The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update XXIV

Rep. Curt Weldon has given a press conference with some bombshells. Check out the complete text of his remarks here.

WELDON: We’ve identified the woman at the FBI who set those three meetings up. She will testify under oath at the Senate hearing next Wednesday that she actually organized three meetings. She knew the topics of the meetings because there had been other discussions that occurred prior to the attempt to set up those three meetings.

And in each of the cases of those three meetings, they were abruptly canceled by Pentagon lawyers hours before those meetings were to take place.

It seems that Weldon will have more then a few surprises up his sleeve for this hearing.

So what we will have is a person who will testify under oath, on the record, that in the summer of 2000, he was ordered — or he would lose his job and/or go to jail if he didn’t comply — he was ordered to destroy 2.5 terabytes of data specific to Able Danger, the Brooklyn cell and Mohammed Atta.

He will name the person who ordered him to destroy that material. And, furthermore, he will note that a commanding general from SOCOM — Russ, what was his name?

STAFF: (OFF-MIKE)

WELDON: General Lambert was incensed when he found out that material that he was a customer for was destroyed without his approval.

So here we have a case where General Lambert at SOCOM was not told that an employee had been ordered to destroy all the material that he was a customer for. And that material related to Able Danger, it related to Al Qaida and it related to Mohammed Atta.

Whoa! So now we have someone outside the chain of command, someone who obviously had alot of pull, order the unit to destroy the data without the approval of the Commanding General of SOCOM. Wow!

But what is in that speech are the exact details I’ve been talking about for the last two months. What was also in that speech, which I had forgotten and which I’m now public acknowledging, is that there was a three-hour briefing provided to General Shelton in January of 2001.

And furthermore, what Tony Shaffer will tell you in the hallway outside is that he personally briefed General Shelton on Able Danger, and in a briefing in the first quarter of 2001, and he will name the people that were in the room. He was giving a briefing on another topic, remember the name of that?

STAFF: (OFF-MIKE)

WELDON: Door Hop Galley (ph) which is another classified program.

In the course of that briefing — and there was a Navy admiral in the room, Admiral Wilson, in charge of DIA, and Richard Schiefren (ph) was in the room. Richard Schiefren (ph) was an attorney at DOD.

In the course of that discussion, Richard Schiefren (ph) discussed Able Danger. I did not know that up until I watched the Heritage Foundation speech that I gave in 2002, where I document the meeting, in the briefing that was done for General Shelton. When I asked Tony Shaffer this morning about that, he said, “Yes, I briefed General Shelton. I was also involved in a Door Hop Galley (ph) brief, where Steve Cambone” — he was not in the position he’s in today. He was a special adviser to Don Rumsfeld.

My concern is if there were 2.5 terabytes of data that were destroyed in the summer of 2000, there had to be material in 2001 if you briefed General Shelton. Where is that material? Where is that briefing?

In addition, there is a question about the possibility of additional data that was in Tony Shaffer’s office that was removed, not all of which was turned over to the 9/11 Commission.

As most of you know by now, when Tony Shaffer returned in January of 2004, Tony Shaffer — or 2003, get my dates right, 2003 — 2004 — in January 2004 — right, because it was in October of 2003 when he first briefed the 9/11 Commission’s staff over in Baghram.

In January of 2004 when he was twice rebuffed by the 9/11 Commission for a personal follow-up meeting, he was assigned back to Afghanistan to lead a special classified program.

When he returned in March, he was called in and verbally his security clearance was temporarily lifted. By lifting his security clearance, he could not go back into DIA quarters where all the materials he had about Able Danger were, in fact, stored. He could not get access to memos that, in fact, he will tell you discussed the briefings he provided both to the previous administration and this administration.

Much more details about whom was briefed and when plus the implication here that his security clearance was lifted for a very suspicious reason. He was sent away only to return to a lifted security clearence and his material on Able Danger gone. How convenient. Tie this to Sandy Bergers theft of National Archives documents related to Clinton’s response to terrorism:

In particular, the Washington Post reports [2] that Berger purloined all draft revisions of a key critique of the government’s response to the millennium terrorism threat, a document that detailed Administration knowledge ? and inaction ? regarding al Qaeda presence in the U.S. in 1999 and 2000. Stolen were crucial notes in the margins of these drafts which reveal the thinking and agendas of the Clinton Administration relating to the mounting terrorist threat.

and

A government official with knowledge of the probe said Berger removed from archives files all five or six drafts of a critique of the government’s response to the millennium terrorism threat, which he said was classified “codeword,” the government’s highest level of document security.

And you have a head scratcher. He stole these in Oct 2003, the same time Shaffer was meeting with members of the 9/11 Commission the first time. He comes back to the states, gets rebuffed by the Commission twice then is sent abroad again. Comes back to find his security clearence lifted and his documents end up missing. Does all of this sound a little too weird to be a coincidence?

Tim Roemer, a good friend of mine, came out and said, “Well, they couldn’t have had a photograph of Mohammed Atta because he wasn’t in the country before a certain date.” That obviously came from staff of the commission.

Well, as we now know, the photograph did not come from an immigration picture or a driver’s license. An individual who will testify on Wednesday will say they bought that photograph from a woman in California who was researching the activity at selected mosques. That’s where the photograph came from.

It’s very troubling to me that people are going out of their way not to want to know the details of what happened here, to distort and spin.

Interesting. I’m assuming this woman has been located and will testify also.

Now, I tried to get to the 9/11 Commission. I contacted the commission through staff.

WELDON: I offered to go in and give them a briefing while they were doing their investigation. They could have seen the Heritage tape that’s on the Heritage Commission’s Web site of the speech I gave in May of 2002. It’s a public document. If they would have talked to me, I would have given them that link. I would have given them every piece of information that I had to reconstruct what I’ve reconstructed.

Do we have the actual date when I presented this document? Was it April?

STAFF: I think it was April — one of the two hearings in the Hart Building.

WELDON: In the Hart Building, when the 9/11 Commission brought in George Tenet, and I was watching the hearings from my home, I couldn’t believe the questioning. So I drafted this document and had my staff director hand deliver it to the 9/11 Commission. They never asked a question. This is the actual document.

The next week, they sent a staffer over to pick up some additional materials about the NOA (ph), about the concept, and about information I had briefed them on. They never followed up and invited me to come in and meet with them. So they can’t say that I didn’t try.

I had one phone conversation with Tom Kean, and it took me a long while to get him. That lasted about five minutes. He was in a big rush.

And I tried to explain to him in that five-minute time period all of the parameters of this information, so they could do what the Congress asked them to do. He assured me that 9/11 commission staff would follow up and they never did.

So we had Scott Philpott (ph) voluntarily go to the commission, Tony Shaffer voluntarily go to the commission. I went to the commission. And they choose to ignore the information. They choose to categorize it as historically insignificant, which the Pentagon will not do. They won’t characterize it as that.

A three-hour briefing for General Hugh Shelton, a briefing on Door Hop Galley (ph) that included Richard Schiefren (ph) and Admiral Wilson and Steve Cambone, where Able Danger was discussed, and no one wants to get to the bottom of what really happened.

The 9/11 Commission has lost my confidence.

I voted for the commission. I supported the commission. I talked about the commission. I have given speeches around the country supporting the commission’s recommendations.

WELDON: I was so frustrated when I could not get a face-to-face meeting with the commission staff or commissioners, that the day that Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean briefed Congress, that was right before the 9/11 commission’s report was to be released, in the Cannon Caucus Room they invited members over. I got there first. I was the first member to raise my hand to ask the first question.

And I stood up and I said to the two of them, “I support your work. I support your recommendations. Many of your recommendations are recommendations previously made by the Gilmore commission. But I am extremely upset that you would not meet with members of Congress who were involved with these issues.”

Lee Hamilton’s response to me, in front of my colleagues in Congress, was, “Well, Curt, we couldn’t meet with everyone.”

Incredible. They had these guys telling them “look, we may have identified Atta and his gang before 9/11” and they say they couldn’t meet with anyone?

Who — and why — ordered 2.5 terabytes of data referring to Able Danger, Al Qaida, and including Mohammed Atta, in the summer of 2000? And why did they not seek the approval of General Lambert before his data was destroyed, especially given the fact that Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state, had declared Al Qaida an international terrorist organization? How could you destroy that volume of material about one of the top terrorist cells in the world?

I don’t buy the idea that there was information about American persons — or I guess, if you include Mohammed Atta in there, he would be considered an American person. I don’t buy that as an excuse to justify destroying that kind of data.

Number two, who ordered — either within the Pentagon legal staff or higher up — the blockage of meetings on three separate occasions in September of 2000 where Able Danger material was going to be briefed to the FBI?

WELDON: And again, we have that person who set those meetings up who will testify on Wednesday. Who stopped those meetings and why did they stop them?

Number three, what was in the three-hour briefing that was prepared for General High Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in January of ’01, and where is that brief, since it would still have existed, even though the bulk of the data had been destroyed in the summer of ’00?

What materials did Richard Schiefren (ph) discuss in a briefing that was held with Colonel Shaffer, Steve Cambone and Admiral Wilson in the Door Hop Galley (ph) briefing in the winter of ’01? What was the Able Danger material discussed in that meeting?

And finally, and most importantly, why did the 9/11 Commission, charged with the responsibility by the Congress with my support, choose to totally ignore the work of Able Danger? And why did they not pursue the people that I’ve pursued over the last 35, 40 days that would have provided them the same information that I’ve provided?

Good questions

WELDON: I think my own perception is the 9/11 Commission staff did not want this story to be pursued. As John Lehman and Tim Roemer told me, I don’t think this was ever briefed to 9/11 commissioners.

I think, for some reason, there was a staff effort deliberately put forward not to allow this information to be brought forward.

Now, a couple of strange things have happened during this time period, and one thing I’ve never mentioned publicly.

The first week the story broke in the New York Times, I was in Pennsylvania that Friday doing district work and I got a call at my office. My chief of staff took the call, and it was from a person I’d never met in my entire life. I’d never mentioned her name. She was on vacation and asked my chief of staff for me to call her back.

Her name was Jamie Gorelick.

I said, “What does she want, Russ? I don’t know the woman.” I said, “I’m tied up. Would you please call her back and ask her what she wants?”

WELDON: Russ called her back on her cell phone. She was on vacation. And her response to my chief of staff was, “Please tell Congressman Weldon I’ve done nothing wrong.”

Wtf! First off, this may very well be a staff effort to keep the information hidden but under who’s orders? Did the staff decide this all on their own? Plus, Gorelick better be on the witness list.

This is the largest disaster in the history of the country. I mean, it would be like saying we don’t want to know the details of Pearl Harbor. Three thousand innocent people were killed; the Congress, Democrats and Republicans, want the answers; why are we not getting straight talk? Why is there a constant effort to spin?

Why would you say, as Larry Di Rita said from the Pentagon after referring to Tony Shaffer and Scott Philpott’s (ph) recollections, “Well, you know, memories sometimes play games on people.”

Well, how about now that they’ve acknowledged five people recalling seeing Mohammed Atta’s photograph and the linkage to the Brooklyn cell?

And how about now the witness that’s going to testify that all this data was deliberately destroyed, in spite of the fact that the general was not aware his material was being destroyed?

There are just too many unanswered questions.

...WELDON: I’ve been told that the woman at the FBI has e-mails that will verify the meetings.

I can tell you that Tony Shaffer will tell you his e-mails, all classified, on his system, were deleted. They were deleted during the time that he could not get access because they had temporarily lifted his security clearance.

WELDON: And that in itself is absolutely outrageous.

You’ve all seen the charges they’ve trumped up against him, which were that he transferred a cell phone that amounted to $60 while he was working over in Afghanistan undercover to his personal phone, and that he had gotten reimbursed for mileage to a training course at Fort Dix that they said he wasn’t entitled to even though it was a military training program which is $109.

And for that, they temporarily lifted his security clearance, conveniently after he gets back and had told the 9/11 Commission staff all the documents were in his office at DIA headquarters, but he could not get back into DIA headquarters because they had temporarily lifted his clearance for these three stupid allegations. But all during this time the Army’s paying him $100,000 a year as a military officer — and, oh, by the way, during that time they promoted him to lieutenant colonel.

Does something sound fishy there? It sure does to me.