US Congressman Curt Weldon (R) claims US intel knew about 9/11 hijackers (http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050810/ap_on_go_co/sept_11_hijackers)

WASHINGTON - The Sept. 11 commission will investigate a claim that U.S. defense intelligence officials identified ringleader Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as a likely part of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the hijackings but didn't forward the information to law enforcement.

Rep. Curt Weldon (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa. and vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, said Tuesday the men were identified in 1999 by a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger." If true, that's an earlier link to al-Qaida than any previously disclosed intelligence about Atta.

Sept. 11 commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton said Tuesday that Weldon's information, which the congressman said came from multiple intelligence sources, warrants a review. He said he hoped the panel could issue a statement on its findings by the end of the week.

"The 9/11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."


Somebody get this moonbat a tinfoil hat and bodysuit. I mean, if they knew then they would have told somebody, right? Its not like Bush tried to stonewall a formal investigation into the attacks and then initially refused to testify without his Uncle Cheney in the room.

Oh wait, yeah he did.

"I believe it said something like "Bin laden determined to attack inside UNited States, but I didn't need a memo to tell me that."
-Condi Rice, testifying before the 9/11 panel

Well, it's not like the Bush admin could do anything with such scant clues, right? I mean, without rock-solid evidence of wrongdoing the Bush admin would never hastily rush into action on an issue, would they? well...maybe....damn.

*waiting to see if Red "fixes" the title of this thread*:rolleyes:

Didn't the Gorelick wall forbid precisely that kind of intelligence sharing?

I heard that the mayor of San Francisco (Willie Brown?) rec’d word to not fly on 9/10 or 9/11. Did the 9/11 Commission address that? I also heard that Pentagon officials rec’d word to not fly on those days as well.

If someone were to ask me if I was satisfied with the findings and conclusions reached by the 9/11 Commission I would say no. I just picked up a book titled The War on Truth - 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed.

Didn't the Gorelick wall forbid precisely that kind of intelligence sharing?

Apparently so.

How does this make it a conspiracy?


"The 9/11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

The commission's report on the terrorist attacks, released last year, traced government mistakes that allowed the hijackers to succeed. Among the problems the commission cited was a lack of coordination across intelligence agencies.

Rep. Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who serves as vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, said a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger" identified the men in 1999.

That's an earlier link to Al Qaeda than any previously disclosed intelligence about Atta if the information, which Weldon said came from multiple intelligence sources, is true.

With the 9/11 commission disbanded for a year under provisions of the legislation that created it, some of the panel's members have said congressional committees should investigate Weldon's assertions.

According to Weldon, Able Danger identified Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi as members of a cell the unit code-named "Brooklyn" because of some loose connections to New York City.

Weldon said that in September 2000 Able Danger recommended that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists." However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because they said Atta and the others were in the country legally, so information on them could not be shared with law enforcement.

Weldon did not provide details on how the intelligence officials identified the future hijackers and determined they might be part of a terrorist cell.

Defense Department documents shown to an Associated Press reporter Tuesday said the Able Danger team was set up in 1999 to identify potential Al Qaeda operatives for U.S. Special Operations Command. At some point, information provided to the team by the Army's Information Dominance Center pointed to a possible Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, the documents said.

However, because of concerns about pursuing information on "U.S. persons" — a legal term that includes U.S. citizens as well as foreigners admitted to the country for permanent residence — Special Operations Command did not provide the Army information to the FBI. It is unclear whether the Army provided the information to anyone else.

The command instead turned its focus to overseas threats.

The documents provided no information on whether the team identified anyone connected to the Sept. 11 attacks on New York City and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.

If the team did identify Atta and the others, it's unclear why the information wasn't forwarded. The prohibition against sharing intelligence on "U.S. persons" should not have applied since they were in the country on visas and did not have permanent resident status.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165268,00.html

It seems pretty likely since the previous administration ignored all terrorist activities in the 8 years prior to 9/11.

It seems pretty likely since the previous administration ignored all terrorist activities in the 8 years prior to 9/11.


Besides ignoring a gathering threat over the course of 8 years, Liberal-Democrat policy makers and their policies prevented the intelligence sharing between agencies.

Some key names include:

Jamie Gorelick
Frank Church


They may re-open the 9/11 commission because of this revelation.

It causes one to wonder what documents Sandy Berger was stuffing in his underwear and socks.

I heard that the mayor of San Francisco (Willie Brown?) rec’d word to not fly on 9/10 or 9/11. Did the 9/11 Commission address that? I also heard that Pentagon officials rec’d word to not fly on those days as well.

If someone were to ask me if I was satisfied with the findings and conclusions reached by the 9/11 Commission I would say no. I just picked up a book titled The War on Truth - 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed.






Where did that book come from ,' mecca'?

I know ahmed wouldn't lie . ;)

Apparently so.

How does this make it a conspiracy?



http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165268,00.html

It seems pretty likely since the previous administration ignored all terrorist activities in the 8 years prior to 9/11.



They were too busy giving Bosnia away to radical muslems .

Haha...

Definately a case where conspiracy theorists salivate at the headline and fail to read the story itself. :p

Ouch.

Didn't the Gorelick wall forbid precisely that kind of intelligence sharing?

As 302Riz indicated, yes. I heard the author of the original article interviewed on the Savage Nation. The Clinton appointed lawyers who now works for Condi Rice should be in prison for being part of the liberal lawyers who did not go after Mohammad Atta because he technically had a Green Card. This Muslim Terrorist was apparently in an Israeli prison, but in a vain attempt for a Clinton inspired "peace process," the beast was let go and to America he came as the Ted Kennedy inspired US immigration policy is structured to allow terrorists entry.

Besides ignoring a gathering threat over the course of 8 years, Liberal-Democrat policy makers and their policies prevented the intelligence sharing between agencies.

Some key names include:

Jamie Gorelick
Frank Church

Don't forget Bill Clinton and the liberal lawyers directly involved who still have government jobs!

They may re-open the 9/11 commission because of this revelation.

They should. The few remaining American citizens who care about the country want to see justice served on the enemies within the government who seem to be just as immune from prosecution as UN employees. This is why a class action suit may be one way to address the problem.

It causes one to wonder what documents Sandy Berger was stuffing in his underwear and socks.

I think Sandy Burgler's punishment for stealing classified documents was that he no longer is allowed access to classified documents. :p

Again, the Pentagon lawyers who are responsible for preventing the capture of the Muslim Terrorists before they committed their acts of terrorism, must be brought to justice even if they now work for The Chimp's administration.

themistocles, the conspiracy theorists have the advantage to continually adjust their theory, but the theory is really a house of cards. I would imagine that they think this news is part of the conspiracy to trick people into thinking there were really passenger jets that hit the WTC and the Pentagon and the field in Pennsylvania because I think they do not belief Mohammad Atta was ever on a plane and is just a made up CIA operative. So crazy as it sounds, they would use this news to support their theory that cargo planes hit the two towers and they were then imploded by the CIA and that a missile struck the Pentagon.

Too bad I wasn't there when that plane came down the street to hit pentagon . I know the difference in a plane and a missel . But since I wasn' there I have to wonder .

Didn't the Gorelick wall forbid precisely that kind of intelligence sharing?

:rolleyes: Wait a minute:

George Tenet was acting CIA director from 1996 to 1997 and was the real deal from 1998 to 2004. Are we to assume then that the CIA director, after the exposure of the AQ-related embassy bombings of the late 90s, the AQ-related Millenium Plot and the AQ-related USS Cole did not light figurative sticks of dynamite under the new Bush administration to exercise all due urgency as warnings of Bojinka-style AQ attacks loomed from intelligence agencies all over the world??

This is unfathomable. If Weldon is correct, Tenet must have known of Atta, warnings were pouring in, Bush gets the August 6th PDB, Pentagon staffers stop flying, Willie Brown stops flying...

Someone tell me again why there aren't people in jail over this??

This thread title should be changed. It's misleading and when people scan through the threads they aren't going to know this is a US Congressman making the claim. :rolleyes:

Corky, stop complaining. Its title is fine.

Somebody get this moonbat a tinfoil hat and bodysuit. I mean, if they knew then they would have told somebody, right?
"I believe it said something like "Bin laden determined to attack inside
R-Pa. and vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, said Tuesday [B]the men were identified in 1999 by a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger." If true, that's an earlier link to al-Qaida than any previously disclosed intelligence about Atta.

"The 9/11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

A congressman divulges information from the US military...Information the 9-11 commission was informed about but did not look into....information the Chairman of the committee knew nothing about...information that makes a member of the commission (Gorelick) look foolish....And you call the guy a moonbat conspiracy nut? okay

Geez, ya'll. The title is a joke to make a point.

According to the Bush apologists, it was simply just physically impossible for anyone to have prevented 9/11 under any circumstances, no matter how many people knew or how many warnings were given; it was just impossible.

Or at least after Janury 2000, that is. During the previous eight years before that there were many opportunities which were blown, according to the Republican mouthpieces, but not after Bush took office. As soon as that happened a technicality in the law prevented anyone from acting on the many, many warning flags.

It's those bastard LEFTISTS. If it weren't for them, this really would be the land of milk and honey...

Yeah, the leftists sat on their hands and did nothing about terrorism for eight years. After that nobody can be blamed because of DOJ code 49809856098347605.459085y8734, which makes it illegal for Republicans to stop terrorist attacks which would be politically fortuitous to their party.

By original author unknown

President Clinton led the fight against terrorism over strong opposition from Republicans in Congress and the pro-Republican Media. Here's a partial - yet incredibly long - list of accomplishments against terrorism for which the Clinton Administration gets almost no credit or even recognition. President Clinton:

-- sent legislation to Congress to TIGHTEN AIRPORT SECURITY. (Remember, this is before 911) The legislation was defeated by the Republicans because of opposition from the airlines.

-- sent legislation to Congress to allow for BETTER TRACKING OF TERRORIST FUNDING. It was defeated by Republicans in the Senate because of opposition from banking interests.

-- sent legislation to Congress to add tagents to explosives, to allow for BETTER TRACKING OF EXPLOSIVES USED BY TERRORISTS. It was defeated by the Republicans because of opposition from the NRA.

When Republicans couldn't prevent executive action, President Clinton:

-- Developed the nation's first anti-terrorism policy, and appointed first national coordinator.

-- Stopped cold the planned attack to blow up 12 U.S. jetliners simultaneously.

-- Stopped cold the planned attack to blow up UN Headquarters.

-- Stopped cold the planned attack to blow up FBI Headquarters.

-- Stopped cold the planned attack to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

--Stopped cold the planned attack to blow up Boston airport.

-- Stopped cold the planned attack to blow up Lincoln and Holland Tunnels in NY.

-- Stopped cold the planned attack to blow up the George Washington Bridge.

-- Stopped cold the planned attack to blow up the US Embassy in Albania.

-- Tried to kill Osama bin Laden and disrupt Al Qaeda through preemptive strikes (efforts denounced by the G.O.P.).

-- Brought perpetrators of first World Trade Center bombing and CIA killings to justice.

-- Did not blame Bush I administration for first World Trade Center bombing even though it occurred 38 days after they had left office. Instead, worked hard, even obsessively -- and successfully -- to stop future terrorist attacks.

-- Named the Hart-Rudman commission to report on nature of terrorist threats and major steps to be taken to combat terrorism.

-- Tripled the budget of the FBI for counterterrorism and doubled overall funding for counterterrorism.

-- Detected and destroyed cells of Al Qaeda in over 20 countries

-- Created a national stockpile of drugs and vaccines including 40 million doses of smallpox vaccine.

-- Robert Oakley, Reagan Counterterrorism Czar says of Clinton's efforts "Overall, I give them very high marks" and "The only major criticism I have is the obsession with Osama"

-- Paul Bremer, Bush's Administrator of Iraq disagrees slightly with Robert Oakley saying he believed the Clinton Administration had "correctly focused on bin Laden. "

-- Barton Gellman of the Washington Post put it best, "By any measure available, Clinton left office having given greater priority to terrorism than any president before him" and was the "first administration to undertake a systematic anti-terrorist effort."

Here, in stark contrast, is part of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism record before September 11, 2001:

-- Backed off Clinton administration's anti-terrorism efforts.

-- Shelved the Hart-Rudman report.

-- Appointed new anti-terrorism task force under Dick Cheney. Group did not even meet before 9/11.

-- Called for cuts in anti-terrorism efforts by the Department of Defense.

-- Gave no priority to anti-terrorism efforts by Justice Department.

-- Ignored warnings from Sandy Berger, Louis Freeh, George Tennant, Paul Bremer, and Richard Clarke about the urgency of terrorist threats.

-- Halted Predator drone tracking of Osama bin Laden.

-- Did nothing in wake of August 6 C.I.A. report to president saying Al Qaeda attack by hijack of an airliner almost certain.

-- Bush - knowing about the terrorists' plans to attack in America, warned that terrorists were in flight schools in the US - took a four week vacation.

-- By failing to order any coordination of intelligence data, missed opportunity to stop the 9/11 plot as Clinton-Gore had stopped the millennium plots.

-- Blamed President Clinton for 9/11.

It is safe to characterize the pre 9-11 BA of putting anti-terrorism about 89th on the priority list simply because it was an evil-Clinton priority

It has become apparent that there was advanced knowlege of the 9/11 attackers and nothing could be done about it because of the policies that were put in place. Bush should share some responsiblity but the Clinton Administration, for the most part should be held accountable.

According to the Bush apologists, it was simply just physically impossible for anyone to have prevented 9/11 under any circumstances, no matter how many people knew or how many warnings were given; it was just impossible.

Or at least after Janury 2000, that is. During the previous eight years before that there were many opportunities which were blown, according to the Republican mouthpieces, but not after Bush took office. As soon as that happened a technicality in the law prevented anyone from acting on the many, many warning flags.

It WAS impossible to have prevented the highjackings, because Americans would not have put with the increased security hassles without being convinced they were necessary. Had Bush implemented the kind of security necessary to actually prevent them, he would have been accused of paranoia, racial bias, insanity, and idiocy by the very people who are now blaming him for allowing 9/11 to happen. After all, Clinton had the same information and did nothing. I find it amusing that somehow Clinton was blissfully ignorant of any kind of terrorist threat to the US and couldn't have been expected to DO anything about them, yet still managed to pass on amazingly detailed warnings to the Bush administration.

It WAS impossible to have prevented the highjackings, because Americans would not have put with the increased security hassles without being convinced they were necessary. Had Bush implemented the kind of security necessary to actually prevent them, he would have been accused of paranoia, racial bias, insanity, and idiocy by the very people who are now blaming him for allowing 9/11 to happen. After all, Clinton had the same information and did nothing. I find it amusing that somehow Clinton was blissfully ignorant of any kind of terrorist threat to the US and couldn't have been expected to DO anything about them, yet still managed to pass on amazingly detailed warnings to the Bush administration.


Such dishonesty..


How can you defend this administration which had plenty of opportunities to stop it yet did nothing?

How can you defend the same clowns who let Bin Laden get away?

Such dishonesty..


How can you defend this administration which had plenty of opportunities to stop it yet did nothing?

How can you defend the same clowns who let Bin Laden get away?

Realism. You know perfectly well (yet hide behind your hatred of Bush) that the American people would have never put up with what would have been necessary to actually prevent the attacks. We would have had to ground all air travel until the extra security measures were in place, costing millions if not billions. We would have had to ethnically profile all arabic appearing young to middle-aged males, opening up that can of worms. We would have had massive protests, and for what? A few vague warnings that Osama was determined to attack within the US. No idea when. No idea what targets. Not enough. You know all of this, yet continue to excoriate and smear the BA at every opportunity. Letting Osama get away? Ha. It's war. Plans don't always work. Maybe we should hit the escape key and reload the game from the last save point so we can do it perfectly. Have you seen Osama lately? How much damage is he causing us? Now as to actually letting him get away, Bill Clinton had several opportunities to grab him and make him disappear, but didn't.

Realism.


Realism? How can you make this claim when anytime somebody questions Bush you accuse them of "hating Bush".


You know perfectly well (yet hide behind your hatred of Bush)


Spare me the tired out over-used RNC talking points, it's like a broken record, anybody says anything about Bush and "they just irrationally hate him!!!"

It's not about his murder of 1800+ US soldiers or tens of thousands of Iraqi's or doing nothing to stop 9-11 because it gave his cronies their dreamed about Pearl Harbor.

Nope, and Jews had no excuse for their dis-like of Hitler too eh??

Stories like this >> http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/002304.html

Should piss any decent human being off..


that the American people would have never put up with what would have been necessary to actually prevent the attacks.


Oh, like going out and arresting 19 evil Muslims for conspiracy to to commit mass murder? Yea, they'd have a real big problem with that..



We would have had to ground all air travel until the extra security measures were in place, costing millions if not billions.


Speculation pulled out of thin air..

On top of putting money over lives...


We would have had to ethnically profile all arabic appearing young to middle-aged males, opening up that can of worms.


Not when we already knew who to look for.. And it's not that hard to stop people boarding planes with weapons, especially a bunch of "young arabic looking males"...


We would have had massive protests, and for what?


Right, Americans don't even go protest when the Patriot act craps on the Constitution and their jobs get sent to China..

Most people wouldn't even know if measures were put in place to stop the attacks..


A few vague warnings that Osama was determined to attack within the US.

Completely false, you know this to be total BS yet you keep pushing this upon us, why is that?

Why do we see nothing but excuses? Nobody is ever and has ever been held accountable for 9-11, why is ity ok to reward failure?

There were dozens of very specific warnings, more than enough to warrant a massive response, instead nothing was done, nothing at all, Bush went on vacation and ignored the obvious. We've been over all this many times before, some of the warnings were so specific certain people were warned not to fly commercial jets on 9-11. Yet supposedly, they knew nothing, right, if they are that incompetent than the whole lot of them shouldn't still be running the country. Just think, the same incompetent boobs are protecting us right now, feel safe? The borders and ports are still wide open. Doesn't this raise red flags? 4 years after 9-11 and still are biggest weaknesses have been totally ignored, you don't see any problems with this?

Sometime in the late summer of 2001, GID headquarters in Jordan intercepted a crucial Al Qaeda communication. This probably took place after the July 5 warning by a Phoenix, Ariz., FBI agent that Arab terrorists could be sending men to flight schools, and either before or shortly after Aug. 6, when President Bush received a CIA briefing about possible hijackings.

The intercept's content was deemed so important that Jordanian King Abdallah's men relayed it to Washington, probably through the CIA station at the US Embassy in Amman. To be sure that the message got through, it was also passed to a German intelligence agent who was visiting Amman at the time.

The message showed clearly that a major attack was planned inside the continental US. It said aircraft would be used. But neither hijacking nor, apparently, precise timing nor targets were named. The code name of the operation was mentioned: in Arabic, Al Ourush al-Kabir, "The Big Wedding."

When it became clear that the information about the intercept was embarrassing to the Bush administration and to congressmen who at first denied there had been any advance warnings of 9/11, senior Jordan officials backed off their earlier confirmations.

Last November, a French magazine and a Moroccan newspaper simultaneously reported a story that has never been publicly confirmed or denied – in Paris, Rabat, or Washington.

It said that a Moroccan secret agent named Hassan Dabou had infiltrated Al Qaeda. Several weeks before Sept. 11, the story goes, he informed his chiefs in King Muhammed VI's royal intelligence service that Mr. bin Laden's men were preparing "large-scale operations in New York in the summer or autumn of 2001." The warning was said to have been passed from the Moroccan capital of Rabat to Washington.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0523/p11s01-coop.html

Hey, let's go on vacation! And when the attacks are taking place we can read about Goats instead of getting up and responding. What a leader this man Bush is! He did nothing at all to stop 9-11, let's blame Clinton!


No idea when.

False, there was plenty of intel saying otherwise..^^


No idea what targets.


Wrong again, The WTC and the Pentagon were known targets and were known to be the #1 attack targets for a long time dating back to Bojinka in 95 and even before that..


Not enough.


Well of course you say this, it's what the RNC says..


You know all of this

I know that everything you just said is complete wrong, you've been shown to be wrong about this countless times here, yet you keep peddling the same false information, why is that?


yet continue to excoriate and smear the BA at every opportunity.

How can one smear a corrupt dministration that allowed 3000 Anericans to die to push forward the PNAC agenda? Is that even possible?


Letting Osama get away? Ha. It's war. Plans don't always work.

Especially when they are intentionally screwed by the people running the show.


Maybe we should hit the escape key and reload the game from the last save point so we can do it perfectly.

Or maybe we can put doing what's right ahead of our partisan love for a adminstration that should be impeached for their disastrous policies?

Biggest terrorist attack on American soil ever completely failed to stop
Stonewall of the investigation into terrorist attack
Corporate cronyism at an all time high
Lying to start a pre-emptive war which killed over 1800 US soldiers
The appointment of some of the most crooked people into powerful positions in his admin
The fear mongering
The Patriot act


You act like everything they do wrong is just a big accident, nobody gets that many chances in the private world, nobody..


Have you seen Osama lately?


No, we might see him sharing a cell with saddam had they not let him get away from Tora Bora..


How much damage is he causing us?

Wow...

So you take whatever position Bush takes? We should just forget about him, he's not that important, it's been awhile since 9-11...

Incredible...


Now as to actually letting him get away, Bill Clinton had several opportunities to grab him and make him disappear, but didn't.


So instead of addressing the fact that we could have got him in Tora Bora you ignore it and pull out the blame Clinton card. Let's hope Osama isn't planning another attack when we could have got him..

Such dishonesty..


How can you defend this administration which had plenty of opportunities to stop it yet did nothing?

How can you defend the same clowns who let Bin Laden get away?

Or explain why the administration that protected their own and their friends:

- Condi's well-known call to Willie Brown
- Ashcroft being advised not to fly commercial
- Pentagoners not flying:

"On Sept. 10, NEWSWEEK has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns"

http://propagandamatrix.com/pentagon_officials_safe.htm

but precious few others?

Or explain the inactions on the part of the nation's own air defenses under Bush, where military fighters automatically scrambled to intercept waywar aircraft (I'll cite Payne Stewarts Lear in 1999 as one example but there are myriad others...) except on that day?

It's fine to theorize that Bush & Co may not have wanted to inconvenience people in their daily travels because people, as hadit posits, would not have tolerated such measures but I would like to know, aside from warning their friends, what exactly did they do? Okay, don't do anything to seriously impede people but do something. So what did they do? What did Bush do in after the August 6th PDB, aside from reel in more catfish? What did he command his people to so? What did he tell Ashcroft to do? Or Tenet?

And Tenet is especially suspect now since it appears he knew specifically about Atta and still the Bush Admin did nothing...

Realism? How can you make this claim when anytime somebody questions Bush you accuse them of "hating Bush".


Yet you DO hate Bush, to the point where you will believe anything that is negative about him.


Spare me the tired out over-used RNC talking points, it's like a broken record, anybody says anything about Bush and "they just irrationally hate him!!!"


See above.


It's not about his murder of 1800+ US soldiers or tens of thousands of Iraqi's or doing nothing to stop 9-11 because it gave his cronies their dreamed about Pearl Harbor.


See above. You go beyond incompetence and into the wacky world of believing he purposefully allowed the attacks.


Nope, and Jews had no excuse for their dis-like of Hitler too eh??

Stories like this >> http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/002304.html

Should piss any decent human being off..


Playing the Hitler card? For shame.


Oh, like going out and arresting 19 evil Muslims for conspiracy to to commit mass murder? Yea, they'd have a real big problem with that..


Where were they to be arrested? No one has made the case yet that we could have arrested "19 evil Muslims for conspiracy to to commit mass murder". We had some names of some people who could possibly have been dangerous, but the intelligence services were forbidden by law to share the information. The ACLU would have had a field day had we done precisely what you are advocating we should have done. Remember, they hadn't done anything to be arrested for at the time.


Speculation pulled out of thin air..

On top of putting money over lives...


Based on a realistic evaluation of the situation. We STILL don't have safe air travel, and have spent millions and taken years. And that's exactly how the American people would have reacted. They would never have put up with the disruption and economic loss. You know this to be true.


Not when we already knew who to look for.. And it's not that hard to stop people boarding planes with weapons, especially a bunch of "young arabic looking males"...


Yes, it is, when you are forbidden to do anything that even looks like profiling. We're STILL searching white grandma so we don't offend Mohammed, and that's AFTER the attacks.


Right, Americans don't even go protest when the Patriot act craps on the Constitution and their jobs get sent to China..

Most people wouldn't even know if measures were put in place to stop the attacks..


Deflection. See above for disruption. I cannot believe you seriously think successful countermeasures would not have been noticed. That's ludicrous.


Completely false, you know this to be total BS yet you keep pushing this upon us, why is that?

Why do we see nothing but excuses? Nobody is ever and has ever been held accountable for 9-11, why is ity ok to reward failure?

There were dozens of very specific warnings, more than enough to warrant a massive response, instead nothing was done, nothing at all, Bush went on vacation and ignored the obvious. We've been over all this many times before, some of the warnings were so specific certain people were warned not to fly commercial jets on 9-11. Yet supposedly, they knew nothing, right, if they are that incompetent than the whole lot of them shouldn't still be running the country. Just think, the same incompetent boobs are protecting us right now, feel safe? The borders and ports are still wide open. Doesn't this raise red flags? 4 years after 9-11 and still are biggest weaknesses have been totally ignored, you don't see any problems with this?


Bull. The response since 9/11 has been totally inadequate. The same groups that prevented the kind of profiling that could have stopped the attacks are keeping the borders wide open now. I don't know why Bush won't seal them shut, and wish he would.


http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0523/p11s01-coop.html

Hey, let's go on vacation! And when the attacks are taking place we can read about Goats instead of getting up and responding. What a leader this man Bush is! He did nothing at all to stop 9-11, let's blame Clinton!


At least he reacted faster than Kerry did. He admitted he couldn't even THINK for 40 minutes after the towers were struck.


False, there was plenty of intel saying otherwise..^^


In hindsight only. Nothing concrete before. Again, you know this. You pick out a few droplets from the tidal wave of intel they have to deal with every day. Do you have any idea how many threats they get every day that don't amount to anything at all? There is no way the government is going to be able to pick up every evil intent against us. I'll say it now. No administration will be able to stop every attack. There are simply too many targets and opportunities. So stop pretending the BA had a chance.


Wrong again, The WTC and the Pentagon were known targets and were known to be the #1 attack targets for a long time dating back to Bojinka in 95 and even before that..


In general, sure. So is the White House and Congress. The Brooklyn Bridge. Every major tunnel. Every nuclear power plant. Nothing new about that.


Well of course you say this, it's what the RNC says..


I don't follow what the RNC says. I don't have to. I guess it's good they agree with me. It is possible for separate entities to arrive at the same conclusion, unless you believe the world is one big conspiracy.


I know that everything you just said is complete wrong, you've been shown to be wrong about this countless times here, yet you keep peddling the same false information, why is that?


Because it's not wrong, as I have demonstrated.


How can one smear a corrupt dministration that allowed 3000 Anericans to die to push forward the PNAC agenda? Is that even possible?


Because they didn't, except in the fevered swamps of conspiracy land.


Especially when they are intentionally screwed by the people running the show.


Wild supposition.


Or maybe we can put doing what's right ahead of our partisan love for a adminstration that should be impeached for their disastrous policies?

Biggest terrorist attack on American soil ever completely failed to stop
Stonewall of the investigation into terrorist attack
Corporate cronyism at an all time high
Lying to start a pre-emptive war which killed over 1800 US soldiers
The appointment of some of the most crooked people into powerful positions in his admin
The fear mongering
The Patriot act


You act like everything they do wrong is just a big accident, nobody gets that many chances in the private world, nobody..

We've been through all that. You find some web pages that say what you believe and claim anyone who says differently is lying. If the media won't spout your line, you say they are right-wing and can't be believed. You have it all conveniently wrapped up so you don't ever have to doubt your viewpoint.

Fear mongering? Interesting. Before 9/11, we're supposed to believe that they should have scared the living daylights out of everyone, yet afterward when they make us aware of the threats, it's fear mongering? NOT.
The Patriot Act is not perfect, but something similar is necessary. We cannot expect to simply return to normal.


No, we might see him sharing a cell with saddam had they not let him get away from Tora Bora..


Yeah, right. Or Clinton could have gotten him, etc, etc. You WANT to believe Bush purposely let Osama get away. You seamlessly make the leap from fact to supposition.


Wow...

So you take whatever position Bush takes? We should just forget about him, he's not that important, it's been awhile since 9-11...

Incredible...


Amazing. I actually fail to drink the Kool-Aid and dance the "I hate Bush" dance on command. Osama has been forced into hiding. He hasn't shown his face but once or twice since 9/11. That's pretty good, considering all things. He will be caught.


So instead of addressing the fact that we could have got him in Tora Bora you ignore it and pull out the blame Clinton card. Let's hope Osama isn't planning another attack when we could have got him..

He was planning to attack when Clinton could have gotten him. We should have gotten him in Tora Bora. Perhaps you could tell us where to get him now, since it is so easy. Bush has made mistakes when it comes to our security, but I really don't see any of the candidates he beat being able to do any better.

Or explain why the administration that protected their own and their friends:

- Condi's well-known call to Willie Brown
- Ashcroft being advised not to fly commercial
- Pentagoners not flying:

"On Sept. 10, NEWSWEEK has learned, a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns"

http://propagandamatrix.com/pentagon_officials_safe.htm

but precious few others?

Or explain the inactions on the part of the nation's own air defenses under Bush, where military fighters automatically scrambled to intercept waywar aircraft (I'll cite Payne Stewarts Lear in 1999 as one example but there are myriad others...) except on that day?

It's fine to theorize that Bush & Co may not have wanted to inconvenience people in their daily travels because people, as hadit posits, would not have tolerated such measures but I would like to know, aside from warning their friends, what exactly did they do? Okay, don't do anything to seriously impede people but do something. So what did they do? What did Bush do in after the August 6th PDB, aside from reel in more catfish? What did he command his people to so? What did he tell Ashcroft to do? Or Tenet?

And Tenet is especially suspect now since it appears he knew specifically about Atta and still the Bush Admin did nothing...

There are some unanswered questions about this whole thing, but accusing an entire administration of something so big as this is going to require a very high threshold of proof. Remember the lengths to which Ken Starr had to go to pin Bill Clinton down on his multitude of lies? That was for perjury and obstruction of justice, not treason. Some people cancelling flight plans "apparently" for security concerns isn't enough for me to raise the executioner's axe.

There are some unanswered questions about this whole thing, but accusing an entire administration of something so big as this is going to require a very high threshold of proof.

The evidence is quite strong though. While the worker-bees in the administration were running around with their hair on fire their superiors, the ones in positions of power and able to issue directives and commands, seem to have done nothing. Ashcroft told subordinates that he didn't want to hear it anymore, Condi went back to old-think missiles, Bush went fishing and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz went back to plotting war against Iraq.

I've seen no evidence that the BA put any real, meaningful measures into place -- measures that might or might not inconvenience travellers -- in the face of warnings that had themselves finding alternatives to aircraft travel and advising their friends likewise.

Remember the lengths to which Ken Starr had to go to pin Bill Clinton down on his multitude of lies? That was for perjury and obstruction of justice, not treason. Some people cancelling flight plans "apparently" for security concerns isn't enough for me to raise the executioner's axe.

That's certainly your perogative. I personally think there are way too many things that, when coupled, paint a picture of an administration in full knowledge of the real threat posed (remember, the Cole had been bombed by AQ just 2 months or so before Bush took office) and doing nothing. It can only be because of a policy, spoken or not, in and amongst the Bush administration. There can be no other explanation as to how so many warnings, in the post-Cole months, went completely unheeded and how the nation's defenses, usually so alert, we inexplicably asleep the one day out of 365 when an attack and hijackings actually occured after a spring and summer of warnings.

I understand your reticence at raising the figurative axe but it's perhaps more difficult to imagine these "unanswered questions" not raising the hairs on the back of your neck, even a little. Something went horribly wrong and there's a very real possibility that it was, at least in part, allowed to happen despite warnings.

The pre-9/11 performance of this administration coupled with the post-9/11 Iraq war fiasco should have every single US citizen demanding accountability. Their stonewalling and ass-covering performances during the 9/11 Commission hearings shouldn't be enough for people.

Lets stick to the topic which is Able Danger.

This is what we know.


1) In 1999, the Pentagon established an intelligence unit called Able Danger, assigned to seek out and identify al-Qaeda cells and members for U.S. Special Operations Command. This group reportedly used data mining from open sources.

2) Approximately August or September 2000, Able Danger identified an al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn. An intelligence official and Rep. Curt Weldon claim that the AD unit identified Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, and included a photo of Atta. (Weldon claims that he has spoken to four persons involved with the program.) At least two of those men were pilots on the hijacked flights.

3) Able Danger analysts recommended the information be passed on to the FBI so that the cell could be rounded up. Accounts in Government Security News, the New York Times, and the Associated Press indicate that Pentagon lawyers decided that anyone holding a green card (as it was believed the cell members did) had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had gathered could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded. This is in keeping with “the wall” philosophy and policy established in 1995 by Assistant Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, in which intelligence and law enforcement were directed to go beyond what the law requires to keep intelligence-gathering and criminal law enforcement separated.

4) The prohibition against sharing intelligence on Atta and the others should not have applied since they were in the country on visas. They did not have permanent resident status.

5) At least two 9/11 Commission staffers were told of Able Danger’s findings on at least two occasions by members of the military intelligence community.

*6) Information about Able Danger was not passed on to the commissioners Tom Kean, Lee Hamilton, Tim Roemer, or John Lehman. If the other members of the commission have indicated whether or not they were informed of this information, I have not seen those reports.

7) The 9/11 Commission Report, which everyone and their brother praised as a comprehensive and definitive analysis of the flaws in U.S. counterterrorism operations before 9/11, now has at least one giant glaring hole in it. One cannot help but wonder what else got left out, because some staffer or staffers seemed to think it wasn’t important enough. I relish the wording in this comment: “The 9-11 Commission’s job was to find and connect all the intelligence dots that obviously didn't get connected prior to 9-11, and then recommend how we can connect the dots better and faster next time. It wasn’t part of their job to erase the dots they didn’t like, before connecting. Doing that, implies that their conclusions were arrived at well before the investigation was complete.”

Source (http://tks.nationalreview.com/archives/072802.asp)


Lets Translate and make the facts very simple for the Clinton lovers:

Clinton policies, Jamie Gorelicks "Wall", prevented the exchange of information so that the FBI could round up and bust this known cell.

This occurred under Clintons watch.

Jamie Gorelick is a 9/11 commissioner.

9/11 Commission staffers knew about this.

The 9/11 Commissioners were not given this information.


More questions;

What did Jamie Gorelick know?
Did Berger or Clinton ever know or hear about any of this pre or post 9/11?
If so, why did they not speak about it?

Did she know this information and not divulge it or was this information kept from her as well?

Had this "Jamie Gorelick Wall" not existed is it plausable that the information would've been passed on to the FBI?

If the FBI had the information, is it reasonable to believe the FBI would've busted the Atta cell?

If the Atta cell had been busted, since ATTA was the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, is it plausible to hypothesize that the 9/11 attacks may have been prevented if Atta and his cell were captured?

Where is the mainstream media?

Does Sandy Berger and his document stuffing have anything to do with this?

Lets stick to the topic which is Able Danger.

This is what we know.


1) In 1999, the Pentagon established an intelligence unit called Able Danger, assigned to seek out and identify al-Qaeda cells and members for U.S. Special Operations Command. This group reportedly used data mining from open sources.

2) Approximately August or September 2000, Able Danger identified an al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn. An intelligence official and Rep. Curt Weldon claim that the AD unit identified Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, and included a photo of Atta. (Weldon claims that he has spoken to four persons involved with the program.) At least two of those men were pilots on the hijacked flights.

3) Able Danger analysts recommended the information be passed on to the FBI so that the cell could be rounded up. Accounts in Government Security News, the New York Times, and the Associated Press indicate that Pentagon lawyers decided that anyone holding a green card (as it was believed the cell members did) had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had gathered could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded. This is in keeping with “the wall” philosophy and policy established in 1995 by Assistant Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, in which intelligence and law enforcement were directed to go beyond what the law requires to keep intelligence-gathering and criminal law enforcement separated.

"Brandishing a secret memo that Gorelick wrote as deputy attorney general in 1995 -- a memo that Ashcroft had helpfully declassified for the occasion -- the current attorney general declared, "Somebody built this wall. ... Full disclosure compels me to inform you that the author of this memorandum is a member of the Commission."

It was a smug bit of political theater, but it was both disingenuous and irrelevant to the proceedings at hand. For one thing, Gorelick didn't exactly build the wall on her own. In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which established a secret intelligence court and relaxed the standard Fourth Amendment rule requiring "probable cause" when the government sought search warrants for the "primary purpose" of gathering foreign intelligence. But over the years, in order to prevent criminal investigators from abusing FISA -- and its lower threshold for obtaining search warrants -- the government built a wall to keep criminal and intelligence investigations separate. Gorelick's memo merely codified what was already standard practice. What's more, if Ashcroft really thought the wall was such an impediment to combating terrorism, he could have moved to tear it down himself before 9/11. But as 9/11 Commissioner Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator from Washington, noted, the Bush Justice Department actually ratified the existence of the wall, noting in its own secret memorandum on August 6, 2001, that "the 1995 procedures remain in effect today.""

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/15/opinion/main612043.shtml

1) It's disingenuous to say the The Wall was Gorelick's. Hers was a codification of practises long before already in use.

2) Given what Tenet knew during his tenure as CIA head man in the late 1990s under Clinton, given the attacks occuring on embassies and even the Cole occuring during his watch, given the warnings pouring in from all over the world in the early part of 2001 -- all instances where The Wall would have had no effect -- and given that the CIA knew of Atta before the many subsequent AQ attacks including the Cole, how is it remotely possible that Ashcroft "ratified the existence of the wall" in the summer of 2001?

Why didn't Tenet and Ashcroft lobby hard in the beginning of 2001 to repeal this dastardly wall?

Lets Translate and make the facts very simple for the Clinton lovers:

:rolleyes:

Clinton policies, Jamie Gorelicks "Wall", prevented the exchange of information so that the FBI could round up and bust this known cell.

And Tenet and Ashcroft continued the 1995 practises despite the AD information, the recent Cole attack and myriad warnings pouring in.

This occurred under Clintons watch.

Indeed. And Tenet was the CIA guy at the time, the same CIA guy under Bush. If The Wall was a problem under Clinton, wasn't it also one under Bush? Why was it not only not removed by Tenet who, one would think, would be one of the ones with this hair afire given the Cole and his knowledge of a Brooklyn AQ cell. Instead, the practise Gorelick's memo codified was re-ratified by the Bushies.

What did Jamie Gorelick know?
Did Berger or Clinton ever know or hear about any of this pre or post 9/11?
If so, why did they not speak about it?

All good questions.

If the Atta cell had been busted, since ATTA was the ringleader of the 9/11 attacks, is it plausible to hypothesize that the 9/11 attacks may have been prevented if Atta and his cell were captured?

If this "could have" occured under Clinton then it certainly could have occured in the first 9 months under Bush. Both administrations hold culpability to some degree.

Where is the mainstream media?

In Aruba.

Does Sandy Berger and his document stuffing have anything to do with this?

Another good question.

1) It's disingenuous to say the The Wall was Gorelick's. Hers was a codification of practises long before already in use.

Jamie Gorelicks Wall was an additional extention of the practices already in use. Even the article your post begrudgingly makes this admission.


2) Given what Tenet knew during his tenure as CIA head man in the late 1990s under Clinton, given the attacks occuring on embassies and even the Cole occuring during his watch, given the warnings pouring in from all over the world in the early part of 2001 -- all instances where The Wall would have had no effect -- and given that the CIA knew of Atta before the many subsequent AQ attacks including the Cole, how is it remotely possible that Ashcroft "ratified the existence of the wall" in the summer of 2001?

Off topic. This is about 99 and 2K and the policies that led to this failure. You are steering the thread towards 01.
Lets stick to the time in question.

Why didn't Tenet and Ashcroft lobby hard in the beginning of 2001 to repeal this dastardly wall?

See above.

If this "could have" occured under Clinton then it certainly could have occured in the first 9 months under Bush. Both administrations hold culpability to some degree.


Again, steering it back to Bush. Why do you keep trying to do this?

I address this only to point out that the information was presented in 2000. We do not know if it was ever presented to anyone in the Bush admin. I do not object to finding out if it was presented to the Bushies as well.

It seems to me that there are 2 important issues here:

1)The first issue here is whether these policies, whether you want to go back to the Church Committee and/or Jamie Gorelicks wall, were largely responsible for this failure to share the information and in turn fail to bust this cell. It appears so.

2) The other important issue is whether or not this information was intentionally kept from the 9/11 commission and whether Jamie Gorelick played a part in this, or even if she already knew about Able Danger and failed to disclose it.


In Aruba.

Don't forget in Crawford next to Cindy Sheehan.

It seems the 9/11 commission missed another important story:


Iraqi Spies Reportedly Arrested in Germany 16 March 2001
Al-Watan al-Arabi (Paris) reports that two Iraqis were arrested in Germany, charged with spying for Baghdad. The arrests came in the wake of reports that Iraq was reorganizing the external branches of its intelligence service and that it had drawn up a plan to strike at US interests around the world through a network of alliances with extremist fundamentalist parties.

The most serious report contained information that Iraq and Osama bin Ladin were working together. German authorities were surprised by the arrest of the two Iraqi agents and the discovery of Iraqi intelligence activities in several German cities. German authorities, acting on CIA recommendations, had been focused on monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin. They discovered the two Iraqi agents by chance and uncovered what they considered to be serious indications of cooperation between Iraq and bin Ladin. The matter was considered so important that a special team of CIA and FBI agents was sent to Germany to interrogate the two Iraqi spies.

http://www.meib.org/articles/0104_irb.htm#irb3


Remember, Atta and several other 9/11 attackers lived in Germany.




It would also be very interesting to know if the Able Danger info has anything on the Atta/Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir al Ani/Prague meeting that is in dispute.

Jamie Gorelicks Wall was an additional extention of the practices already in use. Even the article your post begrudgingly makes this admission.

I searched the article for the terms "additional" and "extension" and couldn't find them.

"Gorelick's memo merely codified what was already standard practice."

Where does it state that she added more impediments?

It's quite possible that she did add provisions but it's not the article. Can you clarify what, exactly, they were?

Off topic. This is about 99 and 2K and the policies that led to this failure. You are steering the thread towards 01.
Lets stick to the time in question.

Tenet was a big player that bridged the timespan you want to limit this to. A fair analysis cannot be done without looking at the "big picture." You want to lay blame solely on Gorelick and Clinton by focusing solely on the one year timeframe in question...it's simplistic to deny any discussion of previous or subsequent timeframes for additional reference.

Again: If Tenet was hamstung by the Clintonesque Wall -- in the timeframe you want things limited to -- then when we step outside the box for a moment for a better overall look, why didn't he make a move with his hair on fire, toward the President's office stipulating his concerns?

Again, steering it back to Bush. Why do you keep trying to do this?

Because I see it as disingenuous to dismiss Bush culpability by selectively focusing on things like "Gorelick's Wall" and Clinton inaction.

Bush was the man at the helm when it happened. Tenet was the CIA man that knew of Atta during Clinton's administration...if we are to believe Tenet was truly butting up against the Wall with his knowledge of Atta and the AQ Brooklyn cell and seeming inability to act on it, then we must also believe that as soon as Clinton left office and an alleged conservative took office that he would rush to the office of the new POTUS and scream bloody murder to get the wall ripped down to get the FBI on the guy linked to the group that had only just blown a giant hole in the Cole.

He apparently did no such thing. Which of course begs the question: Even if the Wall was absent during Tenet's Clinton-era years, would they have done anything?

I address this only to point out that the information was presented in 2000. We do not know if it was ever presented to anyone in the Bush admin. I do not object to finding out if it was presented to the Bushies as well.

That's cool. Both admins are culpable to some degree. How much for each remains to be seen. I find myself increasingly suspicious of Tenet, one of the bridges between administrations. Assuming under Clinton things were a lost-cause, post-Clinton, he should have petitioned the BA to do something about the Wall if he saw it as an impediment and a threat to national security. It appears he did not for, as we saw, the BA ratified the Wall a month before the 9/11 attacks.

Either Tenet did not petition Bush, did not do so strongly enough or did so but was rebuffed.

1)The first issue here is whether these policies, whether you want to go back to the Church Committee and/or Jamie Gorelicks wall, were largely responsible for this failure to share the information and in turn fail to bust this cell. It appears so.

On the surface. Below the surface is the issue of whether action would have been taken even if there was no wall. From http://junkyardblog.net/

"From TKS' summary, we also have a major hint that Able Danger only identified the Brooklyn cell. That lets some air out of Eric Umansky's and Mickey Kaus' speculation that the Brooklyn cell was among hundreds or thousands of other leads, thus the signal-to-noise ratio was too faint for anyone to have taken any action at the time, and that's also why the commission dismissed it.

What seems increasingly likely, based on the TKS summary and others, is that the commissioners who knew of Able Danger dismissed it because its Mohammed Atta timeline didn't agree with theirs."

And an interesting follow-up comment:

"Well this would be all too fascinating if there was really a question about whether the FBI had the “intelligence” to foil 9-11.

Let’s recap:

• In 1996 FBI agents visited flight schools to obtain information about several Arab pilots connected to a Pakistani terrorist eventually convicted of plotting to bomb U.S. airliners. Two provided flight training to Abdul Hakim Murad in the early 1990s and Murad was arrested in Manila in 1995 and later convicted in New York of plotting to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific, then crash a suicide plane into CIA headquarters.

• In 1998, FBI agents questioned officials from Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., about a graduate later identified in court testimony as a pilot for bin Laden, according to Dale Davis, the school’s director of operations.

• In early 2001, the trial of bin Laden associates for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania yielded documents containing several references to flight schools and bin Laden pilots.

• In the spring of 2001, President Bush learned bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors.

• Two months before the September 11 attacks, FBI agent Kenneth Williams sent a memo to bureau brass in Washington and New York warning that a cadre of Osama bin Laden disciples might be training at U.S. flight schools in preparation for future “terror activity against civil aviation targets.” Williams suggested a nationwide FBI review to determine whether such a “coordinated effort” could be seen in other localities.

• Two weeks before the Sept. 11 attack, FBI agents sought information about another Airman student, a French-Moroccan dropout who had entered the country on a visa sponsored by the flight school. The man, Zacarias Moussaoui, had been detained in Eagan, Minn., on an immigration violation after he tried to purchase time on a jet simulator — even though he had never flown solo in a single-engine aircraft. His laptop computer wasn’t searched until after 9/11.

• The FBI missed at least five chances to detect the presence of two of the suicide hijackers — Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar — after they first entered the United States in early 2000.

• Upon taking office, the Bush administration suspended the Clinton Administration’s practice of daily inter-agency information sharing meetings probably because…

• Bush just “didn’t feel that sense of urgency” about the al Quada threat and, besides, he was busy planning attacks on Iraq and the US middle-class.

There are plenty of causes for our government’s failure to stop 9/11 but Jamie Gorelick, Janet Reno and “the wall” had practically nothing to do with it. It was chiefly bureaucratic failures and mismanagement at the FBI and a failure of the Bush Administration to understand the world, recognize the threat and keep its attention focused on something beside its ideologically-driven agenda."

Food for thought on both accounts.

Don't forget in Crawford next to Cindy Sheehan.

Heh. Sure. :shrug: You have to admit that an anti-war mother of a war-dead soldier camped outside the POTUS' ranch is more newsworthy than where Natalie Holloway's bones are though.

Seems Commission spokesperson, Al Felzenberg,admits the commission new about the secret Army program Able Danger and that they had identified Mohammed Atta as an al-Qaeda operative along with three other men in Brooklyn, but left it out of their final report:
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.
Al Felzenberg, who had been the commission's chief spokesman, said Tuesday the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence. ...
Felzenberg said an unidentified person working with Weldon came forward Wednesday and described a meeting 10 days before the panel's report was issued last July. During it, a military official urged commission staffers to include a reference to the intelligence on Atta in the final report.
Felzenberg said checks were made and the details of the July 12, 2004, meeting were confirmed. Previous to that, Felzenberg said it was believed commission staffers knew about Able Danger from a meeting with military officials in
Afghanistan during which no mention was made of Atta or the other three hijackers.
Staff members now are searching documents in the National Archives to look for notes from the meeting in Afghanistan and any other possible references to Atta and Able Danger, Felzenberg said.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20050811/ap_on_go_co/sept_11_hijackers
This brings back to mind the little trips Sandy Berger made to the National Archives .Interesting that he took this classified info in October 2003 about the same time the Commission first heard about Able Danger. OSunds really fishy and is no doubt a great boom for the conspiracy nuts.The constant shift in story and lying has made the commission absolutely unbelievable about their report on saddam and al qaeda being only loosely linked. They have killed any credibility they had .They are hiding something.
First they never heard of Able Danger. Then, maybe a low-level staffer told them about the program but not the Atta identification. Next, the military met with the Commissioners but didn't specify the Atta identification. Now, we finally have confirmation that the Commission itself .They buried it instead of including it in the report.WHY??
Seems the panel intended from the start to make the intelligence community the scape goat instead of the bureaucracy that made the rules that tied their hand and prevented them from protecting the nation.
One of the main beneficiaries of this is Commissioner Jamie S. Gorelick.She stood the most to loose if this info got out and the only other person would be the National Security Adviser who conducted that idiot pants stuffing raid on the archives in the middle of the investigation.
Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton 48 hours before;
"The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165268,00.html
Credibility SHOT on the issue of truth.
Weldon [http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165414,00.html]says the intelligence officers who conducted these briefings have expressed willingness and enthusiasm for testifying under oath and on the record about the information given to Commission staffers on both occasions. Also, they spoke to the officer involved in the October 2003 briefing who insists that Atta's name was brought to the Commission on that occasion.
This all smells like a commission trying to blame the intel sector in order to save the bureaucracy and the administration that set that bureaucracy.
The Commission’s objection to Able Danger’s Mohammed Atta datapoint was:
"There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report," Mr. Felzenberg said. "This information was not meshing with the other information that we had."
There is always the distinct possibility that the other information is wrong and it certainly begs the question of how Able Danger was able to identify Mohammed Atta and ask to turn their evidence over to the FBI if he was not in the country.
But this is the second occasion in which the 9-11 Commission has pooh-poohed other evidence concerning Atta that didn’t “mesh” with their desired storyline.
The elephant in the corner of the 9-11 Commission’s report has always been the perfunctory way in which they dismiss the allegation that Atta met with the intelligence chief at Iraq’s Prague embassy, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, on April 8-9, 2001. This meeting was discounted on the strength of Atta’s cell phone being used on April 6, 9, 10, and 11 and an ATM photo on April 11… and the fact that they can’t find a record that Atta bought plane tickets with presumably any of the 63 drivers licenses the hijackers possessed.
The Prague story would not fit the preconception that the operation was carried out strictly by al-Qaeda without assistance of any other government. The dismissal of the Able Danger information is inexplicable without assuming that the Commission had decided in advance who was to blame.
The left and others have always tried to discount the Atta meeting in Prague .The commission decided to not believe or endorse the Czech intelligence even though the Czechs still to this day insist he did.WHY? It would have implicated Saddam and so they had to ignore it and buy info that discounted it never thinking that THAT info may have been what was wrong.This implication of Saddam is exactly what half of the committee wanted to avoid .
now we can see why they ignored and buried the Able Danger intel.If Able Danger identified Atta correctly, it could have corroborated the timeline that fits with Czech intelligence on Atta's visit.
------------------------
Questions;
Who was it that cleaned out the National Archive along the same time frame as the first briefing of the Commission about Able Danger? Which campaign did he advise at the time of his mission to inspect the records? And on whose behalf did he ostensibly perform that mission?
The report was ignored because the information clashed with what the Commission "knew" about Atta's whereabouts. So what if that info was bad?Talk about a pre-conceived notion.
Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission's follow-up project called the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, had said earlier this week that the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence.
The information did not make it into the final report because it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks, Felzenberg said.

He did not give details.DId Atta travel to the Czech repub? The Czech insist he did .The u.s. says no.
Here is the commissions reasons for a NO[on pages 228-9];
The FBI has gathered evidence indicating that Atta was in Virginia Beach on April 4 (as evidenced by a bank surveillance camera photo), and in Coral Springs, Florida on April 11, where he and Shehhi leased an apartment.On April 6, 9, 10, and 11,Atta’s cellular telephone was used numerous times to call various lodging establishments in Florida from cell sites within Florida.We cannot confirm that he placed those calls. But there are no U.S. records indicating that Atta departed the country during this period. Czech officials have reviewed their flight and border records as well for any indication that Atta was in the Czech Republic in April 2001, including records of anyone crossing the border who even looked Arab.They have also reviewed pictures from the area near the Iraqi embassy and have not discovered photos of anyone who looked like Atta. No evidence has been found that Atta was in the Czech Republic in April 2001.

So his phone was used. Big deal, they even admit anyone may have used it, it proves nothing.Next they state;
These findings cannot absolutely rule out the possibility that Atta was in Prague on April 9, 2001. He could have used an alias to travel and a passport under that alias, but this would be an exception to his practice of using his true name while traveling (as he did in January and would in July when he took his next overseas trip). The FBI and CIA have uncovered no evidence that Atta held any fraudulent passports.
KSM and Binalshibh both deny that an Atta-Ani meeting occurred. There was no reason for such a meeting, especially considering the risk it would pose to the operation. By April 2001, all four pilots had completed most of their training,and the muscle hijackers were about to begin entering the United States.
The available evidence does not support the original Czech report of an Atta-Ani meeting.

The commission seems to willing to ignore the facts that;
1.Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and Binalshibh had given American intelligence disinformation; at the beginning of Chapter 7, the Commission dismisses KSM's assertions about a lack of AQ contacts in Southern California. Why rely on them here?
2.If Iraq had a hand in 9/11, the Iraqis would have required Atta to travel using special cover when they met. The Iraqis would not have wanted the Americans to link Atta with Saddam. They certainly would have provided him a special passport and false identity for such a meeting; they had done the same with Ramzi Yousef, the 1993 WTC bomber, using Kuwaiti paperwork stolen during their 1991 invasion. In fact, no one is sure that Ramzi Yousef is his actual name.
3.The purpose of the trip may have been to ensure that the "muscle hijackers" did get into the US safely, and to arrange for logistical and financial support to make that happen. It would have also given Atta an opportunity to finalize all plans before proceeding with the final phases of his mission.
4.The reason that "[t]he available evidence does not support the original Czech report of an Atta-Ani meeting" could be that they left out the Able Danger evidence that might support it.
Here is your time line;
http://drsanity.********.com/2005/08/motive-for-bergers-bizarre-behavior.html

I searched the article for the terms "additional" and "extension" and couldn't find them.

"Gorelick's memo merely codified what was already standard practice."

Where does it state that she added more impediments?

It's quite possible that she did add provisions but it's not the article. Can you clarify what, exactly, they were?


Sure.

In 1995 she sent a memo to Mary Jo White, a fellow Democrat prosecutor, who was going after the first WTC bombers. It stated that for the sake of "appearances" they would be required to adhere to an interpretation of the wall far stricter than the law required.

Here is the memo:

"These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation"

http://nationalreview.com/document/document_1995_gorelick_memo.pdf




Tenet was a big player that bridged the timespan you want to limit this to. A fair analysis cannot be done without looking at the "big picture." You want to lay blame solely on Gorelick and Clinton by focusing solely on the one year timeframe in question...it's simplistic to deny any discussion of previous or subsequent timeframes for additional reference.

I will agree that since Tenet was around during that time he played a role however I don't know how discussing Tenet relates to Gorelicks wall.

It seems the issue here is how the law, the Church Committe and the Gorelick wall, both products of Democrats, stopped the sharing of intelligence, which in turn prevented the busting of the Atta cell.

The other issue is whether or not this revelation about Able Danger was covered up by 9/11 staffers, even the 9/11 commisioner Gorelick herself.

Again: If Tenet was hamstung by the Clintonesque Wall -- in the timeframe you want things limited to -- then when we step outside the box for a moment for a better overall look, why didn't he make a move with his hair on fire, toward the President's office stipulating his concerns?

We don't know if he did, do we? Again, I see this as not focusing on the issues at hand.



Because I see it as disingenuous to dismiss Bush culpability by selectively focusing on things like "Gorelick's Wall" and Clinton inaction.

Do you agree that this "Gorelick Wall" prevented the bust of the Atta cell?

Is it reasonable to posit that had the Atta cell been busted the 9/11 attacks may not have occurred, especially since Atta was the entire ring leader of the 9/11 attacks?

I am not dismissing Bush culpability, I just don't think it's relevent to this discussion. Would discussing Bill Clintons culpability be relevent to the 8/6 PDB that liberals were waving around?

Bush was the man at the helm when it happened. Tenet was the CIA man that knew of Atta during Clinton's administration...if we are to believe Tenet was truly butting up against the Wall with his knowledge of Atta and the AQ Brooklyn cell and seeming inability to act on it, then we must also believe that as soon as Clinton left office and an alleged conservative took office that he would rush to the office of the new POTUS and scream bloody murder to get the wall ripped down to get the FBI on the guy linked to the group that had only just blown a giant hole in the Cole.

Speculation and largely irrelivent to the issues at hand.

He apparently did no such thing. Which of course begs the question: Even if the Wall was absent during Tenet's Clinton-era years, would they have done anything?

Considering the amount of support and defense being offered by Clinton apologists in regards to his combatting terrorism, had Clinton known about an AQ cell, the answer would be yes. Personally, I don't think Clinton was very concerned about terrorism, I don't think many people were at the time including many Republicans despite all the warning signs.




That's cool. Both admins are culpable to some degree. How much for each remains to be seen.

I believe that there is plenty of blame to go around to both Presidents, Congress, and the FBI/CIA/NSA. It was just not a priority despite the warning signs.

In this specific issue though we cannot deny the importance and relevence of Gorelick's wall, the Church Committee, and it's obvious effect in regards to this.
It is also necessary to ascertain the facts in regards to how the 9/11 commission didn't even bother addressing this. NOW, despite previous comments of not knowing anything about this, some of the commissioners claim they were briefed.
Something stinks here and I'd like to know what.

I find myself increasingly suspicious of Tenet, one of the bridges between administrations. Assuming under Clinton things were a lost-cause, post-Clinton, he should have petitioned the BA to do something about the Wall if he saw it as an impediment and a threat to national security. It appears he did not for, as we saw, the BA ratified the Wall a month before the 9/11 attacks.

I think Tenet is a mixed bag. He was one of the few that beleived in Human intelligence and worked to add more to the CIA. Obviously, he blew it on several occaisions.

Either Tenet did not petition Bush, did not do so strongly enough or did so but was rebuffed.

And possibly did or did not petition Clinton as well.
I don't object to finding all of this information out.



On the surface. Below the surface is the issue of whether action would have been taken even if there was no wall. From http://junkyardblog.net/

"From TKS' summary, we also have a major hint that Able Danger only identified the Brooklyn cell. That lets some air out of Eric Umansky's and Mickey Kaus' speculation that the Brooklyn cell was among hundreds or thousands of other leads, thus the signal-to-noise ratio was too faint for anyone to have taken any action at the time, and that's also why the commission dismissed it.

What seems increasingly likely, based on the TKS summary and others, is that the commissioners who knew of Able Danger dismissed it because its Mohammed Atta timeline didn't agree with theirs."

Possibly. When speculating, anything is possible. We just do not have all the facts. The bottom line though is that this law, and subsequent guidelines that were constructed hampered and in fact stopped the sharing.

And an interesting follow-up comment:

"Well this would be all too fascinating if there was really a question about whether the FBI had the “intelligence” to foil 9-11.

Let’s recap:

• In 1996 FBI agents visited flight schools to obtain information about several Arab pilots connected to a Pakistani terrorist eventually convicted of plotting to bomb U.S. airliners. Two provided flight training to Abdul Hakim Murad in the early 1990s and Murad was arrested in Manila in 1995 and later convicted in New York of plotting to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific, then crash a suicide plane into CIA headquarters.

• In 1998, FBI agents questioned officials from Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., about a graduate later identified in court testimony as a pilot for bin Laden, according to Dale Davis, the school’s director of operations.

• In early 2001, the trial of bin Laden associates for the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania yielded documents containing several references to flight schools and bin Laden pilots.

• In the spring of 2001, President Bush learned bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors.

• Two months before the September 11 attacks, FBI agent Kenneth Williams sent a memo to bureau brass in Washington and New York warning that a cadre of Osama bin Laden disciples might be training at U.S. flight schools in preparation for future “terror activity against civil aviation targets.” Williams suggested a nationwide FBI review to determine whether such a “coordinated effort” could be seen in other localities.

• Two weeks before the Sept. 11 attack, FBI agents sought information about another Airman student, a French-Moroccan dropout who had entered the country on a visa sponsored by the flight school. The man, Zacarias Moussaoui, had been detained in Eagan, Minn., on an immigration violation after he tried to purchase time on a jet simulator — even though he had never flown solo in a single-engine aircraft. His laptop computer wasn’t searched until after 9/11.

• The FBI missed at least five chances to detect the presence of two of the suicide hijackers — Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar — after they first entered the United States in early 2000.

• Upon taking office, the Bush administration suspended the Clinton Administration’s practice of daily inter-agency information sharing meetings probably because…

• Bush just “didn’t feel that sense of urgency” about the al Quada threat and, besides, he was busy planning attacks on Iraq and the US middle-class.


Again, this keeps drifting back to Bush. I'm not understanding why.


There are plenty of causes for our government’s failure to stop 9/11 but Jamie Gorelick, Janet Reno and “the wall” had practically nothing to do with it.

That is a false statement. You can't make that conclusion. If a known terror cell was operating in NY is it not hard to assume they would've been busted if law enforcement had the info? At the very least, would law enforcement begin watching and tracking much more closely?

It was chiefly bureaucratic failures and mismanagement at the FBI and a failure of the Bush Administration to understand the world, recognize the threat and keep its attention focused on something beside its ideologically-driven agenda."

Again, drifing back to Bush. Whoever wrote this cannot stay focused, intentionally or not.

Food for thought on both accounts.

There is a ton of food for thought but I prefer to stay focused to the topic at hand. Obvication does nothing to address it.


Heh. Sure. :shrug: You have to admit that an anti-war mother of a war-dead soldier camped outside the POTUS' ranch is more newsworthy than where Natalie Holloway's bones are though.

What is troublesome is that this one person has received more press coverage than the other 3600 parents combined.
I don't know how one can argue that the press is not biased and agenda driven given this unseemly episode.
The poor woman has cracked, understandably so. The press and the far lefties are using her for their political agenda. I find that disgusting.