I did not have sex with Bin-Laden!
“Does Able Danger Matter?” by Barbara J. Stock — One of the readers equated this moribund Able Danger situation with Teapot Dome. I had to laugh. There is a huge difference between corruption and incompetence insofar as scandals are concerned. I see this going nowhere, but it does provide yet another “blame everything on Clinton” argument. The problem I have is that the Reoublicans were more concerned about Whitewater and Monica than Bin-Laden and the USS Cole during the Clinton administration themselves. And that administration was as hardly in control of things as the Republicans are now.
This piece is interesting but the premise is dubious. For instance it is claimed that Jamie Gorlick “was put there [on the commission] to protect her from being forced to testify before the committee herself and to protect the legacy of the Clinton administration.” Legacy? What legacy? Are you kidding me? This is where they lose me — crackpot assertions.
In light of the Able Danger debacle, everyone is asking: Had Mohamed Atta been questioned, is it possible that information found with or gained from him could have prevented 9/11?
The pompous 9/11 Commission chastised one and all for “missing obvious clues” leading up the Islamic attack. Able Danger wasn’t just a clue, it was a big red banner that the 9/11 Commission did its best to ignore. Many people cried foul when Jamie Gorlick was placed on the 9/11 Commission. It was thought that she was put there to protect her from being forced to testify before the committee herself and to protect the legacy of the Clinton administration.
My point in comparing this “Able Danger” scandal with Tea Pot Dome was that in 9/11 in 3,000 people were killed. I could careless about Clinton’s possible involment in the story. He was not directly responsible for stopping the members of “Able Danger” from giving the info that they had uncovered to the FBI. I think the bigger scandal that people such as yourself seem to miss is that the Washington culture seems to be perfectly fine with a whitewash of the events before 9/11 and the possible breaking of the terrorists cells. I think that the 9/11 commission is content with the story that 9/11 was the result of an intelligence failure when today it looks like it was a failure of lawyers in the DOD and a number of beaurcrats. Clinton’s only connection is that he happened to be President and named various people who might in the future be found accountable in some way for their actions or failure to act.
I think that it is at the outmost importants to get to the truth of what went on and caused the failure to stop 9/11 so we can have a better chance to stop future attacks against this country. It does no good to just throw Clinton’s name in to try to defer crticism of the 9/11 commission and the resposiblity they were given by Congress and the President.
Heard a rumor that the documents that Sandy Berger stuffed down his pants were concerning Able Danger. This Able Danger thing needs either a Special Prosecutor or Congressional hearings to get to the bottom of the entire situation.
Could have picked a better story than the one you posted. This story was only in almost all the major papers today.
Well Gorlick is responsible for the infamous ‘wall’ policy, which wasn’t even brought up by the commission (amazin’).
However, conservative commentators a) don’t think it really applies in this case anyway and b) that this brewing scandle is as much a black eye for Bush as it is for Clinton. After all, after Bush was elected, nobody ran up to him with this information.
Shouldn’t get caught on President Clinton in regards to this. The gotcha game of politics really needs to end or else we won’t be able to protect ourselves properly. This Able Danger thing needs to play out and we need to get to the bottom of the story and fix whatever problems might still exist. I also wanted to add that this story also proves that an open source data mining program works and that we should look to more things like this instead of broad Patriot Act style laws.
You really cannot call this story dead when you have Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer risking his career coming forward to support Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA). The Washington Post also has a internal source in the Pentagon that is not connected with Weldon and this source corroborates the “Able Danger” accounts currently in the media. In the interviews Lt. Col. Shaffer has done I have not heard that he attacked Pres. Clinton. The 9/11 Commission changing their story every couple of hours is troubling considering that they are supposed to be the definitive answer on the attacks.
Um, people, read Richard Clarke or Paul O’Neill’s book before anyone tries, once again, to try to blame everything on Clinton. As a TRUE conservative Republican, the people running the government are NOT conservatives, they are stupid fundamentalists.
The most reprehensible issue with this story is that the 9/11 Commission was supposed to answer the questions that existed after the attacks. It seems that the Commission had a template going into the hearings and investigation and they did not want to deviate from that template. So, they sanitized or left out anything that ran counter to the story they wanted to tell. Much like the media today I think that it came down to laziness of the Commissioners
This story might not be as bad as the Tea Pot Dome Scandal but it does seem that it is worse than Watergate. Remember that Watergate was a break in to try to find a ring of prostitutes that the Democrats used at most of there functions and then bug those prostitutes to try to set up Democrat politicians and use that bugged info against the Democrats in elections in the future.
Perhaps Goerlick was on the Commission to pull a classic CYA and not to try to defend the Clinton legacy.
It was amazing that the Commission didn’t cover the Gorelick wall, but I have to disagree with the conservative pundits who don’t think that it applies in this case. From what Col. Shaffer has said it is pretty obvious that the only reason that Col. Shaffer couldn’t share the info that Able Danger collected with the FBI was because of the Gorelick wall. Before Gorelick’s wall there did exist certain smaller walls between domestic and foreign services following the laws that arose from the Church Commission (Congressional) in the early 1970s. These walls were not used in as many places as Gorelick’s wall or as widespread.
If you want a better story than the one posted, Jacob Goodwin at Government Security News wrote a nonpartisan piece titled “Did DoD lawyers blow the chance to nab Atta?”
The bottom line in the whole mess is that neither Clinton nor Bush took the threat of Al Qaeda seriously. If you remember terrorism didn’t even come up during the 2000 election. At the crux of the situation is that lawyers jobbed all of us at every turn. You have DoD lawyers blocking the sharing of intelligence that would have broken 2 of the 3 Al Qaeda cells in the country. You also have RDDBs lawyers suing the FAA about a year before to change rules in the place that could have stopped the hijackers from even getting on to the planes. The FAA rules stated that people that met certain criteria would be automatically detained. Those criteria were if the person were a particular ethnic background, showed up last minute with no luggage and purchased first class tickets for cash. When Atta and the others went through Bangor, Maine airport they set off everyone of the FAA alarms but because of this one lawyer changing the rules they were are allowed onto the planes and to carry out the attacks.
Don’t forget Infidel that Lt. Col. Shaffer is taking a far greater risk to himself, his family and his career than Mark Felt (Deep Throat) did. Felt kept his identity unknown when he was a informer for WoodBern.
The REALLY interesting part is that the US Army was spying on both citizens and foreign nationals in CONUS.
We can squabble all we want about which civilian government official was incompetent, but when did the military get the power to do intelligence operations on US soil? Last I checked, only the FBI was allowed to do that prior to 9/11/2001.
Makes you go hmmm…..
Barbara Stock, don’t you realize that you have got to get the woman off of Clinton’s desk so that he can read the memos that have to do with the possibly gettting thousands killed. You can’t work on the serious disorders(Clinton’s sociophathy or organic brain damage) without getting sexual addiction out of the way. What I am writing will possibly be unacceptable to you because the sociopath has already brought you under his con.
I was living quite close to Afghanistan in 2001 and our local papers reported one something that was very interesting but I’ve never seen in the west.
(Supposedly), there were members of the Taliban who knew of bin Laden’s plans and had the foresight to predict thatit would be a total disaster for their country and personal power.
So, the Taliban sent an envoy to Washington to warn them of the plans. (I think this was in the spring of that year.) The Whitehouse refused to meet with the envoy and he was turned away. The rest is history.
Anybody else hear of this story?
The Able Danger story may be a mixup over 2 different terrorists named Mohammed Atta. The threat to Clinton’s legacy would be Gorelick’s wall memo as pointed out by Ashcroft to the Commission, and the overall law enforcement approach to terrorism. The Sandy Berger theft may very well have been notes regarding TWA 800 and the possibility of using planes as weapons.