Mary McCarthy and Able Danger

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Excellent article yesterday at AIM about Mary McCarthy, the reporter who used the information Mary gave her to tell the world our secrets, and Curt Weldon:

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz has said that it is “absolutely relevant information” that fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy was a major financial contributor to Democratic Party causes. He made the statement because of criticism of a Post profile of McCarthy, which curiously omitted that information.

[…]If politics motivated McCarthy, could politics have motivated Dana Priest? Priest is the Post reporter who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning story on “secret CIA prisons” in Europe but refuses to say whether McCarthy was one of her sources. The Priest story, based completely on anonymous sources, has not been confirmed.

We do know that Priest authored a vicious attack on Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), a major critic of the intelligence community who supported CIA director Porter Goss’s effort to reform the agency and fire leakers to the press.

As we noted in our August-B, 2005 AIM Report, Priest authored the attack on Weldon without contacting the congressman and the paper refused to print a letter to the editor from Weldon rebutting the Priest article.

Weldon has called on his congressional opponent, Joe Sestak, to return campaign contributions from McCarthy, the fired CIA officer ($350); Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who pleaded guilty to illegally taking and destroying classified documents ($1,000); and Clinton CIA Director John Deutch, who admitted mishandling classified documents ($500). Berger also hosted a fundraiser for Sestak in the offices of Harold Ickes, a close associate of Hillary Clinton and billionaire George Soros.

Sestak, who is also backed by John Kerry, replies he won’t give the money back to his “friends.” Weldon counters that accepting money from “criminals and convicted felons” raises character and security issues.

Other contributions to Sestak came from Hill PAC, Hillary Clinton’s political action committee; Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick; and Clinton chief of staff John Podesta.

One thing is certain: don’t look for any investigative stories from the Post into the intervention of the intelligence community into the media and politics.

While the media have played a nefarious role, officials of the Bush and Clinton administrations are scrambling to silence those, led by Weldon, who are asking tough questions about the performance of the intelligence community. Weldon, for example, wonders how it could happen that lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta was not arrested even though he had been identified as a dangerous terrorist by the Able Danger military intelligence unit well before the terrorist attacks. He and at least three other members of an al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, NY were known as dangerous terrorists more than a year before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field.

With notable exceptions (see below), powerful media outlets are ignoring or ridiculing those who are trying to expose the scandal of what at best can be categorized as incredible incompetence. At the moment, their target is Congressman Weldon, Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the Homeland Security Committee.

Weldon and 248 of his colleagues in both parties are demanding a no-holds-barred investigation. There was one congressional hearing in February–followed by minimal news coverage–with other Capitol Hill investigations possibly in the offing. Congressman Todd Tiahrt, a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said he could not comment when AIM asked if that panel planned hearings on Able Danger. Most of the Intel committee’s hearings are behind closed doors.

[…]At the February 15 House hearing, the Pennsylvania congressman announced that Able Danger records had been found showing hundreds of references to Mohammed Atta prior to the 9/11 attacks. Mondics and Goldstein either were unaware of or ignored the fact that Weldon was working to get the documents declassified. The Inquirer reporters write as if they had been on another planet when all this happened.

In fact most of the media in this country acts as if they are from another planet when it comes to the Able Danger story. One interesting note is the next paragraph which tells us there is an upcoming book by Peter Lance that investigates the disgraceful job done by the 9/11 Commission, all to cover up their favorite boss…President Clinton:

Weldon notes that the top 9/11 staffer who steered away from his investigators the information offered by Shaffer and Philpott was Dietrich Snell–identified on the commission’s website as its chief counsel. The congressman tells AIM that an upcoming “blockbuster” book by ABC investigative reporter Peter Lance identifies Snell as “the key link in getting the 9/11 commission to ignore certain information that would have embarrassed the Justice Department during the Clinton administration in the early 1990s.”

Snell was closely allied with 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick. She was a top official in the Justice Department in the Clinton/Reno regime. In that position she took the lead in preventing intelligence-sharing among different agencies over and above what were already restrictive requirements in the law. The commission rejected outraged demands that she walk over to the other side of the witness table and answer (rather than ask) some tough questions under oath.

Congressman Weldon asks “How can they (the 9/11 commission) justify hiring 70 people and spending $15 million and not interview one analyst or any of the people who were doing the work of Able Danger? How could they do that? Unless [they] deliberately did not want to pursue the story?”

The commission staff told the congressman they “looked at it [Able Danger]” and “we decided not to go down that route.” He suspects a bipartisan cover-up to avoid “embarrassment to both sides.”

All this comes on the heels of the recent revelation that up to 10,000 additional pages of Able Danger documents still exist. Even though the DoD has said over and over that they were ALL destroyed: (via Able Danger Blog)

Scott Malone of NavySeals.com and Christopher Law of PublicEdCenter.org have been following the Able Danger story from the beginning. Back in November, Chris submitted a FOIA request for all documents and emails that could be located related to Able Danger. He was routed from the Pentagon to SOCOM, back to the Pentagon, asked to resubmit his request, then told he had submitted duplicate requests. Last week, his request was finally denied. DOD refused to turn over a single document, but admitted there were at least 9,500 pages of data responsive to his request! Considering that DOD has maintained all along they have not been able to find much material on Able Danger, and has been slow to respond to requests for documents on Able Danger from both the Congress and the 9/11 Commission, this is quite a surprise.

This news is actually quite stunning if you have followed this scandal. How in the world was 10,000 documents misplaced?

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