Able Danger: Motivations

Yesterday, I had email John Podhoretz asking him what could possibly have motivated the Commission to avoid mention of the White memos (Mary Jo White of the US District Attorney's Office in New York had sent memos to Justice warning of problems related to the Gorelick wall) and why Gorelick was never asked to testify.

Mr. Podhoretz was more than kind enough to actually respond to my email. His response was:

They protected Gorelick, in my view, because they decided that the administration was the enemy and they needed to have a united front
against it -- to get documents and the like. That's all I have so far.

That got me thinking.

Bureaucratic politics.

The 9/11 Commission was a newly created bureaucracy, made up of both Democrats and Republicans, but they were working in a bureaucracy that needed to exert its power against both Congress and the Bush Administration in order to achieve some modicum of its goals. Therefore, it would minimize the internal conflicts in order to present a united front against the Administration and Congress in order to obtain documents and freedom to act.

Now, we have yet more revelations from Lee Hamilton, one of the CoChairs of the Commission. Captain Ed explains:

Now we hear Hamilton say the exact opposite. The Commission heard about Atta -- they just ignored it, claiming now that the evidence shown at the briefing did not match up with their timeline for Atta's first entry to the US. That would have been an interesting claim had Hamilton made it when first asked. Now, with his categorical denial still ringing in our ears, it sounds more like another excuse to wriggle out of a debacle they themselves made.

The only development this gives us is an admission that the Commissioners themselves had awareness of Able Danger's assessment of Atta as a terrorist a year before the 9/11 attacks -- and they didn't bother to mention it at all in their report, not even to refute it as contrary information that they could refute. For a group which wound up berating two administrations for only listening to that evidence and intelligence which fit their policies, it at least smacks of the pot calling the kettle black. At worst, it smells much worse than that.

That's right people. The Commission had heard the Able Danger information and Atta's name was produced as part of the Able Danger briefing, but the Commission never included that information anywhere in its reports.

That, to say the least, is curious.
Meanwhile Rusty of The Jawa Report counsels that people should realize that all government reports are flawed, and the omission of Able Danger should not diminish the report in its entirety.

The big story is who in the Clinton Administration decided to follow policy rather than doing the right thing and passing Atta's name from the DOD to the FBI? That is the story about how a bureaucrat could have inadvertently prevented 9/11, but chose instead to follow procedure.

Yes, the portion relating to the intelligence failures may need to be reconsidered, but the section dealing with the day of the attacks, the timeline of US actions on that day are still valid. Rusty notes that we need to know who within the Administration pushed the wall policy to this extreme.

UPDATE:
Added line breaks above, and now have an additional link to provide. Airforceguy made a guest posting at Discarded Lies to talk about the wall of separation. Pretty informative stuff and good for background. Go check it out.

Technorati: Able Danger, weldon, and 9/11