Thursday, August 18, 2005

Able Danger . . .

This story has been floating around the internet for a few weeks, but the regular news is starting to pick up on it, especially since now a whistle blower is coming forth. It looks more and more like the story is true -- that the government had information about M. Atta -- one of the main suiciders in the September 11 attack -- and others. The attempt to pass on the information to the F.B.I. was blocked, so the F.B.I. never had a chance at moving on the information before we were attacked at all.

You have to ask why the information was bottled up in one part of the government where nothing could be done. It appears it was a matter of policy, and a particularly over-legalistic approach to protecting "rights" of visa'd foreigners. Moreover, the protection was probably over-zealous at that.

The trail of responsibility seems to point directly towards Jaimie (sp?) Gorelick, who was the architect of a procedural wall which resulted in a shameful lack of security and resulting death in the twin towers.

By odd coincidence, Ms. Gorelick participated in the 9-11 commission tasked with assessing security in light of 9-11. This is consistent with earlier reports I remember from somewhere that some field agents wanted to check out suspects' hard drives, pre 911, on suspicion that terrorism was a-brewin' but were likewise prevented from doing so by Gorelick's wall separating security from criminal functions.

Oh, and this makes Sandy Berger's foray into top secret documents a little bit more suspicious, does it not? Might there have been some ulterior motive for preventing security threat information about foreigners from being delivered to the F.B.I.? Like Chinese campaign contributions.?

I'm just asking, but this smells like there might be a whole lot more in there somewhere that we aren't hearing about. I'd rather learn that this is just noise and I've been infected with a little paranoia.

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