The recent revelations and accusations surrounding Able Danger seem to be a semi-coordinated campaign to:

1) Get Representative Curt Weldon’s name in the papers.
2) Besmirch the Clinton administration’s lawyerly approach to intelligence sharing, and blame them for 9/11.
3) Build up a case for data mining as a vital instrument in the intelligence gathering toolbox.
4) Perhaps, rehabilitate the Atta in Prague angle, to make sense of a senseless war in Iraq.

But, the likely effect of Weldon’s jihad will be much different. The effect is already beginning. The commissioners want to know why they were not told this information by their investigating team. The investigating team wants to know why the Pentagon didn’t furnish more information. Congress wants to know why their Joint Inquiry was told nothing at all.

Weldon’s jihad is going to open up a can of worms and undermine the credibility of both official investigations into 9/11. But the 9/11 Commission report has suffered a credibility gap since its inception

Update [2005-8-20 16:32:7 by BooMan]: Weldon seems to understand this, which makes his actions all the more confounding:

The unit had provided the information to Pentagon officials as early as 1999, but it was not passed on to the FBI, Weldon said. Information about Able Danger and its reports were also not included in the 9/11 Commission’s report last year, he said, even though it was available to the commission.

Why it was not pursued, Weldon predicted, would be the subject of a “major scandal about to erupt over the 9/11 Commission,” a scandal “as big as Watergate.”
Ardmore Main Line Life

—————————————


The Bush administration has done a lot of things that made the reality-based community shake their collective heads. But, probably nothing was as brass-balled outrageous as their attempt to make Henry Kissinger the head of the 9/11 Commission.

:::flip:::

Kissinger is probably the only former American cabinet member who whose overseas travel has been monitored by Interpol because he was wanted as a material witness in an investigation into Operation Condor. What was Operation Condor?

Operation Condor (Spanish:Operación Cóndor) was a campaign of assassination and intelligence-gathering, dubbed counter-terrorism, conducted jointly by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay in the mid-1970s.

The right-wing military governments of these countries, led by dictators such as Videla, Pinochet and Stroessner agreed to cooperate in sending teams into other countries, including France, Portugal and the United States to locate, observe and assassinate political opponents. They also exchanged torture techniques, like near drowning and playing the sound recordings of victims who were being tortured to their family. Many people disappeared and were killed without trial. Their targets were leftist guerrillas but many are thought to be political opponents, family and other innocent people.

Kissinger also helped bring Nixon to power by helping to sabotage the 1968 Paris Peace Talks.

Nixon was so impressed with Henry’s work that he made Kissinger his National Security Advisor. His reason?

“One factor that had most convinced me of Kissinger’s credibility,” wrote Nixon later in his own delicious prose, “was the length to which he went to protect his secrecy.”

So, this is hardly the man to head up an investigation of 9/11. At least, he is not the man if your goal is to lend credibility to the resulting report.

Let’s not forget how unenthusiastic the Bush administration was about investigating 9/11.

Remember this CNN report from January 29, 2002?

President Bush personally asked Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle Tuesday to limit the congressional investigation into the events of September 11, congressional and White House sources told CNN.

The request was made at a private meeting with congressional leaders Tuesday morning. Sources said Bush initiated the conversation.

He asked that only the House and Senate intelligence committees look into the potential breakdowns among federal agencies that could have allowed the terrorist attacks to occur, rather than a broader inquiry that some lawmakers have proposed, the sources said.

Tuesday’s discussion followed a rare call to Daschle from Vice President Dick Cheney last Friday to make the same request.

“The vice president expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism,” Daschle told reporters.

But, Daschle said, he has not agreed to limit the investigation.

“I acknowledged that concern, and it is for that reason that the Intelligence Committee is going to begin this effort, trying to limit the scope and the overall review of what happened,” said Daschle, D-South Dakota.

“But clearly, I think the American people are entitled to know what happened and why,” he said.

Cheney met last week in the Capitol with the chairmen of the House and Senate intelligence committees and, according to a spokesman for Senate Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham, D-Florida, “agreed to cooperate with their effort.”

The heads of both intelligence committees have been meeting to map out a way to hold a bipartisan House-Senate investigation and hearings.

They were discussing how the inquiry would proceed, including what would be made public, what would remain classified, and how broad the probe would be.

Graham’s spokesman said the committees will review intelligence matters only.

One wonders what would have happened if the Republicans had controlled the Senate back in 2002.

It was only the pressure of 9/11 widows that caused the Bush administration to relent on their stonewalling and set up the 9/11 Commission. The widows forced Kissinger out. But they didn’t succeed in forcing Philip Zelikow out as the chief investigator. Historians will see that failure as crippling to the credibility of the report.

Zelikow is a professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he also directs the Miller Center of Public Affairs. His qualifications to run the 9/11 commission are more than academic, however. During the first Bush administration he served on the National Security Council staff, and at the beginning of the second Bush administration he was appointed to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB). He also happens to be a longtime confidant, collaborator and friend of Rice, with whom he authored a book on German reunification in 1995 — and whom he advised on the restructuring of the National Security Council during the Bush transition in late 2000.
Salon

Mindy Kleinberg, one of the New Jersey widows, had this to say about Zelikow:

“His conflict is so large that he can’t overcome it,” she said. “We asked everybody at the beginning to put their conflicts on the table. Philip Zelikow’s conflicts were not all put out there at the beginning.” She and her friends were particularly disturbed to learn that the Virginia professor had played a key role in advising Rice during the transition, when they believe “things went wrong” in counterterror policy.

“If he was there during the transition, making recommendations about restructuring the NSC, on prioritizing issues, on handling terrorism, on Iraq — then how can he oversee the report on those issues?” Kleinberg asked.

Kissinger’s initial appointment, the Able Danger controversy, and Zelikow’s conflicts of interest, are only pieces of a greater problem with the 9/11 report. For those of us that have followed other official investigations, the appointment of Lee Hamilton to co-head the commission was unfortunate.

Here is some painful history on the Iran-Contra affair, and the disastrous survival of the Bush family as a viable political dynasty.

The scandal only unraveled because of outside events. On Oct. 5, 1986, one of North’s supply planes was shot down over Nicaragua.

The sole surviving crewman, Eugene Hasenfus, pointed the finger at George Bush’s vice presidential office and the CIA. Bush and other administration officials denied Hasenfus’s statement.

The second Iran-contra shoe dropped in early November 1986 with a story in a Beirut newspaper about the Iran arms sales. When the secret about North’s diverting Iranian arms profits to the contras was disclosed a few weeks later, the Iran-contra scandal was born.

But the Reagan-Bush administration was not ready to tell all. Immediately, the administration and Republicans on Capitol Hill moved to counter and to contain the scandal. For his part, Bush insisted that he was “not in the loop” on the Iran-contra business.

Cheney to the Rescue

One of the key congressional Republicans fighting this rear-guard action was Rep. Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who became the ranking House Republican on the Iran-contra investigation. Cheney already enjoyed a favorable reputation in Washington as a steady conservative hand.

Cheney smartly exploited his relationship with Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., who was chairman of the Iran-contra panel. Hamilton cared deeply about his reputation for bipartisanship and the Republicans quickly exploited this fact.

A senior committee source said one of Cheney’s top priorities was to block Democrats from deposing Vice President Bush about his Iran-contra knowledge. Cheney “kept trying to intimidate Hamilton,” the source said. “He kept saying if we go down that road, we won’t have bipartisanship.”

So, Hamilton gave Bush a pass. The limited investigation also gave little attention to other sensitive areas, such as contra-drug trafficking and the public diplomacy operation. They were pared down or tossed out altogether.

Despite surrendering to Cheney’s demands time and again, Hamilton failed, in the end, to get a single House Republican to sign the final report.

Only three moderate Republicans on the Senate side – Warren Rudman, William Cohen and Paul Trible – agreed to sign the report, after extracting more concessions. Cheney and the other Republicans submitted a minority report that denied that any significant wrongdoing had occurred.

The watered-down Iran-contra majority report essentially let Vice President Bush off the hook. Bush’s political career was saved.

With the Iran-contra scandal contained, Bush mounted a 1988 presidential campaign that set the modern standard for negativity, race-baiting and a win-at-all-cost ethic. In 1989, Cheney became Bush’s defense secretary.link

Hamilton also headed the investigation into the October Surprise. He famously cleared George H.W. Bush of guilt before the investigation even began. And the result of the investigation was deeply dissatisfying.

Lee Hamilton saved Bush pere’s political career and reputation twice, so it is no wonder that the son chose Lee for the 9/11 Commission. But those of us that have been trying to expose the Bush junta as a criminal element for 20 years are not impressed.

The 9/11 Commission report was a whitewash, and a poor one. It left dozens of questions unanswered. Most of these questions could be answered without jeopardizing our national security or our foreign relations. The failure to answer them has led a sizeable portion of humanity to assume the worst.

Congress reopened the JFK assassination investigation in the seventies. We need to reopen the 9/11 investigation, and Weldon’s allegations are only one more reason why.