It’s Time To Investigate Able Danger and the 9/11 Commission
Crucial questions have gone unanswered too long.
Andrew C. McCarthy
'Tis the season when annual performance awards are handed out. If there is one for chutzpah, could there possibly be a more worthy candidate than the 9/11 commission?
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... [B]y any objective measure, the 9/11 commission conducted an incomplete and incompetent investigation of Able Danger. It interviewed about one percent of the witnesses with relevant information. And it ignored what little testimony it did gather — from U.S. military intelligence officials with long records of distinguished service to this country.
The version of events proffered by these witnesses differed starkly from the commission's, and would have called into question not only much of the commission's investigation but also the Clinton administration legacy of subordinating national security to concerns about hypothetical privacy violations — a topic that should have been squarely in the commission's cross-hairs, but which it avoided like the Plague. So the commission unconscionably omitted Able Danger entirely. Not a single mention — not even once in its hundreds upon hundreds of footnotes.
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Here, from a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, is [former FBI Director Louis] Freeh's take on what Hamilton has the temerity to portray as the commission's exhaustive inquiry:
[T]his is also a good time for the country to make some assessments of the 9/11 Commission itself. Recent revelations from the military intelligence operation code-named "Able Danger" have cast light on a missed opportunity that could have potentially prevented 9/11. Specifically, Able Danger concluded in February 2000 that military experts had identified Mohamed Atta by name (and maybe photograph) as an al Qaeda agent operating in the U.S. Subsequently, military officers assigned to Able Danger were prevented from sharing this critical information with FBI agents, even though appointments had been made to do so. Why?
There are other questions that need answers. Was Able Danger intelligence provided to the 9/11 Commission prior to the finalization of its report, and, if so, why was it not explored? In sum, what did the 9/11 commissioners and their staff know about Able Danger and when did they know it?
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The entire American intelligence community has been restructured in accordance with the 9/11 Commission's conclusion that, as previously configured, it was incapable of ferreting out a suicide-hijacking plot two years in the making. It now appears that the community may have been quite capable of sniffing out the plot (or, at the very least, identifying the plotters) but was unable to get the information into the right hands because of a government ethos predominant throughout the 1990s — an ethos that elevated the supposed civil rights of aliens, even alien terrorists, over the national-security needs of the American people.
If it was worth having a 9/11 commission at all, is it not worth getting to the bottom of Able Danger?
[Read the whole column here.]
