Rep. Curt Weldon's (R-PA) revelation that SOCOM activity by the name "Able Danger" knew well in advance of 9/11 that Mohamed Atta was part of a Al-Qaeda sleeper cell named "Brooklyn" that was a high risk danger in the US.
Weldon's intended target seems to be the CIA and Clinton, but not so fast, it certainly is far more enlightening and complicated than first appears. Just another gadfly theory of his, or is does this present a rare opportunity for some truth outing? You bet it does.
Weldon's arrant stinger missile, "Able Danger", is looping right back to Bush & Co. already in hyper damage control mode.
Philip Zelikow is now ground zero in 911 cover-up and "mything" the coming war with Iran.
*UPDATE.
with Aug 11/12 articlesContinues...
Weldon's statements in a
special order speech on June 27, 2005 and subsequent statements are aimed at the CIA, failures of the Clinton Administration and "those DoD lawyers" who prevented/suppressed critical intelligence on Atta's activities by not allowing it to reach the right agencies that might have taken action to prevent 9/11.
Journalists are now scrambling to examine Weldon's statements and confirm the facts in a story by Jacob Goodwin that was the spark to the current grassfire, now in full blaze.
The epicenter of this story is a story by Jacob Goodwin at Global Security Network that came out in the first few days of August, 2005 "Did DoD lawyers blow the chance to nab Atta"
Some clips from his story (highly suggest reading all of it):
In September 2000, one year before the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, a U.S. Army military intelligence program, known as "Able Danger," identified a terrorist cell based in Brooklyn, NY, one of whose members was 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, and recommended to their military superiors that the FBI be called in to "take out that cell," according to Rep. Curt Weldon, a longtime Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who is currently vice chairman of both the House Homeland Security and House Armed Services Committees.
The intelligence officer recalled carrying documents to the offices of Able Danger, which was being run by the Special Operations Command, headquartered in Tampa, FL. The documents included a photo of Mohammed Atta supplied by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and described Atta's relationship with Osama bin Laden. The officer was very disappointed when lawyers working for Special Ops decided that anyone holding a green card had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had amassed about the only terrorist cell they had located inside the United States could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded.
"So now, Mr. Speaker," Weldon said on the House floor last June, "for the first time I can tell our colleagues that one of our agencies not only identified the New York cell of Mohammed Atta and two of the terrorists, but actually made a recommendation to bring the FBI in to take out that cell."
According to Weldon, staff members of the 9/11 Commission were briefed on the capabilities of the Able Danger intelligence unit within the Special Operations Command, which had been set up by General Pete Schoomaker, who headed Special Ops at the time, on the orders of General Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Staffers at the 9/11 Commission staffers were also told about the specific recommendation to break up the Mohammed Atta cell. However, those commission staff members apparently did not choose to brief the commission's members on these sensitive matters.
Weldon said he was told specifically by commission members, Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana; and John Lehman, a former secretary of the Navy; that they had never been briefed on the Able Danger unit within Special Ops or on the unit's evidence of a terrorist cell in Brooklyn.
"I personally talked with [Philip] Zelikow [executive director of the 9/11 Commission] about this," recalled the intelligence officer. "For whatever bizarre reasons, he didn't pass on the information."
Weldon spoke with Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, about conversations he has had with several members of the Able Danger intelligence unit. Weldon has urged Hoekstra to investigate the reasons why Able Danger's revelations were not shared with the FBI. Hoekstra looked into the matter at the Pentagon, but after several days of fruitless inquiries, was unable to find anyone at the Defense Department who seemed to know anything about Able Danger or would acknowledge the intelligence unit had ever existed, explained Caso in a telephone interview with GSN.
"Congressman Weldon has met with several people who were working on Able Danger to identify where Al Qaeda was set up around the world," said Caso. "They made the suggestion that this information be passed to the FBI, and lawyers within the Defense Department -- whether within Special Ops or within OSD, we don't know -- and the lawyers said, `No'."
A report about some of these events appeared last June 19 in The Times Herald newspaper, of Norristown, PA, which is located in the Philadelphia suburbs that Rep. Weldon represents in Congress.
Numerous stories have and continue to appear on the story of "Able Danger" and Weldon's statements including this follow-up piece this morning in the New York Times "9/11 Commission's Staff Rejected Report on Early Identification of Chief Hijacker"
But let's return to one of the originals, Keith Phucas' story on June 19, 2005, a hint of the devil in the details is revealed:
A small group of intelligence employees ran "Able Danger" from the fall of 1999 until February 2001 - just seven months before the terrorist attacks - when the operation was axed.
Who stopped this activity? And who blocked this information from the 911 Commission? An arrogant, headstrong Bush team that were looking to take on Iraq and not Al-Qaeda, that ignored an on-going war with Al-Qaeda started by the Clinton Administration, that's who.
And who is the man responsible covering this up? Philip D. Zelikow, Bush mythmaker.
"Mything" -- A New Case Against Iran
All this started when Weldon was flushed from cover during another recent tiff with the CIA over his amateurish activities with his book's (main character "Ali", real name Fereidoun Mahdavi, former commerce the Shah's minister of commerce, a questionable character and a widely-known associate of Iran-Contra vintage arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar.
While assisting in the building the case for action against Iran, Weldon said he received a tip from "Ali" on a plot by Iranians to attack the US. He was subsequently flushed into the open by the New York Times and attempted to patch things on Meet the Press on June 12, 2005:
Partial Transcript
MR. RUSSERT: You talk about--and here we get to
The New York Times on Thursday:
"Mr. Weldon's strongest argument is Ali's report from May 17, 2003, that Iran planned to hijack an airplane in Canada and strike a nuclear reactor in the United States whose name began `Sea.' Mr. Weldon said the plant was later identified as Seabrook Station in New Hampshire. He contended that the August 2003 arrest of 19 Muslim men in Toronto on vague suspicions of terrorism proved the prediction was correct. The congressman said the arrests might have prevented the deaths of `hundreds of thousands' of Americans. But Canadian officials later dropped all security-related charges against the men, leaving only routine immigration charges. And Alan Griffith, a spokesman for the Seabrook nuclear plant, said the alleged plot `was never deemed a credible threat' by federal officials."
REP. WELDON: Well, that, again, differs with the meeting I had on January 26 in my office with two members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the governor's representative for security, the intelligence officer for New Hampshire. They, in fact, told me that the first day that they were informed of the credible threat to Seabrook was on November the 24th. That was the exact day that my informant told me that the reactor was going to be hit.
You know, Tim, this gets down to whether or not we're going to allow the CIA to be totally trusted. There are good agents in the CIA, doing great work. My book's dedicated to them. But they failed in 1992 when the highest-ranking-ever KGB defector, Vasily Mitrokhin, wanted to defect to the U.S. The CIA said, "We don't need him." His information, which was picked up by the British--he became a person who lived in Britain till his death last year--was a treasure trove of information about the Soviet KGB.
The CIA doesn't have a good record. They failed to predict 9/11. They failed to understand North Korea had a three-stage missile before it was launched in 1998. They were wrong on the National Intelligence Estimate, 95, 19, about the threat of long-range missile attack against us. And they've ignored Able Danger, the Special Forces command's secret project against al-Qaeda that ran in '99 and 2000, which CIA officials I've talked to said they weren't even aware of.
Weldon's most recent round of criticism of his misadventures were fueled by a great piece
by Laura Rozen and Jeet Heer in Prospect April 1, 2005 titled "The Front: Hard-liners want evidence that Iran is up to no good. And they're turning to strange sources to get it."
Since then Weldon has been plagued by other stories such as his not-so-secret trip to Paris with Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence in June of 2003.
But Weldon is not the main player in all this so let's move on.
Some Necessary Pre-emptive De-Mythication
Let's assume that Weldon is acting either on instruction, or on his own accord to further expose the failings of the CIA, and/or to place the failures of 9/11 squarely in the hands of the Clinton Administration and "those DoD lawyers".
While there were admittedly numerous problems within the Intelligence and Law Enforcement communities in the sharing and analysis of intelligence tracking Al-Qaeda activities, the facts are that the Clinton Administration was already at war with Al-Qaeda and it was the Bush team that refused to take their advice on continuing the pressure.
Bush deliberately and ignorantly refused to assume command of these security facts and appropriate preventive covert measures, ostensibly in order to make a partisan statement about the difference between himself, his team and outgoing the Clinton team, whom the Bush-backing far right operatives had ridiculed in a long wilding--an orgy of misinformation and denigration. Nothing Clinton had done to destroy terrorism was considered legitimate.
Because of this mindset Bush, the new Commander and Chief, blindsided himself and his principals, who were coming on line to defend the country during a time of clear and present danger.
Barton Gellman of the Washington Post in "Broad Effort Launched After '98 Attacks" December 19, 2001:
"Thus dissolved another moment of hope in a covert war of long shots and near misses that most Americans did not yet know their country was fighting. Unfolding in the last two years of his presidency, long before the events of Sept. 11, Clinton's war was marked by caution against an enemy that the president and his advisers knew to be ruthless and bold. Reluctant to risk lives, failure or the wrath of brittle allies in the Islamic world, Clinton confined planning for lethal force within two significant limits. American troops would use weapons aimed from a distance, and their enemy would be defined as individual terrorists, not the providers of sanctuary for attacks against the United States.
Within those boundaries, there was much more to the war than has reached the public record. Beginning on Aug. 7, 1998, the day that al Qaeda destroyed the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Clinton directed a campaign of increasing scope and lethality against bin Laden's network that carried through his final days in office."
Joe Conason in "Big Lies", Chapter Ten "Dead or Alive" - or Maybe Just Forgotten, , St Martins Press 2003, Pages 205-206.
"The Clinton critics like to dismiss his administrations efforts to stop bin Laden as a couple of missiles fired at an empty tent. Yet there was no lack of zeal in Clinton's hunt for the Saudi terrorist. In 1998 Clinton signed a secret National Security Decision Directive that authorized an intensive, ongoing campaign to destroy al-Qaeda and seize or assassinate bin Laden. Several attempts were made on bin Laden's life, aside from the famous cruise missile launches that summer, which conservatives falsely denounced as an attempt to deflect attention from Lewinsky. (It never seems to occur to the conservatives who snicker about Wag the Dog that they are also smearing ranking intelligence and military officers such as retired General Anthony Zinni, more recently Bush's Mideast envoy, who encouraged Clinton to take that shot in the dark.")
The fact is these same Reagan vintage decision makers, now apparently seeking some form of quasi-religious penance. They were the real enablers of the rise of violent Islamic extremism. It's their blowback that is our current plague. Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001:
"During the Reagan years in particular, it was a very superficial, certainly, Reagan often used the terminology of his, you know of freedom. These were freedom fighters. These were noble freedom fighters. I don't want to overstate this, but the Afghans were regarded with some distance almost as noble savages in some sort of a state of purity fighting for an abstract idea of freedom.
The idea that Afghanistan was a messy place filled with complexity and ethnicity and tribal structures and all of the rest of what we now understand about Afghanistan was it was generally not part of American public discourse. By contrast, the covert wars in Central America were much richer controversies in the United States, and they were often discussed in much greater detail and nuance in Congress and elsewhere.
Of course, the support for the Contras became a raging controversy by the second term of the Reagan administration. Afghanistan never became such a program. It attracted bipartisan support and a general quietude throughout. In part because it was so far away, in part because the war was one between an occupied people and the soviet army. This is not a -- this is not proxies on both side. This is a direct invasion that was generally regarded at unjust across the developing world. Also, the United States didn't play a very direct role on the front lines of the jihad. There were not Americans in tennis shoes generally standing up on the paths getting shot or creating episodes. This was a war in which the United States acted as quartermaster and let the Pakistani intelligence service run things on the front lines."
See also: Gellman's reporting on Sudan and bin Laden appeared in the Washington Post, October 3, 2001. The episode is covered in greater detail in The Age of Sacred Terror by Daniel Benjamin and Steve Simon (Random House, 2002) pp 244-47. Benjamin and Simon also provide copious evidence of Clinton's efforts to hunt down bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and his administration's efforts to strengthen U.S. counter-terror measures. Bremer and Oakley's comments appeared in the Washington Post, December 24, 2000.
But Real Story is...
Bush, and in particular Dr. Rice, missed the critical hand-off and must bear heavy responsibility for the failure to comprehend and to forestall 9/11's attacks. "The Grown Ups." as the former Nixon and Reagan holdovers call themselves, start to face their own culpability in US security failures, the emergence of Al-Qaeda plans are underway, they are unable or negligent in reacting in the professional manner demanded of their official roles as protectors of the this Nation.
Blessed are the Myth-Makers:
Philip D. Zelikow, Chief Mythic and Data Washer
Who the hell is Phil Zelikow? He is the man that wrote the myth-making and is now at the forefront of the building the new myth for a case to attack Iran.
However, back in late 2001, Zelikow was appointed to the 911 Commission for a single purpose; to protect Condeleezza Rice and the Bush national security team from the fact that they seriously dropped the ball on the pursuit of Al-Qaeda during in the transition from the Clinton Administration just like Richard Clarke testified before the commission. Part of this failure is a kind of ideological arrogance on the part of Bush and his team. As described by 9/11 Commission watchers:
The commission's executive director, Philip D Zelikow, is a crucial player. This is the man who directs all the investigative research of the commission. On October 5, 2001 - two days before the beginning of the bombing of Afghanistan - he was appointed as one of the three members of Bush's foreign intelligence advisory board. Zelikow is the ultimate Bush insider.
Andrew Rice says that Zelikow "worked with these people and now he is defending them". Zelikow also worked for Jim Baker, former secretary of state of Bush senior. He spent three years on Bush senior's National Security Council. He is close to Bush junior, and even closer to Condi Rice: they worked together, and he even co-wrote two books with her.
A formal attempt to remove Zelikow from the 911 Commission was made, but to no avail.
Zelikow wrote the book on "myth-making" which is the center piece of Bush & Co's playbook.
In his writings are found the basic theory and structure of how to manipulate public perceptions to fit a desired policy outcome. Without going to too much detail on all the work done by Zelikow in this area, the basics are (from Essence Decision - Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, Zelikow, p. 392):
"Model I fixes the broader context, the larger national patterns, and the shared images. Within this context, Model II illuminates the organizational routines that produce the information, options, and action. Model III focuses in greater detail on the individuals who constitute a government and the politics and procedures by which their competing perceptions and preferences are combined."
Zelikow is involved in the case against Iraq, and was there at a principals meeting on September 12, 2001, and was the lead in the cover-up of policy failures of the Bush Administration.
In fact it was Richard Perle, one of the top Israeli-connected neocons forced last year to resign who brought Philip Zelikow onto the Defense Intelligence Board of which he was Chairman shortly after the Bush/Cheney takeover in Washington. Down the road the White House and the Republican Congressional leadership made the same Philip Zelikow Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, which has since been quite accurately accused of mostly covering up government failings and actual policies. While speaking extemporaneously at a university forum on 10 September 2002, Mr. Zelikow partially let the cat out of the bag when he actually admitted the U.S. was going to invade Iraq to protect Israel. Now Vice-President Cheney himself was reported to have said much the same during a visit to Israel earlier that year -- and MER reported this at the time -- but there was no actual recording of those secretive meetings in Israel.
Kelikow is now Counselor of the State Department. Who says being a cover-up operative has no rewards?
Philip Zelikow, Counselor of the Department, is a principal officer who serves the Secretary as a special advisor and consultant on major problems of foreign policy and who provides guidance to the appropriate bureaus with respect to such matters. The Counselor conducts special international negotiations and consultations, and also undertakes special assignments from time to time, as directed by the Secretary.
His latest project as the Head of the Council on Counter Terrorism is clearly Iran. In a recent statement he is quoted as saying:
"Unfortunately, Cuba, North Korea, Syria, and in particular, Iran continued to embrace terrorism as an instrument of national policy. Most worrisome is that these countries also have the capabilities to manufacture weapons of mass destruction and other destabilizing technologies that could fall into the hands of terrorists."
The CIA has been doing a little pre-emptive "de-mythication" of it's own, with the leaking of content of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran hoping to slow down the rush to war with Iran. Operations against Iran is what Bush & Co. now feel they desperately need to gloss over their failure in Iraq and in their continued misuse of military action to maintain and consolidate political power
Zelikow in a presentation about his book, "The Essence of Decision: Foreign Policy Choices under Uncertainty," April 25, 2003 states:
"Perhaps there is nothing more dangerous than high intelligence wedded to bad judgment, because the high intelligence erases humility and gives a person license to express opinions that appear to be erudite. But without being wedded to good judgment that may be the most dangerous thing of all."
Got that one right Phil.
BOTTOMLINE:
Want to get to bottom of what the "Able Danger" story is really about and why it didn't save the country from terrible attacks?
Ask Phil Zelikow, before he forgets.
The Grand Inquisitor speaks:
"They will marvel at us and look on us as gods, because we are ready to endure the freedom which they have found so dreadful and to rule over them -- so awful it will seem to them to be free. But we shall tell them that we are Thy servants and rule them in Thy name. We shall deceive them again, for we will not let Thee come to us again. That deception will be our suffering, for we shall be forced to lie."
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, 1879
Special thanks to BooMan23, heterodoxy, lawnorder, Gnostic and other Kossacks not afraid of not-so-tinfoil hats on this important story.
>*UPDATE with Aug 11 and 12 articles content on Follow-on.