When Rep. Curt Weldon started tugging on the loose string called Able Danger, he expected to find an oversight by the 9/11 Commission. Surely the Commission would regard the identification of Mohamed Atta al-Sayed as an Al Qaeda operative, within the United States, prior to 9/11, as significant and would be eager to clear up the omission.
Not so.
The Commission has denied that anyone ever told them that Atta or other hijackers were identified by DOD employees prior to 9/11. The Able Danger documents they reviewed, they claim, mention Al Qaeda and show charts, but none of the stuff they saw mentions Atta.
So why has it been so difficult for an investigative commission charged with getting to the truth about the events of 9/11, that has powers of subpoena, had such trouble finding out the Atta revelations when Weldon, who is not on the commission has no problem producing witnesses, including corroborative witnesses, to back up these statements;
ONE
"What I did not know, Mr. Speaker, up until June of this year, was that that secret program called Able Danger actually identified the Brooklyn cell of al Qaeda in January and February of 2000, over 1 year before 9/11 every happened. In addition, I learned that not only did we identify the Brooklyn cell of al Qaeda, but we identified Mohamed Atta as one of the members of that Brooklyn cell along with three other terrorists who were the leadership of the 9/11 attack."
TWO
"The Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency was in a meeting with Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer almost a year before 9/11, and Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer showed him a disk in his office with information about al Qaeda and Mohammed Atta, and the Deputy Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency stopped the briefing and said, you cannot show me that. I do not want to see it. It might contain information I cannot look at.
Now, Tony Shaffer was not in the room alone, Mr. Speaker. There were other people, and we know their names. So we have witnesses. Now, the Deputy Director has denied that meeting and denied he was there and denied this particular story, but the fact is he knows that we are going to pursue it."
From: ABLE DANGER FAILURE—House of Representatives – October 19, 2005
If Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer and others are just making things up, then why has the DIA and DOD gagged him and others, and specifically set out to destroy Shaffer’s career?
"So what has happened to Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer, Mr. Speaker? The Defense Intelligence Agency has lifted his security clearance. One day before he was to testify before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, in uniform, they permanently removed his security clearance. And now our Defense Intelligence Agency has told Colonel Shaffer’s lawyer that they plan to seek a permanent removal of his pay and his health care benefits for him and his two children. Why, Mr. Speaker? Because Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer, like Commander Scott Philpot of the Navy, like J.D. Smith, and like a host of other Able Danger employees, has told the truth."
From: ABLE DANGER FAILURE
Now, if Weldon’s antics raise suspicions, that’s fair enough. Vice President Cheney is currently in the media crosshairs as the person who may have initially revealed Valerie Plame as a CIA NOC. This after months and months of buck passing and what looks like perjury by a good chunk of the current Republican administration.
Then there are always the Downing St. Memos which reveal that British Intel had determined that “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” to invade Iraq by US Intel.
So I can see where the skepticism is coming from. I can see how you might think that Weldon is blowing smoke up our collective asses, hoping to spray the previous administration with some 9/11 blame.
I would be right there with you except for the fact that the 9/11 Commission has done a poor job kicking over all the rocks to expose the events that resulted in 9/11.
The 9/11 Commission’s final report was issued in the summer of 2004, and drew scrutiny immediately following its publication. Among the first to criticize the report was Sibel Edmonds, who, with the determined aid of the Jersey Girls and the advisory committee of 9/11 families, (who literally dragged Edmonds before the Commission), was able to testify to the Commission.
Her testimony, which was wide-ranging, specific and highly damaging to the current adminstration according to many reports, (most recently a long piece in Vanity Fair), was entirely omitted. She is referred to only anecdotally in the report.
The biggest and most detailed critique of the report appeared as the cover story for the October, 2004 Harper’s Magazine, Whitewash as Public Service by Benjamin DeMott. After 6,000 scathing words, DeMott concludes;
The Commission, in sum, offers peace through exculpation, evasion, and entertainment--and in doing so dangerously reenergizes a national relish for fantasy. Given a chance to brace the electorate with incontrovertible evidence that the search for leadership must be a search for flexible intelligence, endlessly curious and rapid, devouring in its appetite for the whole body of knowledge bearing on fateful choices, the Commission speaks out for loose-limbed feel-good geniality and artful dodging. Its vote for harmony is perfectly comprehensible, but as the costs of the vote are weighed, the imperative of protest against it stands forth as immensely more comprehensible--and just. "In all the general concerns," James Fenimore Cooper wrote long ago, in 1838, "the publick has a right to be treated with candor. Without this manly and republican quality . . . [American] institutions are converted into stupendous fraud." Faced with The 9/11 Commission Report, this country's true need now is to shout Shame!
Back to Edmonds. She is only the tip of the iceberg. According to one of the 9/11 widows, ‘Jersey Girl’ Lorie Van Auken, the Commission ignored whistleblowers and truthtellers by the bushel. The following is from testimony she gave at Rep. Cynthia McKinney’s July 22nd Congressional Briefing: “The 9/11 Commission Report One Year Later: A Citizens' Response - Did They Get It Right?”;
While the Department of Defense and others were threatened with subpoenas for not being forthcoming with information requested, we were of the mindset that all known evidence pertaining to September 11th, should have been subpoenaed by the Commission from the outset, with no exceptions. Which, by the way, was the mandate of the 9/11 Commission.
No stones should have remained unturned. And yet, this was not the case. For example with regard to videos that recorded the Pentagon crash, we knew of at least 3 versions of videos that record the crash of Flight 77. Yet only one version ever made its way into the public domain.
That version had the date stamp of 9/12 instead of 9/11/01. The time stamp is repeated on 2 of the 5 frames while the times on the other frames were missing. We had read in National Geographic about the second video that was recorded by cameras located at the Sheraton Hotel overlooking the Pentagon. We also read about the 3rd video recording that showed the crash from the nearby Nexcom Gas Station security camera.
We asked the Commission, specifically Team 8, to subpoena for these videos, and just before the Commission released its final report, we met with some of them. They told us that they had not subpoenaed for this evidence but had instead issued document requests which were never answered.
This seeming lack of persistence on the part of the Commission to collect all known evidence is worrisome. Again, if they were unwilling to go after even easily obtainable evidence, what other critical and more difficult pieces of the story were they missing?
How was one to feel comfortable with their investigation, knowing that they were not aggressively pursuing the most tangible of evidence or information?
Also missing from the Commission's definitive report was the testimony from national security whistleblowers who had tried to testify before the Commission, but where either not asked to testify or their testimony was only barely acknowledged, or worse yet, completely omitted from the record.
This list includes:
Robert Wright – FBI Agent, whom the FBI refused to allow to testify, and the Commission did not subpoena him.
John M. Cole – FBI Counterintelligence who had pertinent information with regard to Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the 9/11 attacks. He notified the 9/11 Commission during its tenure but never received a response back from them.
Coleen Rowley – FBI Division Council, the FBI commission did not interview her and chose instead to rely on transcripts from the Joint Senate House Intelligence Inquiry.
Mike German – FBI Counterintelligence, in February, 2004 his name and contact information were provided to the Commission as a key witness, but they never called him to testify.
Mark Burtons – Senior Analyst at NSA, he provided dozens of pages of information and testimony to the 9/11 Commission but was ignored, and was never invited to testify.
Aris Ashar – Language Specialist at the FBI, he was refused twice by the Commission to testify but finally did testify however, his testimony was omitted from the final report.
This list is in no way complete, rather, it's just a small sample of the legitimate witnesses or corroborators of valuable 9/11 information that they tried to provide to the Commission. But they were instead turned away.
Knowing full well that the best source of how an agency really works would entail talking to the people who actually work there, why is it that the Commission refused these key witnesses an opportunity to tell what they knew?
How could the Commission be trusted to make the right decisions without obtaining all pertinent information?
Worse yet, what happens when the Commission actively and knowingly ignores that information?
Lorie Van Auken, July 22nd, 2005
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David Ray Griffin, a gadfly of the official story of 9/11, wrote a whole book about the report, The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions And Distortions and it’s been selling fairly well for a small press publication to a growing mass of people who feel that the Commission has done more of a disservice than a benefit to the American citizenry. With the highly questionable war on Iraq dragging on after two years, launched as an accessory war to the War on Terror, the Commission owes an apology to the citizenry of the world. The facts need to be known and shared by all. Even the ugly ones.
So that leads us back to Weldon. Left to his own devices, Weldon will fuss and make house speeches until he turns blue in the face and nothing happens. However, since the DOD has taken such Draconian measures against its whistleblowers, Weldon has started to receive support from his fellow Republicans, and nods from Democrats.
Left to their own devices, the Republicans will do anything in their power to portray Able Danger as a singularly Clintonian failure in the hopes that it draws attention away from the tsunami of indictments flying around the Capitol.
This is where citizens who want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about the events of 9/11 can start to make a difference.
Rep. McKinney and Weldon should be encouraged to work in a truly bi-partisan manner. Weldon should be encouraged to take up the banner of the whistleblowers, and force the 9/11 Omission Commission to seriously re-examine the testimony already provided by any whistleblowers and gather any new testimony that is germane to the events that led up to 9/11.
Let me close with some of McKinney’s comments from the July 22nd Briefing;
How was it that it took over an hour after the first transponder went off before planes were scrambled to meet the threat? All of them too late.
What happened to those reports that surfaced within months of September 11th stating that 7 or more of the alleged hijackers had come forward and claimed that they were victims of stolen identities, they were alive and well, living in Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Tunisia? Why did the Commission choose not even to address this?
What about the terrorist Omar Said Sheikh? Now sitting in a Pakistani prison on charges of participating in the kidnapping and murder of Wall Street Journal's Daniel Pearl. According to Indian intelligence, this man received orders from a Pakistani General to transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta. People all over the world are talking about this story. But not a word about it in the Report.
What about Osama bin Laden and his role in the Mujahadin backed by the CIA in the 1980's to fight the Soviets? The Commission didn't go there.
This morning, we will be hearing about these omissions, errors, and about the historical background of September 11th from the collection of experts we have assembled. In the afternoon we will be looking at the Report's recommendations. And I think we will find very little in them that challenges the Bush administration's foreign policy and its war on terrorism.
In fact, its recommendations for centralizing America's intelligence networks seems designed to further that agenda.
And we will be hearing about how under the P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and the dual legal system that has been enacted to allow detainees to be held indefinitely without facing judge or jury, how our Civil Liberties are being eroded in the name of fighting the terrorists. As if the term `terrorist' alone tells us all we need to know about our enemies.
We need to know about our enemies, if we're going to reclaim a future free from the fear of terrorist attacks and weapons of mass destruction. We cannot afford to shy away from inconvenient truths. Many of you may find what you hear today to be inconvenient information. But Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but times of challenge and controversy."
I encourage you to engage with the issues that are raised, and if you don't agree, or don't like what you hear, challenge it.
I believe that we should take in what every reasonable person has to say, to inform our decisions, because that's the best way to find the truth.
And in our pursuit of the truth, I encourage you to emulate the courage and the determination of the September 11th families, in their struggle to know, what really happened.
Amen.