Interesting how this story has been allowed to die. Seems at least as worthy of coverage as Aruba, Michael Jackson, etc.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/able-a19.shtml<edit>
The 9/11 commission report flatly declared that no US intelligence agency had identified Atta before September 11. Colonel Shaffer directly rebuts this claim, telling the media that he personally provided information about Able Danger, including its identification of Atta, at an October 2003 meeting in Afghanistan, where he was then stationed as a Special Forces officer. Several members of the commission staff were present and received the information, including staff director Philip Zelikow, now the senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
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It is now clear that those who have rejected this account—including the World Socialist Web Site—have been proven right. The future hijackers were detected by US government agencies, including the CIA and military intelligence, yet nothing was done either to arrest them or disrupt their operations.
There is only one politically serious explanation of this now-indisputable fact: powerful forces within the US military/intelligence complex wanted a terrorist incident on US soil in order to create the needed shift in public opinion required to embark on a long-planned campaign of military intervention in Central Asia and the Middle East. Whether or not they knew the scale of the impending attacks and what the precise targets would be, they acted in such a way as to block the arrest of known terrorist operatives and allow them to carry out their plot.
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The focus on Gorelick and the “wall” serves three obvious political ends. It reinforces the right-wing campaign to eliminate all legal restraints, no matter how ineffective, on the operations of US intelligence agencies (that appears to be the principal motive of Republican Congressman Curt Weldon, who arranged Shaffer’s initial meetings with the press). It appeals to the anti-Clinton mania of the Republican Party’s far-right base. And it diverts attention from the responsibility of the Bush administration for both the 9/11 security failure and the subsequent cover-up.
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Shaffer’s revelations are only the tip of the iceberg. The 9/11 commission report is now discredited as a bipartisan cover-up, in which Democrats and Republicans joined forced to protect the key institutions of the state. The accounts of 9/11 in the corporate-controlled mass media are little more than successive versions of government press releases, rewritten without even serious effort to maintain a consistent cover-up. The truth about 9/11 requires a genuinely independent investigation which will focus on the role of the US government and the US intelligence apparatus in allowing the attacks to occur.
lots more...