More Commision Shenanigans: Part II—Able Danger Not "Historically Relevent."

This comes from the WaPo this morning, and it is cited from a statement released by the 9/11 Commission regarding the omission of Able Danger from the final report, and it is the final paragraph of the Post piece:

The Able Danger program is also not mentioned in the final report because "the operation itself did not turn out to be historically significant," the statement said.

"Not historically significant?" Was the commission off of it’s rocker when it made this statement? The Commission has had a glaring number of inconsistencies so far this week.

"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 Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

I cited that yesterday in the post I put up. It was a statement made by Lee Hamilton on the 9th of August. This next statement was released on the 12th.

In a joint statement, former commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said a military official who made the claim had no documentation to back it up. And they said only 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta was identified to them and not three additional hijackers as claimed by Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees. "He could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification," the statement said of the military official.They also said no else could place the other three hijackers with Atta in a purported terror cell code-named "Brooklyn" during the time period cited by Weldon.

And now, today, we have the 9/11 Commission backing away from the relevance of Able Danger. Further, the Post reports this from the Commission:

The commission statement raises significant doubts about the likelihood that Able Danger could have identified Atta or other Sept. 11 hijackers as al Qaeda operatives and placed them in Brooklyn in 1999 or early 2000. Atta never lived in New York and did not enter the United States until June 2000, and two other key hijackers mentioned by the intelligence officer in media interviews were not in the country until 2001, the statement said.

But Weldon said Able Danger was "not about dates and times" but "was about linkages and associations of individuals identified with direct links to al Qaeda."

Two sources are at the heart of Weldon's allegations. One, a former defense intelligence official, has told media outlets and Weldon that he briefed the commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, and three other staff members about Able Danger's identification of Atta during an overseas meeting in October 2003. The commission said in its statement that its records of the briefing, held in Bagram, Afghanistan, include no mention of Atta and that none of the staff members who attended recalls such a claim.

The second person, described by the commission as a U.S. Navy officer employed at the Defense Department, was interviewed by senior panel investigator Dieter Snell and another staff member on July 12, 2004, 10 days before the release of the commission's best-selling report.

According to the commission, the officer said he briefly saw the name and photo of Atta on an "analyst notebook chart." The material identified Atta as part of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell and was dated from February through April 2000, the officer said.

"The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document," the statement says, because Pentagon lawyers were worried about violating restrictions on military intelligence gathering in the United States.

But the commission statement said that because no documents or other evidence had emerged to support the claim, "the commission staff concluded that the officer's account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation."

First, let me state that I’m not an analyst for intelligence. I have never been a part of military intelligence, the DIA, the CIA, or any domestic intelligence agency. However, what has been disclosed, thus far, is that Able Danger warned the previous administration of Atta, and possible co-conspirators. They did this not once, but twice to the Commission, and several times to the previous administration. Yet, their warnings went unheeded. Regardless of the reason, the commander-in-chief, then Pres. Clinton, opted to ignore them.

Intelligence, for the layperson, isn’t an easy job. I know a bit about it due to my uncle working in Naval Intelligence for the last 20-plus years. It isn’t a treasure map. "X" doesn’t always mark the spot. And it is anything but clear and definitive. It takes a lot of data and number crunching to reach a decent, logical assertion for the intelligence presented. Able Danger not only cultivated the dots, but they connected them, and the administration—and apparently the 9/11 Commission, as well—couldn’t see the forest through the trees. They didn’t get the big picture. Unfortunately for us, America go the big picture on 11 September.

There is enough coming out about what the Commission didn’t address to warrant a Congressional inquiry. We need to see if these people really did their job, or was the administration and the nation simply spinning it’s wheels while these people screwed around on the taxpayer’s dime, and not making us one whit safer through their recommendations.

Publius II

UPDATE: Welcome to all the Republican Jen readers for stopping by. Feel free to comment now that our comment coordinator is back. WB Mistress Pundit....18 August