The Friends of Phil Zelikow (Able Danger Debunkers)

[leveymg]

The Friends of Phil Zelikow (Able Danger Debunkers)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/8/15/123554/807
Mon Aug 15th, 2005 at 09:35:54 PDT
More on the developing story about the US Army surveillance unit, codenamed Able Danger, that detected the four primary 9/11 hijackers inside the US, and the decision by Philip Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission staff director, to withhold this information from the Commissioners before the 9/11 report was published in July 2004.

leveymg's diary :: ::
On Saturday, the Washington Post's Dan Eggen laid out the defense being offered by Zelikow for his failure to tell the Commission about the staff's multiple interviews with a DIA officer who worked on the Able Danger, and that a second officer has come forward to confirm that account. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/12/AR2005081201655.html

" U.S. Navy officer . . . told the commission staff in July 2004 that he recalled seeing Atta's name and photograph on a chart prepared by another officer. Panel officials also said they have found no evidence to support similar claims made to reporters by a second person, a former defense intelligence official."

Then, Kevin Drum in the Washington Monthly weighed in, attempting to dismiss all the commotion as simply the result of the dementia of Congressman Curt Weldon, who has been trying to ride the story into a higher committee assignment and to sell a book. Wahttp://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_08/006908.php

I respectfully disagree with the would-be Able Danger debunkers and friends of Phil Zelikow, above. Read the comments at Drum's blog to get a sense of the sort of arguments that are being made, back and forth.

No one's said Able Danger is a figment of Weldon's Lucky Charmed imagination. Far from it. Indeed, the Post article on Saturday revealed that there's a second DIA analyst who have come forward to confirm that a Pentagon unit had detected the hijackers were in the US, but that the unit was ordered to move onto other things, and the FBI wasn't notified. The Commissioners still say that information wasn't passed up to them by Phil Zelikow. That's a gravely serious matter that needs to be investigated.

Most of the the Able Danger debunking effort seems to be an ad hominem attack on Curt Weldon and an attempt to deflect attention from the bigger picture. Weldon is almost beside the point. Let's focus on what the DIA guys were saying to Zelikow. There are two DIA intelligence officers who have confirmed that Army Intelligence produced a matrix that showed the primary 9/11 hiajckers inside the U.S. months before the attacks. It was irresponsible in the extreme for the staff director to have thrown this information away and not tell the Commissioners about it, if indeed he didn't.

The material questions about Weldon's claim seem to devolve into three very slim, almost irrelevant, issues. Those issues are 1) whether the chart had Atta's name on it -- note, no one is contesting that there was a DoD chart produced that showed four al-Qaeda-linked terrorists detected inside the US -- 2) whether it had Atta inside the US in late 1999 or in mid-2000 (note, that's a discrepancy that needs to be checked out, not something that should have led to Zelikow throwing the information out); and 3) that the UBL cell on the chart was designated the "Brooklyn Cell", and nothing places Atta in Brooklyn. Well, the chart isn't about Atta -- it's about al-Qaeda, which I recall had substantial (in the $$$millions) financial ties to the al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. What this seems to actually reveal is that DoD was aware in 1999 of funding sources that flowed from the mosque to the UBL cells then preparing an attack inside the U.S. Serious stuff. Should have been thoroughly investigated by the Commission, but apparently wasn't. Why?

Don't get diverted from the fact that there's a forest fire roaring toward you because some of trees might be out of place on the map.

Eggan's story reads like a lawyer's brief, citing a list of minor discrepancies between what the 9/11 Commission thought it knew about Mohamed Atta and what US military intelligence had actually determined before the attacks. The Post article is significant for the fact that it confirms that not one but two DIA officers were interviewed by Zelikow and other senior Commission staff.

[FrankLee]

1. C'mon now, speak English

Somebody put this in context. Do we not know enough yet to make any sort of definitive statements about who did what when? The right-wingers are going ape-shit claiming Clinton sat on everything. I sincerely doubt that is the case, even though Clinton has done several things over the years to piss me off.

Even if it WERE true that Clinton snuffed out this intelligence, what would prevent "the adults" (e.g. Bush and his band of crooks) from discovering it and doing something about it in the many months they were in office before 9/11. As we already know, the Bush Gang cast out anything with Clinton's imprint on it.

[leveymg]

2. Story context. Please see the following:

There's a string of articles on this topic posted last week both here at DU and at DKos. They're chock full of links to sources.

Read 'em at my diary page at DKos: http://www.dailykos.com/user/leveymg

The 9/11 Commssion statement of August 12 on Able Danger is now available:

http://www.9-11pdp.org/press/2005-08-12_pr.pdf

Correction: my post above concludes that the commission staff met with two officers who had worked on Able Danger. That should state that the Washington Post interviewed a civilian DIA Analyst who confirms the statement made to Commission staff by the original source, a Navy Officer, assigned to the program.

[enough]

3. Thank you leveymg.

Very useful.

[agincourt]

4. LIHOP or MIHOP,

could easily happen without presidential involvement or approval. We have many people in gov't tied in with corporations that don't answer to anyone. They can use terrorism to push a neo-con agenda without the neo-con figurehead necessarily giving approval. That's why I think 9-11 could have happened during a Gore presidency, to remove him from power, rather than make him dumbo dictator like Bush.

[Emit]

5. Zelikow has been a controversial figure on the 9/11 Commission

as discussed here:

http://discussions.pbs.org/viewtopic.pbs?p=253763#253763

Perhaps no more glaring conflict of interest attracted opposition from victim families and 9/11 activists than that of the commission's Executive Director, Philip Zelikow...

Advocates for the families said they were alarmed by the commission's disclosure on Thursday that only one of the 10 commissioners would have access to a wide range of the briefings, and that the only person from the commission with similar access would be its staff director, Philip Zelikow, who has close ties with Condoleezza Rice and senior officials in the Bush Administration.

The commission has previously rejected a request from victims' families to limit Mr. Zelikow's responsibilities sharply in light of potential conflict of interests involving the White Hoouse.

The families' advocates said the decision to have Mr. Zelikow be one of only two commission officials with wide access to the highly classified documents --- the other is Jamie S. Gorelick, a Democratic commission member who was deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration -- raised new questions about the investigation's impartiality...

Mr. Zelikow, who wrote a book with Ms. Rice in 1995, was on the Bush administration's transition team for the National Security Council and has acknowledged having contacts earlier this year with Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political advisor, about Mr. Zelikow's scholarly work at the University of Virginia.

"Phil Zelikow has a very large conflict of interest," said Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, was killed at the World Trade Center, and who is spokeswoman for the Family Steering Committee, an umbrella group that represents several family organizations. "He is very close friends with Condi Rice, he was on the transition team, and some of these documents are going to pertain to that. It's very disturbing."

Mr. Zelikow said in an interview that he frequently dealt in his scholarly work with prominent political figures, Republicans and Democrats alike, and that he had attempted to be even-handed in pursuing the commission's investigations. "I talk to a lot of people in both parties, including highly poilitcal people in the Democratic part," he said.

Philip Shenon, "Terrorism Panel Tapes from New York," New York Times, November 21, 2003.

Perhaps the worst conflict of interest was the fact that Zelikow had advised the incoming Bush administration of terror-related intelligence matters and had several discussion about bin Laden and al Qaeda in 2000-2001 with Richard Clarke. By rights, he should have been a witness testifying under oath before the commission instead of its executive director. When many of the victim families learned of this they were justifiably outraged at an arrangement that would have never been permitted in a court of law.

Statement of the Family Steering Committee for
The 9/11 Independent Commission
March 20, 2004

From <http://www.911independentcommission.org>

The Family Steering Committee is deeply disturbed to learn about Executive Director Philip Zelikow's participation in urgent post-election briefings, December 2000, and January 2001, with Sandy Berger and Condoleezza Rice. In this particular meeting the Senior Clinton Administration official clearly warned that al Qaeda posed the worst threat facing the nation.

It is apparent that Dr. Zelikow should never have been appointed to be Executive Director of the Commission. As Exucutive Staff Director his job has been to determine the focus and direction of the Commission's investigation, an investigation whose mandate includes understanding why the Bush administration failed to prioritize the Al Qaeda threat. It is abundantly clear that Dr. Zelikow's conflicts go beyond just the transition period.

It is extremely distressing to learn this information at this late date. This new information clearly calls into question the intergrity of this Commission's investigation. The Family Steering Committee repeatedly expressed concerns over all members' conflicts requesting that the commission be forthcoming so as not to taint the validity of the report. The Family Steering Committee was unaware of Dr. Zelikow's participation in this intelligence briefing until today.

As such, the Family Steering Committee is calling for:
1. Dr. Zelikow's immediate resignation.
2. Dr. Zelikow's testimony in public under oath.
3. Subpoena of Dr. Zelikow's notes from the intelligence briefings he attended with Richard Clarke.
4. The Commission to apologize to the 9/11 families and America for this massive appearance of impropriety.

The Family Steering Committee (FSC) is an independent, nonpartisan group of individuals who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The FSC does not receive financial support or other support from any outside organizations.

As written in Michael Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, pp.454-457.