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Jewish World Review August 22, 2005 / 17 Av, 5765
Dangerously disabled
By Jack Kelly
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Since I wrote about the top-secret intelligence unit last week, Able Danger
has gained a face, and other pertinent information about 9/11 that didn't
make it into the 9/11 Commission's final report has emerged.
Able Danger was established by the Special Operations Command in 1999. Army
LtCol. Tony Shaffer was the liaison between the Defense Intelligence Agency
and Able Danger.
Then speaking anonymously, Shaffer and another intelligence officer told the
New York Times and the Associated Press that in the summer of 2000, Able
Danger had identified Mohammed Atta and the other members of his cell as
likely al Qaida operatives. Shaffer said he tried three times to pass this
information to the FBI, each time to have the meetings cancelled at the
insistence of Pentagon lawyers.
Shaffer and the other officer, a Navy captain, also said they told members
of the 9/11 Commission staff about Able Danger and what it had found.
Shaffer outed himself after the commission issued a statement saying Able
Danger was not "historically significant."
Staff director Philip Zelikow had been briefed on Able Danger in a meeting
in Afghanistan in October, 2003, but Mohammed Atta was not mentioned at that
meeting, the statement said.
Atta was mentioned by the Navy captain in a meeting with staff the following
July, but the information was discounted because the officer had no
documentary evidence, the statement said.
The commission said also that it had asked the Department of Defense for
information about Able Danger, and the information the Pentagon supplied
made no mention of Atta or his cell.
This could well be true. Shaffer says the information the Pentagon handed
over — two briefcase-sized packages — was less than 5 percent of the Able
Danger files.
But since Shaffer was the guy with whom commission staff met in Afghanistan,
and Shaffer is adamant that he told them about Atta, there can be no
innocent explanation for the statement claiming he did not. Either Shaffer
is lying, or the commission is.
The New York Times reported Wednesday on something else that wasn't in the
9/11 Commission's report, a 1996 warning from State Department analysts that
permitting Osama bin Laden to move from Sudan to Afghanistan would make him
more dangerous. (Sudan claims it offered to turn bin Laden over to the U.S.
Clinton officials dispute this.)
It isn't clear that the commission was aware of the top secret memo, which
was obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch in a Freedom of
Information Act request and provided to the Times.
But the commission did receive a copy of the blistering memo from Manhattan
U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White warning that the rule Clinton Deputy Attorney
General Jamie Gorelick made forbidding information sharing between FBI
intelligence officers and criminal investigators was "the single biggest
mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism."
"It's hard to avoid the conclusion that the commission ignored White's memo
because it was a potential embarrassment to the woman to whom it was
addressed: commission member Jamie Gorelick," wrote New York Post Washington
bureau chief Deborah Orin.
Nor is there a good reason why the commission should not have been aware of
this, reported by the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin in March, 2001:
"German authorities, acting on CIA recommendations, had been focused on
monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Laden," said the
summary of a report that had appeared in an Arabic newspaper in Paris.
Yet there is not a word of this — not even a footnote debunking it — in
the 9/11 Commission's report. Curious, when one recalls that Atta's cell
was based in Hamburg before it moved to the United States.
"The commission never bothers even to supply the dots that might connect
outside their preferred narrative," said Ed Morrissey, who reported on the
German arrests in the Weekly Standard Wednesday.
CORRECTION: In last week's column, I said commission spokesman Al
Felzenberg initially denied the commission had been briefed on Able Danger.
That was incorrect. It was commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton who made
that denial. What Felzenberg denied — and still denies — is that the
commission was briefed on Atta in 2003. I regret the error.
"They discovered the two Iraqi agents by chance and uncovered what they
considered to be serious indications of cooperation between Iraq and bin
Laden. 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."