Able Danger’s hidden hand

The report of the September 11 Commission, once a best seller and hailed by the news media as the definitive word on the subject, must now be moved to the fiction shelves.

The commission concluded, you’ll recall, that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon couldn’t have been prevented, and that if there was negligence, it was as much the fault of the Bush administration (for moving slowly on the recommendations of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke) than of the Clinton administration.

Able Danger has changed all of that.

Able Danger was a military intelligence unit set up by Special Operations Command in 1999. A year before the September 11 attacks, Able Danger identified hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the other members of his cell. But Clinton administration officials stopped them — three times — from sharing this information with the FBI.

The problem was the order Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick made forbidding intelligence operatives from sharing information with criminal investigators.

“They were stopped because the lawyers at that time in 2000 told them Mohamed Atta had a green card (he didn’t) and they could not go after someone with a green card,” said Rep. Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania Republican, who brought the existence of Able Danger to light.

The military spooks knew only that Atta and his confederates had links to al Qaeda. They hadn’t unearthed their mission. But if the FBI had kept tabs on them (a big if, given the nature of the FBI at the time), September 11 almost certainly could have been prevented.

What may be a bigger scandal is that the staff of the September 11 Commission knew of Able Danger and what it had found, but made no mention of it in its report. This is as if the commission that investigated the attack on Pearl Harbor had written its final report without mentioning the Japanese.

Mr. Weldon unveiled Able Danger in a speech on the House floor June 27, but his remarks didn’t attract attention until the New York Times reported on them Tuesday.

When the story broke, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, Indiana Democrat, co-chairman of the September 11 Commission, at first denied the commission had ever been informed of what Able Danger had found, and took a swipe at Mr. Weldon’s credibility:

“The September 11 Commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of the surveillance of Mohamed Atta or his cell,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Had we learned of it, obviously it would have been a major focus of our investigation.”

Mr. Hamilton changed his tune after the New York Times reported Thursday, and the Associated Press confirmed, that commission staff had been briefed on Able Danger in October of 2003 and again in July of 2004.

It was in October of 2003 that Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger stole classified documents from the National Archives and destroyed some. Mr. Berger allegedly was studying documents in the archives to help prepare Clinton officials to testify before the September 11 Commission. Was he removing references to Able Danger? Someone should ask him before he is sentenced next month.

After having first denied that staff had been briefed on Able Danger, commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said no reference was made to it in the final report because “it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta’s whereabouts before the attacks,” the AP reported.

The only dispute over Atta’s whereabouts is whether he was in Prague on April 9, 2001, to meet with Samir al Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer.

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