punished” a bad decision? No.
I think the whole thing is moot. IIRC, one of the prime findings of the 9/11 commission was that US intelligence sources were not communicating properly and well, and it was recommended that a department of Homeland Security should be created and an intelligence czar named to ensure that information that legitimately should be in the hands of domestic law enforcement got there.
So, it’s not like the issue was ignored or swept under the rug.
Seeing as these laws precluding communication existed with the best intentions and for good reasons I see nothing to be gained in finger pointing after the fact.
It is a mistake that the 9/11 commission seemed to ignore or hide these particulars. I think it was done for political reasons and now that it’s public it’s being used for political reasons.
That’s politics. What do you expect?
The part that I care about is that they learned from and rectified the mistakes of intelligence sharing so it wouldn’t bite us in the ass in the future. All the rest is bullshit and fodder for Limbaugh and Franken to snipe at each other.
as an accusation that Gorelick was responsible for the immediate decision (“Who made the decision…?”). I know that people fault her for her policy but that’s not what was portayed in the OP.
That’s very fair. And Scylla is right that “it was done for political reasons and now that it’s public it’s being used for political reasons.”
The problem is that the 9/11 commission has been regarded by many as this inviolate bastion of wisdom that must be heeded (though some disagreed and said it was flawed from start). Now that we find that they were covering things up for political reasons, it invites the question of whether they suppressed anything else. Mack: Understood. Mea Culpa.
It looks like there is a lot of jumping to conclusions going on here. While it has a bias, you might take a look at Kevin Drum’s Washington Monthly item for August 13. While bias the site seems fairly rational.
Does Congressman Weldon need to jack up a controversy / scandal / publicity frenzy for his own purposes? Has anyone from the Dept of Defense bothered to tell us what this program was, what it knew and who it told? Is there some reason we should think any of this is accurate and reliable information?
MSNBC is pretty thoroughly debunking Wledon’s claims. The NBC Reality Check this week on the MSNBC Website (video) contains the essentials, which to me include:
Weldon admits he used a single Intelligence Officer for his claim
Both Weldon and the Intelligence Officer have told NBC news that they have absolutely no documents or proof of any kind to back their claims
The Intelligence Officer tried to have other information included that was deemed "factually inaccurate” by the 9-11 Commission
“Senior Pentagon Officials” have stated that Able Danger was a broad info collecting program that did not track single individuals
“Senior Pentagon and Intelligence Officials” have told NBC News that Atta’a name does not appear in single U.S. Intelligence document prior to 9-11
but I think he does make a valid point. I took a quick look yesterday just to see if I could learn anything new about this story and was also shocked to see nary a mention.