The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update IV

I’m sure most of you have read the news reports already about the 9/11 Commission’s statements. Couldn’t get to it till now since I had to work.

Here it is:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 – The Sept. 11 commission concluded that an intelligence program known as Able Danger “did not turn out to be historically significant,” despite hearing a claim that the program had identified the future plot leader Mohammed Atta as a potential terrorist threat more than a year before the 2001 attacks, the commission’s former leaders said in a statement on Friday evening.

The statement said a review of testimony and documents had found that the single claim in July 2004 by a Navy officer was the only time the name of Mr. Atta or any other future hijacker was mentioned to the commission as having been known before the hijackings. That account is consistent with statements this week by a commission spokesman, but it contradicts claims by a former defense intelligence official who said he had told the commission staff about Able Danger’s work on Mr. Atta during a briefing in Afghanistan in October 2003.

The statement was issued by Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton after a week in which the Able Danger program, a highly classified operation under the military’s Special Operations Command, rose to public prominence. The Sept. 11 commission report made no mention of the unit, disbanded in 2002, and the statement by Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton defended that omission, saying the operation had not been significant “set against the larger context of U.S. policy and intelligence efforts” that involved Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton also noted that the name and character of Able Danger had not been publicly disclosed when the commission issued its public report in 2004. They said the commission had concluded that the July 2004 testimony by the Navy officer, who said he had seen an Able Danger document in 2000 that described Mr. Atta as connected to a cell in Brooklyn “was not sufficiently reliable” to warrant further investigation, in part because the officer could not supply documentary evidence to prove it.”

Not historically significant? Even if this officer couldn’t produce evidence that this document existed why was this not checked out? The whole damn purpose for this Commission was to find out where the faults were and to fix them. So go check it out before you issue the Final Report. But from this statement I gather not one person checked out this information. They just brushed it aside as if it came from some wacko.

Why would they do this? Because he didn’t bring proof? The Captain responds:

it seems to me that such an approach to witnesses demonstrates a certain laziness on the part of the Commission. Witnesses who bring their own documentation obviously make it easier on investigators, but to dismiss those who have none in a case involving the highest type of classified data is ludicrous. Investigators have the responsibility to locate documentation, or at least follow up to find it if they can. People working in the intelligence field do not get handed fliers and bulletins containing top-secret information so they can maintain personal files of it at home and on the road. The notion that an officer in military intelligence bringing an insider tip has to bring his own evidence as a cover charge severely limits the effectiveness of any inquiry.

As a police officer I get told information about a crime with no evidence to back it up often. It is then up to me and the Detectives to find that proof. It’s really not that hard and if we didn’t do this then we did not do our job. In my view this Commission obviously failed in their job.

The Captain also has a few words about Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton:

Finally, as I posted last night, Hamilton himself has some pretty severe credibility problems himself. After the Commission spokesman denied that Able Danger ever came to their attention, Hamilton himself said, “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. Had we learned of it obviously it would’ve been a major focus of our investigation.”

Three days later, we find out that not only did staffers hear about it, they dismissed it without investigating it at all. Hamilton also wants us to believe him when he says that another witness who claims to have briefed them on Able Danger in October 2003 is also unreliable. Somehow Hamilton does not fill me with confidence in his own credibility, nor should he do so with anyone else after this week of lies and evasions.

Now onto a bit about the timeline and Sandy Berger.

From the Washington Post:

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.

Ok, now this is interesting. Do you recall the documents Sandy Berger stole from the Archives? Here is a reminder from one of my earlier posts:

What was Mr. Berger doing with the documents? And why did he destroy only three? The likeliest answer is that he sought to conceal comments he or other Clinton administration officials wrote on them when they were circulating in January 2000. He couldn’t have been trying to erase the document itself from the record, since copies besides the five exist elsewhere. What’s likelier is that jottings in the margins of the three copies he destroyed bore telling indications of the Clinton administration’s approach to terrorism. Mr. Clarke’s document reportedly criticizes the Clinton administration’s handling of the millennial plots and mostly attributes the apprehension of a would-be bomber headed for Los Angeles International Airport to luck and an alert official.

Ok, so you have this Officer complaining that the information was deleted sometime after he saw the documents from Feb – Apri, 2000. You have Sandy Berger then stealing and destroying documents in 2003 that were written and circulated in Jan, 2000. Does anyone see a connection here?

In Jan, 2000 Clinton Administration officials are jotting down comments in regards to Clarke’s document that criticizes the Administration about it’s handling of terrorism.