Right Wing Nut House

A few days ago, I wrote that I believed we were at a critical point of the War in Iraq. I discussed several disturbing trends that pointed to a worsening situation on the battlefield as well as a steady erosion of the President’s support here at home. I thought that part of the problem was that the President seems disengaged from the war at this point, allowing surrogates to make his case for staying the course in Iraq for him. I pointed out that only the President can really grab the attention of the American people and hold it long enough to explain what the benefits are if we succeed and the catastrophic consequences of failure.

In short, it appears to me that things have been allowed to slide, to limp along with us pinning our hopes on the idea that an improvement in the political situation will alter the combat situation for the better. This is unacceptable. As is the notion being floated in Washington that political progress will be used as a cover to draw down our troops in what could only be termed a riverboat gamble that the country would then not slide into sectarian conflict, or worse.

Over the next week or so, I am going to expand on the themes I brought up a few days ago. It’s time for those of us who support victory in Iraq - call us “the bitter enders” - to step forward and demand that both the vital interests of the United States and the memory of those who have sacrificed so much in our name be honored in fighting this war to the bitter end and winning through to a clear victory.

THE POLITICAL CRISIS

There are two things the President can do almost immediately to improve the domestic political situation as it relates to the war:

1. Re-engage on the issue by getting in the face of the American people and not letting up.

During the campaign last fall, Bush drove his political opponents to distraction by making the war the central news story of the day every day. While the campaign for office is over, the campaign to convince the American people that what we’re doing in Iraq is vital to national security never ends. In this respect, the American people need to be told the hard truth about Iraq instead of the rose colored glasses version we seem to get when ever Rumsfeld or Cheney opens their mouths about the war. Yes, we like to hear about all the schools being built and hospitals re-opened but we also need to hear about the growing movement for Shia autonomy in the south, the failure of our recent offensives in the Sunni triangle to make a dent - a real dent in the potency of the insurgency, the sectarian militias springing up all over the country that’s so reminiscent of Lebanon of the 1970’s, and the increasing deadliness and sophistication of our enemy’s attacks.

I personally would like to see a little more than stiff, diplomatic notes delivered to Syria and Iran for their meddling in both the politics of the country and their support for the murderous jihadists who are responsible for killing most of the civilians in Iraq. It’s past time that some kind of warning - short of an ultimatum but stronger than the demarches that we dole out on a regular basis - be given to both Iran and Syria. And for good measure, call in the new Saudi Ambassador and remind him that while we value Saudi friendship (and a wide open oil spigot) political reform has a nasty habit of being contagious and that a more intense effort to close their border with Iraq to terrorists would be appreciated.

Being brutally honest is only a start. The President must draw a picture of what a failed state brimming with fanatical jihadists smack dab in the center of the middle east would do both to our regional security interests and security for our homeland. These are the consequences of failure. At the moment, the cut and run crowd is in the ascendancy because there’s no counter to their argument that at least once we’re out, Americans will stop dying.

Henry Kissinger sums up the consequences succinctly:

Because of the long reach of the Islamist challenge, the outcome in Iraq will have an even deeper significance than that in Vietnam. If a Taliban-type government or a fundamentalist radical state were to emerge in Baghdad or any part of Iraq, shock waves would ripple through the Islamic world. Radical forces in Islamic countries or Islamic minorities in non-Islamic states would be emboldened in their attacks on existing governments. The safety and internal stability of all societies within reach of militant Islam would be imperiled.

In other words, failure in Iraq would be a massive blow to our efforts in fighting the Global War on Terror.

2. De-fang the political opposition here at home.

The critique of the Administration’s war effort by the political opposition has now reached a point where their only idea is to get out immediately, regardless of the situation on the ground. If they could be made to look like the fools that they are, there’s a chance that the President can regain some lost ground in approval for his handling of the war.

This is a political problem. As such, it requires a political solution. Past war presidents FDR and Lincoln were never above playing politics when the aim was to help the war effort. In fact, one could say that the President’s political position is much more analogous of Lincoln’s dilemma in 1863 than any period in FDR’s presidency. Support for the war in the spring of 1863 was at a low point following the bloody defeat of federal forces at Chancellorsville. The clamor from Copperhead Democrats to end the conflict and “negotiate” with the South was at its height. Instead of trying to appease the Copperheads, he had their leader Clement Vallandingame arrested and appealed to his most radical Republicans in Congress for support. The crisis passed with Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg later that summer.

Lincoln showed that he was willing to do anything to prosecute the war successfully. He ruthlessly stamped out opposition and appealed to bitter end Republicans out of political necessity. Surprisingly, these strong actions translated into political victory in statehouse elections in Ohio and Indiana later in the fall.

Some kind of bold stroke is similarly necessary now. And the President can start by firing his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.

As readers of this site know, I’ve been agitating for getting rid of Rumsfeld for almost as long as this blog has been in existence. If what we heard was true, that Rumsfeld offered to resign following the Abu Ghraib revelations and the President refused to accept it, then this constitutes the biggest blunder of the War to date. Sacking Rumsfeld for Abu Ghraib, not to mention the breakdown in discipline that led to torture at other detention sites that seems to indicate an endemic problem and not a series of isolated instances, would have gone some ways in defusing the torture issue that despite the President’s nonchalant disregard, seethes below the surface of the political debate.

Greg Djerejian sums up the case against Rumsfeld nicely:

Mr. President, this hubris-ridden, incompetent Secretary is increasingly becoming a major liability to you. Think beyond Andoveran codes of loyalty and such. This isn’t the Andover cheerleading squad or Skull & Bones. It’s really, really important–the ramifications of failure in Iraq are immense–and so the effort must be seen through with steely resolve. If a key member of your team doesn’t understand that an Iraq characterized by civil war or dueling militias is a strategic and moral failure, he must be taken off your team. National interest must trump any residual loyalty. Again, how can we be talking about troop pull-outs when, in the capital city itself, the mayor is sacked in some putsch, one cannot drive safely from the airport to downtown, and dozens of Shi’a police recruits are massacred by Sunni insurgents? Again, this is in the capital itself. Not to mention there is a roiling insurgency throughout the strategically critical Sunni heartland (as well as recent, and very alarming, moves towards Shi’a autonomy in the south of which more later)? Was this meant as some tactical signal to the Sunnis that they need to start playing ball or we will leave them to the bloodthirsty revenge-minded Shi’a? Absurd. Again, an Iraq characterized by large scale sectarian killings will be a strategic defeat for America, as well as a massive moral failure. Thinking conservatives cannot allow this to happen. We supported Bush because we thought he was likelier to provide serious war leadership with the rock-gut conviction to see it through even past ‘08 (hopefully handing off to his successor a project moving in positive direction). If his Defense Secretary is not on this page anymore, his Defense Secretary must go.

Is there a chance that the entire dynamic of the political debate will change as a result of this one move? Hardly. However, a Clintonian stroke of putting someone from the opposition party - someone in the defense establishment whose bona fides are so strong that at the very least, some of the acidity of the debate would dissipate, could split the political opposition into the cut and run camp and the war winning camp. The critique of the war would remain the same, but the dynamic would change as the debate would shift to war winning strategies rather than pure political naysaying.

And if that doesn’t happen? Then at least the President would have gotten rid of someone who should have been canned long ago.

There are other things the President can do to alter the political situation in the country so that the tough, slogging work in Iraq will have the political backing of the American people. But these two things will give the President a head start and can be done immediately.

NEXT: The Military Crisis

Forget about Cindy Sheehan…for a moment anyway. Let’s talk about the Joooos.

You know, the Jooooos. They’re the people who ordered George Bush to invade Iraq. The people who are oppressing those poor, benighted women and children in Palestine. And if you can’t find Palestine on a map, don’t fret. It’s located in the very same place that some country called “Israel” currently occupies. Not to worry because that’s just a typo. The map makers of the world are simply waiting for the heroic Palestinian people to throw off the yoke of oppression encircling their waists like the bomb belts worn by their children. It’s simply a matter of time. There are apparently an endless number of Palestinian children willing to blow themselves to smithereens - and take as many of those evil, occupying Joooos with them as possible. And since there are a helluva lot more Palestinian Arabs than there are Joooos, logic dictates that eventually, the devout wish of those peace loving, misunderstood, day-care-starting-hospital-administering-food-bank-donaters from Hamas will be realized; i.e. the Jooos will cease to exist.

Why, to hear some people talk, it’s a matter of justice, a question of hoooomun rights. The freedom fighters who wear the, er uniform of Hamas aren’t really that violent. Did you know that a grenade launcher has a dual use utility? That’s right. It also makes a great martini shaker.

I bring all this up because the mainstream press refuses to bring the embarrassing truth about Cindy Sheehan and the company she keeps to the attention of the droolers, the half-wits, and Ritalin guzzlers who make up her starry eyed and swooning Greek chorus here in the Shadow Media. I’m talking about Kos, the DU, and the Huff ‘n Puffers who think the nauseating anti-semite camped out in front of the President’s ranch in Crawford is either the second coming of Rosa Parks, or the catalyst to morph the current anti-war movement into a resurrected manifestation of some 1960’s flower-child protest party.

This is why the left is so anxious to bring back those heady days of Viet Nam; they miss the guilt-free, consequenceless sex that made being a hippie so rewarding. In the age of AIDS and other epidemic sexually transmitted diseases, who doesn’t long for those sexually charged times when men were men and women were…well, easy. One would hope that the greying group of long haired, sandal wearing, Viagra swilling ancients would have taken a bath at least once since 1968. Otherwise, the new age youngsters who’ve joined them in the trenches may be a little put off by the aroma.

I did a post a few days ago asking that when opposing Mrs. Sheehan, we understand that she is so stricken with grief that it has warped her judgement. But really, there’s no excuse for this:

“9/11 was Pearl Harbor for the neo-conservatives’ agenda” and declared the U.S. government a “morally repugnant system.” Then she raged:

“We have no Constitution. We’re the only country with no checks and balances. We want our country back if we have to impeach George Bush down to the person who picks up the dog sh-t in Washington! Let George Bush send his two little party animals to die in Iraq. It’s OK for Israel to have nuclear weapons but we are waging nuclear war in Iraq, we have contaminated the entire country. It’s not OK for Syria to be in Lebanon. Hypocrites! But Israel can occupy Palestine? Stop the slaughter!”

This is a mild outburst. And for those who say advocating the Palestinian cause is not anti-semitic, I will accuse you also of being a hater of the Jews. You cannot exist on this planet and not know that the “Palestinian cause” is annihilation of not just the Jewish state but all Jews everywhere. By making common cause with the genocidal thugs of Hamas, you reveal yourself to be as bad as any run-of-the-mill goober chewing, goose-stepping neo-Nazi skin head thug in this country. No difference.

Which brings us back to Mrs. Sheehan and her friends. For the media to glorify this paranoid is beyond belief. She thinks America would be a fascist state if not for the internet:

“This is something that can’t be ignored,” Sheehan said during a conference call with bloggers representing sites like democrats.com, codepink4peace.org, and crooksandliars.com. “They can’t ignore us, and they can’t put us down. Thank God for the Internet, or we wouldn’t know anything, and we would already be a fascist state.”

And again, here’s that mythical place called “Palestine:”

“You get America out of Iraq and Israel out of Palestine and you’ll stop the terrorism,” Sheehan declares.

Sheehan, who is asking for a second meeting with President Bush, says defiantly: “My son was killed in 2004. I am not paying my taxes for 2004. You killed my son, George Bush, and I don’t owe you a penny…you give my son back and I’ll pay my taxes. Come after me (for back taxes) and we’ll put this war on trial.”

“And now I’m going to use another ‘I’ word - impeachment - because we cannot have these people pardoned. They need to be tried on war crimes and go to jail.”

And Powerline links to some interesting information on her “host” in Crawford; the Crawford House:

Cindy Sheehan has tied her cart to, the Crawford Peace House [Note: The CPH people have deleted the material mentioned in this post from their page, but I have the original. Here is the Google cache. See the update at the bottom of this post.]. They claim to be a house of peace, and Cindy Sheehan’s agenda would seem to be centered on the War in Iraq, but even a cursory look at the CPH’s web page shows a clearly different agenda. As I write this, the word “Iraq” appears on CPH’s front page a total of ONE time. The number of times a certain eastern Mediterranean country’s name appears? Seventeen times. And the single essay on the page is about…Iraq? No. It is about the world’s true demon, root of all evil, Israel.

The probable reason Crawford House took down their Jew-baiting material was the intervention of one of the slickest PR firms around - Fenton Communications - who recently came on board as a hireling of Ben Cohen’s group Truemajority. Mr. Cohen is the moonbat who helped start Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream and who famously used to give a part of his profit to “world peace” including donations to the National Council of Churches which acted as a front organization (unwittingly) for KGB donations in the United States in the 1980’s.

Fenton has their work cut out for them. The ragamuffins attending to the Queen of Grief need to be “handled” so that their anti-semitic rhetoric doesn’t get out of hand. And the fact is, since Fenton came on board, Mrs. Sheehan’s rhetoric has moderated to the point that she just seems a little kooky rather than a frothing at the mouth Jew hater.

Hindrocket at Powerline wonders if she’s “a poor, benighted woman unhinged and rendered irrational by grief, or is she a calculating, vicious anti-Semite and anti-American like the extremists with whom she associates?”

I’m really not sure. But I know in order for her to avoid self-destruction, she’s going to have to be managed by her handlers like a candidate in a political campaign.

Which, of course, is exactly what her little one act play is all about - politics. Her “crusade” has gone beyond grief, beyond anger and has entered the high-tech digitial world of a media campaign. The danger is that word will get out about this, that the MSM will actually start reporting the spin just like they do for a political campaign. Once that happens, her little charade will lose it’s drama value for the nets and Cindy Sheehan will be left with 15-30 second sound bites to spout her hatred.

The closer one looks at Mrs. Sheehan the less attractive she becomes. This is why the big lefty blogs are steering clear of her. They sympathize with her goals but recognize a charlatan when they see one. But as long as Kos and his minions are on board, she won’t lack for internet coverage.

That is, unless she really starts saying what she thinks about the Joooos and how their evil influence is the cause of all the problems in the world.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin links to a fascinating article in Newsweek that tells the story of some of the President’s visits with families of the fallen. I’ve written about the same thing here where Bush visited with familes before going on TV to make his nationwide address on Iraq.

Lori at Polipundit rightly questions some of the editorializing in the article but I think the slant is overwhelmed by the simply humanity of the President revealed in the article.

Read the whole thing.

Q & O picks up on the anti-semitism angle:

Cindy Sheehan has gone from a grieving mother most could feel sympathy for to the ringmaster at a tawdry circus. Of course the anti-war crowd and the MSM love it, not that anyone’s particularly surprised by that.

The one thing the MSM is sensitive about is anti-semitism - at least the kind of nauseating overt variety practiced by Mrs. Sheehan and her enablers at Crawford House. If they start to play that aspect of her “vigil” up, the tide may turn against the sympathy maven.

If you thought that the statement released by the 9/11 Commission on Friday in which they state that Commission staff members thoroughly examined the Able Danger conclusions and found them wanting was the last word on this matter, think again.

“Crazy” Curt Weldon may be just that. But there appears to be one, lone Able Danger team member (maybe two?) who have declared war on the Commission and are challenging their denials that they ignored crucial evidence that would have changed both the tone and substance of the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report.

Here’s a comment left on the site Intel Dump in response to skepticism regarding Able Danger problems in passing their information on Atta to the FBI. The commenter is posting as “Anon” but his bona fides are granted by the author of the post, Jon Holdaway:

OK smart guys - with your “smell tests” and “Thats just flat out wrong” opinions shown above - I hope you don’t mind, but let me clear up a few things - I was there and I lived through the ABLE DANGER nightmare.

First - yes - The lawyers involved in this (and similar projects) did interpret the 9-11 terrorists as “US persons” - so while you can second guess them all you want - but that was their “legal” call as wrong as it was and is. Unfortunately, the chain of command at SOCOM went along with them (and this, I expect, will be a topic that will become more clear in the near future).

And lawyers of the era also felt that any intelligence officer viewing open internet information for the purpose of intelligence collection automatically required that any “open source” information obtained be treated as if it was “intelligence information”…does this sound like idiocy to you? It did to me - and we fought it - and I was in meetings at the OSD level, with OSD laywers, that debated this - and I even briefed the DCI George Tenet on this issue relating to an internet project.

And yes, Virgina - we tried to tell the lawyers that since the data identified Atta and the others as linked to Al Qaeda, we should be able to collect on them based on SecState Albright’s declaration of Al Qaeda as transnational terrorist threat to the US…well the lawyers did not agree…go figure…so we could not collect on them - and for political reasons - could not pass them to the FBI…I know because I brokered three meetings between the FBI and SOCOM to allow SOCOM to pass the information to the FBI. And, sadly, SOCOM cancelled them every time…

Oh - and DATA MINING is not overt or clandestine - it just “is” - it is something that is done with either open source or classified information. ABLE DANGER used an array of both open and close databases…

And here’s an interview with an Able Danger team member made available by Congressman Weldon to Mike Kelly, a columnist for the Bergen Record of New Jersey and a journalist for 40 years:

The story begins a year before the attacks. A top-secret team of Pentagon military counter-terror computer sleuths, who worked for a special operations commando group, was well into a project to monitor al-Qaida operations.

The 11-person group called itself “Project Able Danger.” Think of them as a super-secret Delta Force or SEAL team. But instead of guns, they relied on advanced math training as their key weapons. And instead of traditional spying methods or bust-down-the-door commando tactics, the Able Danger group booted up a set of high-speed, super-computers and collected vast amounts of data.

The technique is called “data mining.” The Able Danger team swept together information from al-Qaida chat rooms, news accounts, Web sites and financial records. Then they connected the dots, comparing the information with visa applications by foreign tourists and other government records.

From there, the computer sleuths noticed four names - Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.

All four turned out to be hijackers. Atta and al-Shehhi took a room at the Wayne Inn. They rented a Wayne mail drop, too, and even went to Willowbrook Mall. Al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi took rooms at a motel on Route 46 in South Hackensack.

(HT: TKS)

And Mr. Kelly has a great question for the Able Danger team member - one that was implied in the Commission’s response to the allegations:

Perhaps just as alarming, even the Able Danger team understood its limits. When lawyers blocked Able Danger’s request to approach the FBI, the team simply went back to its work and kept quiet - even after the 9/11 attacks occurred.

Why? If the Able Danger team was so concerned about U.S. security, why didn’t it approach Congress or even the press to sound an alarm?

When I posed that question in my interview with the Able Danger team member, he fell silent. Listening on a speaker phone, a congressional staffer interrupted: “Have you ever seen what happens to whistleblowers?”

Again, the Able Danger member had no answer.

No one is suggesting that the Commission deliberately tried to cover up information. Rather, in order to achieve consensus, the 9/11 Commission was predisposed to believe or disbelieve certain kinds of information. Anything that didn’t jibe with the narrative (and timeline) was either given short shrift or dismissed outright - as the Able Danger information from the July 12,2004 meeting.

No more blue ribbon commissions. Let’s have Congress look into this. And if the 9/11 investigation has to be re-opened, so be it.

Calling all bloggers!

You have until Monday night at 10:00 PM to get your entries in for this week’s Carnival of the Clueless.

Last week was the best yet with 32 entries from both the right and left side of the political spectrum hammering those individuals and groups among us who are truly clueless.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

Each week, I’ll be calling for posts that highlight the total stupidity of a public figure or organization – either left or right – that demonstrates that special kind of cluelessness that only someone’s mother could defend…and maybe not even their mothers!

Everyone knows what I’m talking about. Whether it’s the latest from Bill Maher or the Reverend Dobson, it doesn’t matter. I will post ALL ENTRIES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER I AGREE WITH THE SENTIMENTS EXPRESSED OR NOT..

You can enter by emailing me, leaving a link in the comments section, or by using the handy, easy to use form at Conservative Cat.

I am taking a well deserved break today from blogging. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not writing. I’m working on a brand new article for The American Thinker as well as an article I hope to have published in a major national publication about Civil War Re-enactors. But Mr. Blog himself will have to go without today.

I’ll leave you with some excellent stuff from other bloggers. I’ll be back tomorrow.

Here’s Varifrank’s latest. As usual, very powerful stuff.

Powerline fisks the Frank Rich piece from today’s New York Times, something I wanted to do but got too lazy. “Defeatist Triumphalism?” Read it.

Pat Curley has pictures of a local moonbat. Well, he’s colorful anyway.

Ferdy the Cat has some thoughts on begging…and pouncing.

Charles Johnson has some PR strategy sessions from Kos regarding Cindy Sheehan. “Mother Sheehan” indeed!

Read this piece that appeared a couple of days ago by Greg Djerejian and realize that when very smart people like Greg start to worry about Iraq, the rest of us better sit up and take notice.

John Cole has his own unique take on the Cindy Sheehan matter. So does Jay Tea at Wizbang.

Even though I linked to this post by Rusty Shakleford yesterday, it’s so good I’m linking to it again.

Michelle Malkin has an unconfirmed report about the pending divorce of Cindy Sheehan.

Hugh Hewitt links to a column on Iraq by one of my favorite historians Niall Ferguson.

9/11 COMMISSION: FROM L TO R: THOMAS KEAN, LEE HAMILTON, STAFF MEMBER DEITRICH SNELL

You’ve got to hand it to the 9/11 Commissioners. When push comes to shove, they know when to duck:

The Sept. 11 commission concluded that an intelligence program known as Able Danger “did not turn out to be historically significant,” despite hearing a claim that the program had identified the future plot leader Mohammed Atta as a potential terrorist threat more than a year before the 2001 attacks, the commission’s former leaders said in a statement on Friday evening.

The statement said a review of testimony and documents had found that the single claim in July 2004 by a Navy officer was the only time the name of Mr. Atta or any other future hijacker was mentioned to the commission as having been known before the hijackings. That account is consistent with statements this week by a commission spokesman, but it contradicts claims by a former defense intelligence official who said he had told the commission staff about Able Danger’s work on Mr. Atta during a briefing in Afghanistan in October 2003.

“Not historically significant?” How’d we get there from “if the briefers had mentioned anything that startling, it would have gotten their attention?”

You don’t have to read between the lines to see what’s going on here. In fact, 9/11 Commission spokesman Felzenberg couldn’t have made it any more plain when he said “The information that he provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing” from the commission’s investigation.” And just to make sure that we understood perfectly that the Commission ignored the Able Danger revelations because it didn’t fit their pre-conceived ideas they were pushing in the 9/11 narrative, Mr. Felzenberg repeated himself by saying “This information was not meshing with the other information that we had.”

As the Captain points out, the Commission’s entire defense boils down to two facts: 1) The Commission had no previous evidence that 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta was in the country at the time Able Danger says he was; and 2) The reason they know when Mr. Atta was in the country and when he wasn’t was because he always used his real name while traveling abroad.

Huh?

The Captain explains:

…it’s also worth noting that the Commission had an unusual standard for determining Atta’s timeline — they relied on him to travel under his own name at all times. I discussed this in earlier posts, but it bears repeating: terrorists can change tactics situationally. All the report can possibly state was the first time Atta traveled under his own name or any known aliases, and then only if immigration records picked it up. It doesn’t take much imagination, however, to think that he may have traveled here under a separate cover once or twice first to test the system and to do preliminary research for his mission.

The question should be asked of the 9/11 Commission staff - especially Deitrich Snell who interviewed the Able Danger team member in July, 2004 - why they didn’t try to either prove or disprove his story by asking the Pentagon about the data mining operation. There’s also the question of the arrests in Germany of Iraqi Intelligence operatives in March of 2000; operatives that the Germans said “uncovered what they considered to be serious indications of cooperation between Iraq and bin Ladin,” and that “acting on CIA recommendations, [the Germans] had been focused on monitoring the activities of Islamic groups linked to bin Ladin.”

That makes two pieces of potential evidence ignored by Commission staffers (or not informed by the CIA about the German-Iraqi spy arrests?). How many other facts were discarded because, in Mr. Fetzenberg’s words, they didn’t “mesh” with conclusions already reached by the staff?

The Commission has made an effective counter to Congressman Weldon’s charges, placing the burden now on him to prove the Commission liars. The only way to do that would be to hold hearings and put some people under oath.

Expect those hearings to begin shortly after the August recess is over.

UPDATE

Kevin Drum:

The Able Danger program was classified, of course, so we may never know exactly what it was and what it found out — especially since if the Pentagon was aware of Atta in 2000 it’s not likely to want to admit it in any case. However, I’m going to stick with my original guess: it produced some general information about al-Qaeda, but nothing specifically about Atta or the other 9/11 hijackers. That’s why no one ever mentioned Atta in the original reports. Later on, frustrated because their story wasn’t getting enough attention, Weldon and his source embellished it to suggest that Able Danger had specifically uncovered actionable intelligence about an al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn headed by Atta.

Suitably cautious but fails to account for the fact that there are two different sources telling the Commission about Able Danger - once in October, 2003 (at the same time that Sandy Berger was getting sticky fingers in the National Archives) and July, 2004 which was at a time as Drum suggests that the Commission’s Final Report had mostly been written.

However, Drum may be correct in that it appears according to what the Commission staff is saying, Atta was not mentioned in the October, 2003 meeting. My reading of Weldon’s interview with Government Security News is that someone is lying; either the Able Danger team member or Commission staffers:

According to Weldon, staff members of the 9/11 Commission were briefed on the capabilities of the Able Danger intelligence unit within the Special Operations Command, which had been set up by General Pete Schoomaker, who headed Special Ops at the time, on the orders of General Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Staffers at the 9/11 Commission staffers were also told about the specific recommendation to break up the Mohammed Atta cell. However, those commission staff members apparently did not choose to brief the commission’s members on these sensitive matters.

UPDATE II

AJ from The Strata-Sphere who’s been on top of this issue since it broke:

There is no ‘credibility’ issues here! None. Able Danger is as credible as the other leads the government dropped and only realized post 9-11 they were missed.

Baldilocks:

The commission’s response only leads to more questions. I don’t know whether the answers will come out without this military official having to be named in public.

I’m afraid she’s right.

The Counterterrorism Blog:

The INS Headquarters National Security Unit (NSU), which was created in the late 1990s in spite of considerable obstacles generated by the INS High Command, was one of the few and small success stories within the INS. The INS/NSU, circa 1999-2000, tried to post a liaison officer to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) specifically to tap into DoD intelligence on counter-terrorism matters. The NSU Director at the time approved it and DIA bought off on the plan…but INS senior management above the NSU Director nixed it so it never happened.

Hindsight is alwayas 20/20 and the refusal of the INS to approve the liason with DoD, given the pre-9/11 mindset, was both to be expected and understandable. It should go without saying, however, that it would be nice to know that the situation has been rectified and such nonsense is no longer being practiced by the INS.

UPDATE III

Rusty Shackleford and Ed Morrissey are having fascinating back and forth regarding the Iraqi spies caught in Germany and whether or not they could have been connected to Mohammed Atta’s Hamburg cell.

Read the whole thing here. And here’s the Captain’s original post and follow up.

And here’s Rusty’s original post where they have a back and forth in the comment section.

I’ll confess to not being an expert about much of anything. And being a “generalist” has many, many drawbacks when trying to write coherently about the War in Iraq. I’ve never served in the military so I can’t speak to what our soldiers are enduring on the ground as they try to stamp out what appears to be a never ending insurgency that continues to take its toll in American lives and treasure. I was never much of a “policy wonk” so it’s difficult for me to write about how the White House and Pentagon are formulating and carrying out our policy there.

All I can do is read. So for 10-12 hours a day I sit in front of my computer as the world tries to squeeze itself through my little 17″ monitor and enlighten me. I try to cram as much information and opinion as I can on a wide variety of issues that interest me. But what takes up most of my day is reading about the war.

I don’t write about Iraq as much as I used to because frankly, I’ve been pretty confused. I’ve contented myself with writing about the fight here at home between right and left believing that it’s vitally necessary to counter what Michelle Malkin so aptly describes as “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” seeing in that disease a real danger to both our continuing effort in Iraq and the poisoning of political discourse that makes governing here at home so much the harder.

I think what I am good at is detecting and recognizing trends. It’s quite simple, really. Flood your mind with enough information and the most fantastic computer ever built - the human brain - does the rest. As long as you arm yourself with a good enough bias detector (and B.S. detector) there really is nothing to it. And the trend I’ve been most concerned with lately has a dual track; the progress the anti-war left is making in playing to the war weariness of the American people and the situation on the ground in Iraq that is not improving and, in some ways, is worsening.

I’ve taken the President to task before on this site for not putting the war front and center on his agenda. In fact, the problem the President now has is if he tries to refocus the American people’s attention on Iraq and why we are there, he can rightfully be accused of playing politics with the issue. His approval rating on Iraq is going down because he has abandoned the issue to his political and ideological opponents. You can have administration spokesmen giving speeches all over the country and Congressional Republicans talking about the war until they”re blue in the face. But no one can grab the attention of the American people like a President speaking about war. The people are anxious and not a little confused. With the left wing in full cry against the war and the President personally along with continuing and in some respects escalating violence in Iraq, the people need to hear their President constantly, patiently, and doggedly explain why we are there, what losing the war would mean, and defining the rough parameters of victory.

It’s not that the American people don’t know these things already. It’s that they need to hear it again and again to buttress their faith against the faithless and steel their resolve against those whose major domestic concern is a humiliation of the President personally and the United States in general.

The left’s effectiveness in instilling war weariness in the public is the result of a constant drumbeat day after day of saying exactly the same thing; the President lied about WMD in Iraq. From this, all other critiques of the war resonate because, according to polls, people are now convinced this is so. Amplified as it is by a sympathetic media, the left’s message is falling on fertile ground because of the President’s unwillingness to take his critics head on, unashamed and without apology.

Once the President’s honesty about the reasons for going to war is successfully questioned, it’s simply a matter of people picking and choosing what other criticisms of the war they wish to believe. Is this a war for oil? For Haliburton? For Israel? To “finish the work” of his father? Take your pick. Once the President’s credibility is destroyed, anything is possible.

Mark Noonan points out the consequences of the President losing his credibility:

For the longest time I didn’t care much about the conspiracy theorists - putting them down as harmless nuts. This was a mistake on my part: a lie is a lie, and all lies are bad. We’ve become used to lies here in the United States - indeed, in a lot of cases a lie is much more easily believed than the truth. As it relates to our War on Terrorism, there is a built-in ability to believe a story about the President lying to get us into Iraq. We should have resolutely fought against the conspiracy theory lies right from the beginning, rather than allow them to become woven into the fabric of our society.

The price we are paying for allowing lies to gain currency is being paid in blood - the blood of our soldiers, as well as the blood of innocent non-combatants. You see, the people who believe conspiracy theories about the war might seem like laughable lunatics to most of us, but to our enemies they seem rational beings who, because of MSM puff-pieces on them, represent the average American - and in representing the average American, they play up to enemy propaganda about us. Unlike our domestic leftists, our Islamist enemies are not at all shy about stating their conspiracy theories in public - the theory that Mossad carried out 9/11 is underground in the United States, but it is front page news in the Arab world…to have paranoid theories “confirmed” by the statements of Americans protesting against President Bush and the war is like water in the desert to terrorists in Anbar province…and their masters in Damascus and Tehran.

This is why the Cindy Sheehan campaign is starting to pay dividends for the left. Contained in her “plea” for the President to “explain” why her son died is the accusation that he lied in order to start a war. In fact, the Sheehan drama is a two ring circus; one ring is the grieving mother seeking answers to her questions about why her son had to die. The other ring is the fiery, anti-war activist that accuses the President of doing the bidding of Israel and the oil companies. The first ring speaks to the fairness and compassion of the American people. The second ring feeds their doubts about the President’s motives.

I still think Mrs. Sheehan will self-destruct - especially now that apparently every loon who wants to get his face on TV is descending on Crawford. This will turn the “Cindy Sheehan show” into something similar to what happened to the right during the Terri Schiavo tragedy. The extremists will take center stage and the American people will turn away in droves.

This won’t solve the President’s political problem of re-invigorating the war effort here at home. For that, he could use some help with good news about Iraq both from a military and political standpoint. At the moment, neither seems likely.

For the last several months, the analysis I’ve read from people whose opinion is generally respected by both the left and the right has slowly been changing from cautious optimism to growing alarm over several trends in Iraq. They include:

1. An insurgency that is getting more sophisticated in their tactics and more deadly in their ability to inflict casualties. This sophistication includes being able to mount attacks aimed at causing political damage to the new government as well as escalating sectarian tensions.

2. A growing dismay at the lack of concrete progress in the training of the Iraqi army.

3. A deepening worry over sectarian militias that call to mind Lebanon’s fractious past.

4. The real possibility that despite the best efforts of government and religious leaders, civil war is growing more likely.

5. The political struggle over the form and content of the Iraqi Constitution that now appears will result in a delay in approving the document.

6. The battle at home over troop withdrawal which will test both the unity of the Administration as well as the President’s ability to resist the impulse to leave too soon.

Greg Djerjian on many of these trends I outlined above:

But to win this thing we need to be decimating the enemy–not disrupting him–with overwhelming force. And we simply don’t have that amount of force in theater. So we are doing the best we can with the resources at hand (do we really need all those troops in Germany, by the way?), scraping by really, and hoping against hope that the political process will improve and help us turn some corner in the not too distant future.

But hope isn’t a strategy, and to all those (and there are more and more) ready to give up (or fakely declare victory in that we weren’t strictly ‘defeated’ on the battlefield) and say to hell if Iraq degenerates into civil war, we gave it our best shot–let me be clear. An Iraq mired in large-scale sectarian conflict, let alone full-blown civil war, would be a cluster-f*&k of epic proportions. Why? Because it would mean a failed or failing state smack in the center of the Middle East. We would have created an embittered Sunni para-state, a terror haven really, roiling and destabilizing the region (such an unstable state of affairs would help foster radicalization of Shi’a behavior also, of course, in ways not helpful to the U.S. national interest).

Iran, Turkey, Syria and even Saudi Arabia and Jordan would have direct interests implicated too, of course. Need I sketch this out more? (Hint: Borders wouldn’t be treated with any sanctity by the neighbors, friends). The point is, leaving Iraq to fend for itself without a viable, stable polity in place would be a disaster–for the thousands and thousands (coalition and Iraqi alike) who will have died in vain, for the region, for our national prestige, for the war on terror generally.

Does the President have the political courage not to mention the political skills necessary to dramatically increase troop strength in Iraq? What kind of resistance would he get from the military? Would an increase in troop strength only serve to heighten sectarian tensions, feed the insurgency, depress the Iraqi armed forces, and embitter the average Iraqi citizen? Or has the military situation made all those concerns ancillary to the need to establish some semblance of order so that an elected Iraqi government can function?

This is why I think we’re in the biggest crisis of the war. We’re at a crossroads. And the decisions taken over the next few months by the President will determine whether the war is a success or failure. What makes me a little bitter is that this is taking place as the President seeks to put the war to the side as he pursues domestic concerns. The war may be a political downer for the White House. But we’ve got 138,000 men and women in Iraq who don’t give a fig about politics. They only want to get the job done and come home. And if getting the job done means increasing troop strength in the sort term then so be it.

The long and short of it is we need the President to do his job. I find it hard to imagine that FDR or Lincoln could have endured as political leaders if they had sought to sweep the war they were waging under the rug. If the President’s hope is that the American people will forget about the war, someone should dash that hope for him immediately. His opponents and the press won’t let that happen. If that ’s the case then the President has a choice; he can either treat the war with the seriousness and focus that it deserves or he can continue on as he is now.

It’s no longer a question of whether or not he should be more active in dealing with the war. It’s a question only of whether he will attempt to take control of events and guide the country to a far distant shore where Iraq is a peaceful, democratic state or whether events will instead control him. If it’s the latter, we will have no chance of succeeding. The former, we wing big.

There really is no other choice.

It’s a fascinating day here in blogland. We have dueling blogswarms between the left and right, each trying to push a story into prominence in the mainstream media.

On the left, there’s the Cindy Sheehan story and what’s rapidly becoming something known as “Camp Casey.” The lefties believe that the image of a mother who has lost her son in Iraq camped out in front of the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas begging for an audience (her 2nd) with George Bush is somehow a tipping point in the Iraq War.

On the right, there’s a story that’s getting curiouser and curiouser about a top secret Pentagon intelligence team called Able Danger whose data mining operation apparently uncovered the al Qaeda terror cell of Mohammed Atta a full year before 9/11. This fact, known to the 9/11 Commission staff at least 10 months prior to the issuance of their final report, was inexplicably not included in the 9/11 narrative. Nobody knows why and as I write this, Commission staff - the very same staff who failed to include the information in the first place - is over at the National Archives trying to find out why they were too stupid or too partisan to report it.

For sheer volume, the left wins in a walk. As of 3:00 PM central time, there were 4370 posts on Cindy Sheehan while only 468 posts were on Able Danger. However, most of those posts on Sheehan were written before this last Tuesday when the Able Danger story hit the fan. And many, many more righty bloggers are posting about Cindy Sheehan than lefty bloggers are posting about Able Danger.

In fact, while the left has gone off the deep end with the Sheehan story, calling the disturbed woman the “Rosa Parks” of the anti-war movement and other equally over the top encomiums, the counter reaction from the right has been equally vigorous, albeit with as much hyperbolic rhetoric in opposition to Mrs. Sheehan as can be found in support of her.

By contrast, the reaction on the left to the Able Danger story has been muted and dismissive. None of the top left blogs are even posting on it. Then again, they aren’t doing much Cindy Sheehan coverage either. Why do you suppose that is?

Mrs. Sheehan comes off pretty well in 15-30 second snippetts. But if you sit her down in a chair at CNN or Fox or read an interview with her in a newspaper what emerges is a shrill kook whose anti-semitic rants against Israel and fantastic conspiracy theories involving Bush, the oil companies, and American “colonies” in the middle east mark her as someone the sane left is keeping at arms left. While both Daily Kos and Democratic Underground are wall to wall Sheehan, Josh Marshall, TPM Cafe, Wonkette, and Jerelyn Merritt have all kept their distance from the story. Wonkette even has a plea for sanity:

Is that what the debate has come to? Which side can corral the saddest crop of widows, parents, and orphans? Call it a harms race. Better: an ache-off. We hope the grimly absurd image of two competing camps of mourners illustrates why it is we’ve been somewhat reluctant to weigh in on Sheehan’s cause: Grief can pull a person in any direction, and whatever “moral authority” it imbues, we can’t claim that Sheehan has it and those mothers who still support the war don’t. The Bush administration knows all about exploiting tragedy for its own causes, including re-election. Whatever arguments there are against the war in Iraq, let’s not make “I have more despairing mothers on my side” one of them. The only way to win a grief contest is for more people to die.

Cindy Sheehan is a ticking media time bomb waiting to go off. I find it more than likely that she will eventually say something so grotesque, so outrageous, so off the wall, as to make her damaged goods. At which point of course, the left will abandon her.

That said, there is real danger on the right that instead of criticizing the message (and the people pushing the grieving mother forward) there will be a “piling on” aspect to criticism of Sheehan herself that will generate more sympathy for her. Some of the rhetoric I’ve seen directed against this poor woman has been despicable. This has certainly not been the finest hour for many righty bloggers out there (and you know who you are).

In the meantime, the left has another problem with potential revelations in the Able Danger story. One thing you might notice today is that just about everyone is going back in time examining posts they did last year on the 9/11 Commission. Several interesting tidbits have come to light including some tantalizing clues about what exactly Sandy Berger was stuffing in his socks at the National Archives last year. Did the Clinton Administration know about Able Danger and have Berger purloin documents in order to sanitize the record? A skeptic would want more proof but some timelines I’ve seen out there are compelling. Not proof - but enough questions raised that someone with subpoena power should be looking into the entire matter.

The problem for the left with the Able Danger story is that it may, in fact, reveal connections that destroy the national narrative on 9/11 put forth by the Commission. A re-examination of the record could reveal other tidbits - not the least of which is this eye opener the Captain found today about Atta’s Hamburg cell and a busted Iraqi Intelligence ring. The left’s entire anti-war rationale - that Saddam was not involved in 9/11 - may, in fact get a second hearing. And wouldn’t that cut the anti-war crowd off at the knees if any significant changes are forced upon the Commission.

The power of this new media will be on display over the next few weeks. Will the Sheehan story become more compelling as the hard left makes pilgrimages to Crawford to spout their conspiracy theories and preen for the cameras? Or will new revelations about what the 9/11 Commission knew and when they knew it regarding Mohammed Atta push its way to the forefront of coverage in the MSM and put pressure on Congress to investigate what John Podheretz has termed “the story of the summer” in Washington, D.C?

UPDATE

What better place for a post on blogswarms than the blog trackback party at James Joyner’s Outside the Beltway!

Watching Cindy Sheehan as she carries on outside of the President’s ranch in Crawford, Texas I’ve been struck by her apparent heartfelt sincerity. She really does believe that the President of the United States is personally responsible for the death of her son, Casey. She really does believe that the War in Iraq is a gigantic conspiracy involving Israel, the oil companies, and big business. This is not a bid for publicity on her part, at least not consciously. I believe that she thinks that the best way to honor her son’s memory is to have the United States cut and run in Iraq. And I believe that she’s sincere when she says that she wants to talk to the President and get an “explanation” as to why her son had to die.

Cindy Sheehan is in the grip of some pretty powerful emotions. Grief and anger can play very strange tricks on the mind. I can remember my mother blaming the government for the death of my father in 1981 because of exposure to radiation while he was serving in the army in occupied Japan. She would rail constantly against the government for killing her husband, for knowingly sending him to his death. There was no reasoning with her or talking to her about alternative reasons for the cancer that killed him. So, I just let her go on and on about it, hoping that eventually the grief and hurt would subside and she could move on.

She never really did. In the midst of her grief, Alzheimers disease began its slow, insidious work and I don’t know if she ever really came to terms with her loss.

I think Cindy Sheehan is going through something similar now. Her pain has become such a constant companion that it seems natural, a part of her life. She can’t imagine living without it. In short, in order to feel good, she has to feel bad. Her grief is like a comfortable old blanket that she wraps around herself in order to insulate her from the very scary prospect of moving on in life without her son.

This is why any Gold Star mother deserves our pity and yes, our respect. Losing a child under the circumstances of war is especially hard. And her questions about the government’s plans for the war’s aftermath are legitimate, as pertinent as questions mothers in World War II who lost a son at Anzio or the Battle of Hurtgen Forest, or Kasserine Pass may have asked. Those battles were American blunders that resulted in thousands of needless deaths.

Mothers ask these questions in every war. What makes Mrs. Sheehan’s situation unique is that she has chosen to make her ordeal a public spectacle. She has taken the personal and made it political. And she has made common cause with those whose actions in support of the terrorists in Iraq may have, in fact, assisted in the death of her son.

I’m not talking about the rational anti-war left whose critiques of Administration policy are harsh but do not descend into the kind of exaggerated, conspiratorial hyperbole that Mrs. Sheehan and the crazy left have adopted. The gimlet-eyed anti-Americans who have captured her cause and made it their own know exactly what they’re doing and where they want to go. They want to piggyback their agenda on Mrs. Sheehan’s grief and ride her until the media tires of the spectacle and moves on to something else.

Michelle Malkin calls them “grief pimps.” Somewhat vulgar, but apt. They are without principals and without honor. To try and cash in politically on someone who so obviously is suffering the kind of denial Mrs. Sheehan is going through defies belief. The simple, common decencies normal people take for granted do not apply because to them, the personal is political. This is the foundation of modern leftist ideology. It has brought us multiculturalism, identity politics, and a host of irrational idiocies that threaten to destroy our civilization. What R. Emmett Tyrell has called liberalisms “riot of conceits” now allows for the exploitation of grief. One may ask, well why not? The left has managed to exploit everything else, why not human misery?

There’s an extraordinary picture of National Security Adviser Steve Hadley sitting at the feet of Mrs. Sheehan a few days ago talking to her and listening to what she has to say. Her subsequent recollection of the meeting reveals what happens to mind and memory when grief and anger take over:

Joe Hagin [WH Deputy Chief of Staff] told me that he goes with the president when he meets with families, and that George Bush really cares about the soldiers and the families, and I said, “Don’t even tell me that! Because I met with him before, and that man doesn’t even have an ounce of compassion in his body.” And he looked really surprised. Don’t you think that’s something they would have known about before they had this little tete-a-tete with me yesterday

Contrast what she said there with this snippett from her meeting with the President in June of last year:

THE REPORTER of Vacaville, CA published an account of Cindy Sheehan’s visit with the president at Fort Lewis near Seattle on June 24, 2004:

“‘I now know he’s sincere about wanting freedom for the Iraqis,’ Cindy said after their meeting. ‘I know he’s sorry and feels some pain for our loss. And I know he’s a man of faith.’

“The meeting didn’t last long, but in their time with Bush, Cindy spoke about Casey and asked the president to make her son’s sacrifice count for something. They also spoke of their faith.

“The trip had one benefit that none of the Sheehans expected.

“For a moment, life returned to the way it was before Casey died. They laughed, joked and bickered playfully as they briefly toured Seattle.

For the first time in 11 weeks, they felt whole again.

“‘That was the gift the president gave us, the gift of happiness, of being together,’ Cindy said.”

I have no doubt that Cindy Sheehan remembers her meeting with the President the way she described it two days ago on Air America. She’s not lying. She has replayed that meeting over and over in her mind and where she first thought the President showed compassion, she now sees flippancy. She re-runs every word, every gesture of the President’s and each time she does, she becomes more convinced that the President is an unfeeling, uncaring monster. The two descriptions may not sound the same, but they relfect what she actually felt back then as well as the way she feels now.

The fact that this has now caused a split in her family is actually feeding the pain she needs to go on. Being encouraged by the left to carry a cross, her martyrdom would be complete if her family abandoned her. And this apparently is what she wants.

I doubt whether Mrs. Sheehan will ever retreat from the precipace that has opened beneath her feet. It remains to be seen whether her friends on the left will push her over the edge or simply abandon her and move on. Either way she’s a lost soul. For that reason, I can’t be too harsh on her. I can only pity her as she wallows in her pain and grief and is exploited by people who aren’t fit to clean her dead son’s army boots.

In an interview with Government Security News, one of the Able Danger team members revealed that it was lawyers for the Department of Defense who prevented information gleaned from the data mining operation from reaching the FBI:

The intelligence officer recalled carrying documents to the offices of Able Danger, which was being run by the Special Operations Command, headquartered in Tampa, FL. The documents included a photo of Mohammed Atta supplied by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and described Atta’s relationship with Osama bin Laden. The officer was very disappointed when lawyers working for Special Ops decided that anyone holding a green card had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had amassed about the only terrorist cell they had located inside the United States could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded.

“We were directed to take those 3M yellow stickers and place them over the faces of Atta and the other terrorists and pretend they didn’t exist,” the intelligence officer told GSN.

DoD lawyers may also have been reluctant to suggest a bold action by FBI agents after the bureau’s disastrous 1993 strike against the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco, TX, said Weldon and the intelligence officer.

Could political correctness have killed 3000 of our fellow citizens? And this charade of covering the faces of Atta and his cell with little yellow pieces of paper borders on the surreal. What kind of bureaucratic mindset could be responsible for such idiocy?

Well…before she became the #2 lawyer at the Department of Justice, Jamie Gorelick was a lawyer for the Department of Defense. Make sense to you now?

The next question would have to be: Is this practice still going on?

We know that the Patriot Act broke down many of these barriers between the CIA and FBI but did it also cure the timidity and stupidity that led to this fiasco?

Meanwhile, the Washington Post points out the interesting fact that we have the fox in charge of investigating the hen house regarding the 9/11 Commission’s probe into the Able Danger allegations; the same people who may have discarded the information about Mohammed Atta and his Brooklyn terror cell in the first place are investigating why they may have done such a stupid thing:

Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission are investigating allegations by a Republican congressman that lead hijacker Mohamed Atta had been identified as a potential threat by a highly classified Defense Department program a year or more before the attacks occurred.

Commission officials confirmed a report in yesterday’s New York Times that two staff members interviewed a uniformed military officer, who alleged in July 2004 that a secret program called “Able Danger” had identified Atta as a potential terrorist threat in 1999 or early 2000.

This is probably why a Congressional investigation is in order. Here we have the staff of the 9/11 Commission investigating themselves. And Congress should look into one particular Commission investigator, Deitrich Snell, who according to the NY Times story yesterday was the staff person who interviewed the Able Danger team member at Commission headquarters in July, 2004 - 10 days before the Commission’s Final Report was released:

Mr. Snell also prosecuted one of the Bojinka plot conspirators and turned down a deal with the terrorist:

Abdul Hakim Murad, a conspirator in the 1995 Bojinka plot with Ramzi Yousef, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and others, was convicted in 1996 of his role in the Bojinka plot (see January 6, 1995). He is about to be sentenced for that crime. He offers to cooperate with federal prosecutors in return for a reduction in his sentence, but prosecutors turn down his offer.

Dietrich Snell, the prosecutor who convicted Murad, says after 9/11 that he doesn’t remember any such offer. But court papers and others familiar with the case later confirmed that Murad does offer to cooperate at this time. Snell claimed he only remembers hearing that Murad had described an intention to hijack a plane and fly it into CIA headquarters. However, in 1995 Murad had confessed to Philippine investigators that this would have been only one part of a larger plot to crash a number of airplanes into prominent US buildings, including the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a plot that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed later adjusts and turns into the 9/11 plot

You may recall that the Bojinka plot involved the blowing up of 11 US bound airplanes over the Pacific Ocean, in January of 1996. This is the plot KSM eagerly took to Osama Bin Laden for approval only to have OBL scale the attack down to what eventually turned out to be the 9/11 attack. The behavior of Mr. Snell in this case is eerily similar to what he did with the Able Danger information. In other words, Mr. Snell has experience in burying information that may have led to discovery of the 9/11 attack.

According to today’s Washington Post, we may hear something from the Commission today about Able Danger and why the staff failed to include the information in the Final Report.