Friday, August 12, 2005

Sandy Berger and Able Danger

Pat Santy thinks he may have found the motive for the former national security advisor's theft of documents from the national archives. Able Danger is the codename of a classified military intelligence unit which identified Mohammed Atta and three of his fellow terrorists a year before 9/11. The Clinton Administration is alleged to have blocked this information from being shared with the FBI.

And now we hear that the 9/11 Commission never saw this information. If true, this could be dynamite.

Update: Meanwhile, Kevin Drum is telling us to move on, nothing to look at here. One has to wonder if the left would be treating it like this if it had happened after Bush became president. Drum fails to note what the scandal is really about, the fact that Jamie Gorelich, a member of the 9/11 commission, had instituted the policy that military intelligence could not be shared with the FBI. Obviously, we don't know whether the FBI would have acted on the information that Mohammed Atta was someone to be worried about, but this explanation has to make one wonder:
Weighing this with the information about Atta’s actual activities...the Commission staff concluded that the officer’s account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation.
Not sufficiently reliable to present to the commission members? Shouldn't that conclusion have been the Commission's to make? It does tend to shake one's confidence that the Commission's findings were complete and accurate. Maybe they would just have said that the policy of not sharing intelligence had already been sufficiently discredited, but shouldn't that conclusion have been the American people's to make?

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