Sunday, December 30, 2007

Information Dominance, Part 9

We continue from Part 8 reviewing The Writing on "The Wall" (by Thomas Ryan, FrontPageMagazine.com, August 22, 2005); if you haven't already read Part 8, you may want to.

Possible Motives

Able Danger's intelligence on Atta was dismissed not only in 2000, but was ignored a second time in 2003 by the 9/11 Commission. In their article "9/11 Coverup Commission," Ben Johnson and Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu made the following observation:

Recent revelations about covert 'Able Danger' operations are forcing certain people to deal with subjects that they had thought swept under the rug. Despite apparent attempts to conceal the fact, the 9/11 Commission has had to admit it was informed that government agents knew of Mohammed Atta's affiliation with al-Qaeda two years before 9/11, that Clinton-era policies prevented intelligence officials from sharing that information with the FBI, that the amended time frame would allow Mohammed Atta to have made contacts with Iraqi intelligence, and – most damningly – that it kept all this out of its final report.


So, it was Clinton's fault. The reason "The Wall" was reinforced, beyond any legal requirement, was to keep counterintelligence from passing to criminal investigators information it had on Clinton's sale of missile technology to Communist China for contributions to Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign (see Part 8).

That "Wall" also kept the Army Information Dominance Center from passing what it had learned about Al Qaeda to the FBI, thus costing us an excellent opportunity to catch the terrorists and prevent the attack.

But, when this information was presented to the 9/11 Commission, the information was buried.

Here someone was asking why.

What could explain such a seemingly egregious lapse in judgment? To answer this, we must consider the role of President Clinton's Deputy Attorney General, Jamie Gorelick, in the 9/11 Commission. Gorelick, who (as noted earlier) authorized the creation of the communication wall between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, was also a member of the 9/11 Commission. Thus a key individual who should have been testifying before the Commision was, instead, one of its sitting members. The seemingly inescapable conclusion is that Gorelick prevented the 9/11 Commission from including the Able Danger information so as to protect herself and the Clinton legacy from the condemnation they deserve.


Clintonite obstruction of justice on the 9/11 Commission to cover up past criminal conduct, which itself included obstruction of justice and a cover-up, as well as influence-peddling, bribery and treason...?

A second possibility is that any reference to the Able Danger intelligence was omitted (from the 9/11 Commission report) because it seemed to suggest that Iraq was somehow involved in planning or funding the 9/11 attacks. Such a revelation would constitute a deathblow to the argument that the Iraq War was unjustified because Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorist threats against the United States. Admitting that the Able Danger intelligence, like the Czech intelligence, placed Atta at a meeting with an Iraqi agent in Prague on April 9, 2001 would strongly suggest that al-Qaeda and Iraq had worked in unison on the attacks. This conclusion would not sit well with the political enemies of George W. Bush. Of this possibility, Ben Johnson and Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu write in FrontPage:

If there was, in fact, covert direction from the top of the Commission to key members of its staff to cloak any link between Saddam and the September 11 attacks, to obfuscate evidence tying the Iraqi regime to al-Qaeda and Mohammed Atta, and to paint the most positive possible picture of the Clintons as implacable terror-warriors, then "Able Danger" had to be ignored and covered up...

By acknowledging the Iraq/al-Qaeda ties, not only to terrorism in general but to the September 11 attack, the war becomes completely justifiable as exactly what the Bush administration claimed it was: a defensive, if preemptive, war to protect the United States from a regime with cordial ties to anti-American terrorists.


Or an effort to put partisan politics ahead of foreign policy, so Bush could be bashed?

Congress had already given King George all the authority he needed for his war in Iraq; besides which, most of the Democrats that are criticizing Bush for the Iraq war now voted for it then.

Would the Clintonites put partisan politics ahead of the best interests of the United States? Oh, yes, and they did so many times. Was that the problem here, though?

Dismantling the Wall: The USA Patriot Act

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. House and Senate set about to create legislation that would provide new tools in combating the terrorist threat facing our country. On October 26, 2001, the USA Patriot Act was passed, and with it new regulations regarding intelligence gathering were enacted, as well as new parameters that would pave the way for criminal investigators and intelligence agencies to cooperate on international terrorism cases. In March of 2002, the Justice Department asked the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which was responsible for the formation of the wall in 1978, to consent to new procedures that would, in effect, dismantle it. The Justice Department affirmed that the USA Patriot Act mandated such an action, and today, because of it, collaboration on vital anti-terrorism initiatives is occurring between different agencies.


So, Clintonites caused the problem, and the Bush Administration solved it, right?

Sibel Edmonds, on the other hand, has been telling us that people in Washington are abusing the system to cover up their own criminal activity -- and this had been going on for years as of 2002, when she was fired from the FBI as a contract translator, and we know this continues today with the ongoing gag order on her by the Bush Administration.

In his April 2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Attorney General John Ashcroft said that by the end of the Clinton Administration, "the Justice Department was so addicted to the wall, it actually opposed legislation to lower the wall. Finally, the USA Patriot Act tore down this wall between our intelligence and law enforcement personnel in 2001. And when the Patriot Act was challenged, the FISA Court of Review upheld the law, ruling that the 1995 guidelines were required by neither the Constitution nor the law."

The way in which the Patriot Act succeeded in dismantling the wall was a simple change in the language of the law. Prior to the Patriot Act, FISA warrants were issued only when it could be demonstrated that the "primary purpose" of a particular surveillance was the collection of foreign intelligence information. The Patriot Act changed the language of the warrant to read as "significant purpose." This simple modification purged the divider that existed between threats classified as foreign in nature and those that were classified as domestic crimes.

Jamie Gorelick, who played such a key role in the formation and reinforcement of that wall, has criticized the Patriot Act. At an October 2004 symposium titled, "Pursuing Justice and the War on Terrorism," Gorelick remarked that "the President had yet to prove the effectiveness of the Patriot Act and other controversial national security legislation," and that the Bush Administration "has also failed to show that there exist proper checks and balances to curb its expanded powers."

Although critics of the Patriot Act regularly portray it as a threat to civil liberties and decry that no proper checks and balances are in place to restrain it, its merits in the post-9/11 world are unquestionable. With regard to abuses of civil liberties, the Justice Department's Inspector General, who monitors the ACT in an effort to prevent such abuses, has reported that none have yet occurred. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein agrees, stating, "I have never had a single abuse of the Patriot Act reported to me. My staff...asked [the ACLU] for instances of actual abuses. They...said they had none." Prior to 9/11, and because of the efforts of the Clinton Administration, the nation's intelligence and law-enforcement agencies were barred from sharing information with one another. The Patriot Act removed that barrier, and because of it, terrorist cells in Portland, Oregon; Lackawanna, New York; and Virginia were uncovered and eliminated.

Looking Ahead

The 9/11 Commission's decision to exclude any mention of Able Danger from its report merits an aggressive and immediate inquiry. As things now appear, corrupt politics enabled the 9/11 hijackers to carry out their horrifying mission. Compounding the sin, the very Commission entrusted with the task of shedding light on what led to 9/11 appears to be engaged in a cover-up that is a slap in the face to the grieving loved ones of 9/11's victims.

[End of article -- YD]


So, it was a bureaucratic rule, excessively strengthened by the Clinton Administration to cover up Slick Willie's own treasonous conduct -- selling missile technology to Beijing in exchange for money for Clinton and the Democrats in 1996 -- and the Bush Administration was the hero.

And any one of us from the conservative side of the house will believe that -- water is wet, fire is hot, and Clinton is a treasonous criminal; we know these things.

Except for one thing: why did the Bush Administration, days after this article was published, gag all military officers who were familiar with Able Danger and prevent them from testifying before Congress the following month?

What is there to hide, if it was a problem from the previous Administration that had been corrected?

Remember the words from the hearing: "Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer ... is under Rumsfeld's gag order".

Okay, so Bush didn't want to drag his predecessor through the mud; Bush is honest, Clinton is not, but Bush is taking the high road, and not exposing Clinton's treason. An accomplice after the fact is what that makes somebody.

But, why?

Recall that Able Danger, looking at Al Qaeda via open-source material, connected Condoleeza Rice to Chinese proliferation, too:

Representative Weldon. There were a combination of reasons. They had done a profile of Chinese proliferation in 1999 that John Hamre had asked for. I was aware of that presentation, and because it was massive data mined that had not yet been vetted, a couple of very sensitive names surfaced because they had been affiliated with Stanford University, where many of the students that were doing this very, very specific research, very sensitive to our country's security, were located, and I think partly because of that, there was a wave of controversy.

[snip]

Senator Biden. Is there anything to the sort of, when you get into this, the sort of buzz that it was shut down because Able Danger exceeded its authority and was dealing with targeting Americans that the Defense Department and others were concerned would cause a real brouhaha? There were even some press accounts that the now-Secretary of State came up on a list as being a suspect somehow, or something ridiculous. What part did that play in it?

Representative Weldon. It was a significant part. In fact--


The "now-Secretary of State" would be Condoleeza Rice, formerly of Stanford University. She was there from -- what was it? -- 1981 to December 17, 2000, when she stepped down from her position at Stanford to serve in the Bush-43 Administration. She served as Provost, chief budget and academic officer, and full professor.


(See also Part 7.)

Then, was it not the Bush Administration that snubbed the Congressional hearing on the A. Q. Khan nuclear proliferation network? Was it not Bush, and his "now-Secretary of State" that failed to pressure Pakistan into making Khan available to answer some questions for international investigators of nuclear proliferation?

Recall how close Pakistan is to China, and how Pakistan is sharing its nuclear weapons with Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is Bush's buddy, and Rice was connected to proliferation to China.

It is also interesting to recall how then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice had not imagined "that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile", when we know this idea had been circulating in the intelligence community for years, and that the President's Secret Service detail was supposedly warned about this very possibility in late August, 2001.

The highest levels of the Bush Administration know and have known for some time a great deal more than what they let on, and have been consistently obstructing any line of inquiry that might make a connection.

Are they covering up their own treasonous, criminal conduct?

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