Terrorist Atta Intelligence Omitted From 9/11 Report

Ah, the 'Gorelic Wall'......

She should have been booted from the Commission...it's beginning to look like a conflict of interest.

Doesn't do much for the credibility of the 9/11 final report.

Good call BrandX




You damn right there was a wall, and as BrankX has stated it was erected by Jamie Gorelic.......who was unbelievably a member of said 9/11 commission and also as Brank X correctly states, should have been "booted" from the commission and called as a witness instead of being a member of the commission.

The wall created by Gorelic and the Clinton administration contribute mightily to the catastrophe of 9/11 and now it may yet become self evident , as all truth eventually does.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/politics/13intel.html

9/11 Panel Explains Move on Intelligence Unit
By DOUGLAS JEHL
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.

The leaders said the staff learned about the program in the October 2003 briefing and later sought Defense Department documents about it. But those department documents, they said, "had mentioned nothing about Atta, nor had anyone come forward between September 2001 and July 2004 with any similar information."

Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who has called attention to the program, said the commission had done too little to follow up on the information. Mr. Weldon said he would continue to "push for a full accounting of the historical record so that we may preclude these types of failures from happening again."

Among the questions left by the commission statement is whether the Special Operations Command received information about Mr. Atta and others from the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000 and chose not to forward it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as Mr. Weldon and the former defense intelligence official have said.

If verified, that would be the first indication that Mr. Atta was identified as a threat by any American agency before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Special Operations Command and the Pentagon have declined to comment, and the statement issued by the commission on Friday evening addressed only its own role in reviewing information about the program.

In an interview this week, a former senior military officer disputed that the unit members had ever presented to their superiors information that identified Mr. Atta or other suspected members of Al Qaeda. A second former officer said any information presented by the team to the leaders of the Special Operations Command would have been unlikely to be shared outside the command in the environment that prevailed before Sept. 11.

The former defense intelligence official, who was interviewed twice this week, has repeatedly said that Mr. Atta and four others were identified on a chart presented to the Special Operations Command. The former official said the chart identified about 60 probable members of Al Qaeda.

In interviews, former military officers have said the Able Danger unit was established in September 1999 by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, then the head of the Special Operations Command, under a charter issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Shelton, now retired, has said he does not recall the program; General Schoomaker, now the Army chief of staff, has declined to comment, as has Gen. Charles R. Holland, who took over the Special Operations Command in October 2000.

About the so called wall and Gorlic

http://mediamatters.org/items/200508110001

Limbaugh falsely blamed Clinton administration for "wall" that purportedly prevented intelligence sharing about 9-11 hijackers

On the August 9 and 10 broadcasts of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh falsely accused the Clinton administration of enacting a policy that prevented the Pentagon from sharing intelligence -- one year before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon -- about lead 9-11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. In fact, the policy, often referred to as a "wall," was established well before Clinton took office and was retained by the Bush administration; it is unclear whether the "wall" played any role in the decision to withhold information about Atta.

Criticizing a New York Times article for "hid[ing]" the reason for withholding information about Atta, Limbaugh asserted on August 9 that former Clinton deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick was responsible for creating the "wall" that restricted information sharing between intelligence and law enforcement agencies prior to the September 11 attacks and that the "wall" prevented the Pentagon intelligence operation Able Danger from disclosing to the FBI or CIA the Al Qaeda connections of Atta and three other future hijackers. Limbaugh repeated the claim on August 10: "They [Able Danger] couldn't forward the information to law enforcement because there was a wall which prevented them from doing so, erected by Jamie Gorelick, who ran the Justice Department while [then-Attorney General] Janet Reno was the face of that department."

But the joint House and Senate intelligence committees' report of pre-September 11 intelligence failures did not find that the "wall" originated in the Clinton administration; the report states: "The 'wall' is not a single barrier, but a series of restrictions between and within agencies constructed over 60 years as a result of legal, policy, institutional and personal factors." Similarly, a ruling by the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review -- when it met for the first time in 2002 -- traces the origin of the "wall" to "some point during the 1980s."

Nor did enforcement of the "wall" end with the Clinton administration. In his April 12, 2004, testimony before the 9-11 Commission, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft conceded that his own deputy attorney general, Larry Thompson, reauthorized the "wall" in August 2001.

It is unclear whether the "wall" prevented intelligence sharing about Atta during the Able Danger operation; the 9-11 Commission plans to soon investigate why information identifying Atta was withheld from law enforcement agencies.

Some evidence suggests that the "wall" itself was not responsible for the failure to share information on Atta but, rather, that it was an example of what former FBI International Terrorism Operations Section chief Michael Rolince has called "perceived walls where none actually existed." The Associated Press reported on August 10 that the Pentagon did not provide the FBI with information on Atta "because of concerns about pursuing information on 'U.S. persons,' " even though the "prohibition against sharing intelligence on 'U.S. persons' should not have applied since [Atta and the other future hijackers] were in the country on visas and did not have permanent resident status." Similarly, The New York Times wrote on August 9 that revealing the identity of a visa holder such as Atta would not have been illegal under the law but that, according to Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) and an unnamed intelligence official, the decision not to do so may have reflected "a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing information with a law enforcement agency":

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

From the August 9 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: Let's just get straight to it. I want to take you back in time. Not just to the 9-11 Committee hearings, but shortly after 9-11 itself, when everybody was talking about, "Why didn't we connect the dots? Why didn't we connect the dots?" And I said, "You know why we didn't connect the dots?" Meaning the FBI and the CIA, military intelligence. Why couldn't we share information with each other? There's one reason: the Clinton administration. And most importantly, Jamie Gorelick. Jamie Gorelick, who was number two at the Justice Department. She really ran the place while Janet Reno was the face of the Justice Department. Erected a wall and because the Clinton administration determined that they were gonna fight terrorism not as a war but as a legal matter. And they were gonna use indictments, and they were gonna use grand jury testimony to try to nail these people.

And of course, grand jury testimony is, by law, confidential. And so any information gathered by say, the CIA or the FBI had to be turned over to Justice.And when Justice got it and took it to grand jury, it became confidential, could not be shared with any of the other branches. And that's one of the reasons why we couldn't connect the dots. Because of the strategery that the Clinton administration used to fight terrorism when they cared about it. Well, get this from no less than The New York Times: It's a story that's headlined this way. "Four in 9/11 Plot are Called Tied to Al-Qaeda in 2000". This story is all about how we knew four of the 19 hijackers. And we were tracking it, we knew who they were in 2000, but we couldn't do anything about it because the information that was known couldn't be shared.

[Reading from The New York Times] "More than one year before the September 11th attacks, a small highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of cell of Al-Qaeda operating in the U.S., according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress."

This is about Curt Weldon and his book [Countdown to Terror (Regnery, June 2005)]. And remember how the left tried to cream Weldon and his book? Turns out now that in the summer of 2000, the military team known as Able Danger, summer of 2000. Who was president? Who was president in the summer of 2000? Somebody help me out here. I think it was this guy Clinton was president or something. Because, yeah, because the campaign of 2000, the election of 2000 wasn't until November. And Bush wasn't inaugurated until January. Of course, that election wasn't decided until December. Remember that, Brian [show engineer]?

So the summer of 2000 would be Bill Clinton was president.

[...]

Now, this story does not say what I just said to you. This story does not go on to talk about the wall that Jamie Gorelick erected and that the 9-11 Commission was not interested in hearing about. But it does cite the fact that Atta was known and that military intelligence was not allowed to share the information with the FBI. They don't say why. The why was because of the wall. They tried to hide this under some visa law, but it has nothing to do with that. And has everything to do with the fact that the Clinton administration had laws on the books that these agencies couldn't share information with one another, i.e. connect the dots, because of the need to maintain the privacy and secrecy of grand jury testimony. I kid you not.

And I don't know where [former U.S. security adviser] Richard Clarke was on this. And I don't know where the Jersey Girls are on this now since -- the Jersey Girls out there leading the charge that Bush didn't do enough, and Bush didn't act fast, and Bush didn't connect the dots, and, of course, we all know now -- and we've known it for awhile. It's just, I find it fascinating that The New York Times actually runs with the story, especially considering Curt Weldon is one of the sources. But it's just another "see I told you so."

From the August 10 broadcast of The Rush Limbaugh Show:

LIMBAUGH: They [Able Danger] didn't forward the information to law enforcement is not the correct way to say it. They couldn't forward the information to law enforcement because there was a wall which prevented them from doing so, erected by Jamie Gorelick, who ran the Justice Department while Janet Reno was the face of that department.

?- A.S.

Posted to the web on Thursday August 11, 2005 at 1:08 PM EST

Copyright © 2004-2005 Media Matters for America. All rights reserved

Able Danger Mystery Solved?
Saturday, August 27, 2005



Able Danger Mystery Solved?
Bloggers may have figured it out.
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Monday, Aug. 29, 2005,

Not so fast? Just when I thought the Able Danger claims might be explained by a conflation of one Mohamed El-Amir (a.k.a. Mohamed Atta) with another, come two potentially complicating developments:

1) Ed Epstein emails to say that J.D. Smith, the Able Danger contractor who made news yesterday (see below) did not say he relied on "public" information, but rather "open source" information, meaning information from sources not classified as secret. Epstein claims those sources could include airline passenger manifests and State Department visa applications. He has revised his post to argue more clearly how Able Danger might have culled Atta's name from these "open" sources in 2000. Update-Contra Epstein: A veteran reporter emails

open source info does NOT include airline manifests and credit card info, which is either protected by law from disclosure (like credit info in the US) or proprietary to the companies involved (and thus not usually available to investigators without a subpoena).

In any case, I'm told Smith was specifically asked at the Friday press conference if Able Danger had visa, credit or airplane info and he said they had nothing like that.

2) The New York Post comes up with a reason why the Able Danger contract to Smith's outfit was terminated--fear on the part of "military brass" that an unrelated chart on China-U.S. connections had put too much "focus on U.S. citizens." At first glance, the story seems to oddly shore up the Able Danger claims, by providing a good reason for a) the Pentagon's hostility to the program and b) the frustration of the Able Danger "whistleblowers" who have come forward. It also adds a slight Keystone Kops quality. (The Able Danger chart on China suggested "Condoleezza Rice and other prominent Americans as potential security risks.")

11:40 A.M. link

Friday, August 26, 2005

'Able Danger' Ball Advances: Fox News reports on this morning's press conference with J.D. Smith, the latest Able Danger figure to step forward. Smith, a defense contractor, claims Mohamed Atta's name and picture were on a chart on his wall well before 9/11. ... Bonus Value-Adding Info! Kf also hears: 1) Smith said the data mined by Able Danger was public data, which would seem to rule out the kind of searches (e.g. of "Arab males who applied for a U.S. visa with a newly issued passport") envisioned by Ed Epstein; 2) Smith acknowledged that the picture of Atta he claims to have seen on the chart was very grainy, but he says he recognized Atta by his distinctive cheekbones; 3) Smith maintains that Able Danger obtained the Atta information from a female researcher in California, whom he declined to identify; and 4) Smith didn't have a very good answer when confronted with the "Two Atta" theory first suggested by Tom Maguire--i.e. that the Able Danger people might have confused the 9/11 hijacker Atta with a known Abu Nidal terrorist with a near-identical name. ... That said, I'm told Smith seemed sincere. And if the Able Danger crew wasn't trying to talk to the FBI about Mohamed Atta, what were they trying to talk about? Were they just bureaucrats scheduling meetings to justify their existence? ... Take it away, Minuteman.

Update--the two El-Amirs: Minuteman delivers! J.D. Smith also said that Able Danger had gotten Atta's name by linking him to Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheikh implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But how could they have linked Atta to Rahman? Easy! It turns out, as blogger A.J. Strata discovered, that there are links--whether accurate or inaccurate [thanks--lawyer]--in the public domain between Rahman and a doctor, Magdy El-Amir--who may be completely innocent! [ditto]--but who has a brother named Mohamed El-Amir who has apparently been linked by Dateline--again, perhaps erroneously--to some intrigue or other. Mohammed El-Amir ... why is that name familiar? Wasn't that the same name used by Mohammed Atta at the beginning 2000? I think it was! In other words, here is a simple explanation for how Able Danger could have fingered an Egyptian with the name of the 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed El-Amir (whom we now know as Mohamed Atta). It was just a different Mohamed El-Amir. ... Why do I feel that through the power of the blogosphere we are asymptotically approaching the truth? ...

Backfill: Umansky flagged a possible El-Amir confusion last week. ...

[If the Able Danger project confused the 9/11 Mohamed El-Amir (Atta) with another Mohamed El-Amir, that might explain why that name would be on a chart. But J.D. Smith emphatically says they had the 9/11 Atta's photo. How to explain that?--ed I've been assuming that if you could account for Able Danger getting Atta's name, the photo might be explained as a case of honest memory confusion. Or maybe they managed to obtain the right photo for the wrong man!] 2:59 P.M. link

New Jaguar : It's astonishingly uninspired, as feared. If Jaguar were a separate stock, you could short it. ... 1:19 P.M.

kf senses a subtle media shift against the visionary Jon Klein. This could disrupt Klein's obvious plan to secure himself a lucrative Pew fellowship when he's forced to leave CNN.