Able Danger...
Imagine the shock, shock I say, when I heard this morning about a government program run from the Pentagon which was called Able Danger. Now what was so shocking about Able Danger is not that it existed, but what it was supposed to be doing.

From what I've been able to gather, Able Danger was constituted in 1996 with the specific mission of finding out everything that could be found out about Usama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda and then to formulate a plan of attack against both. The implication is that UBL and his band of merry men were recognized as a threat to American interests way back in 1996 and that someone decided to keep tabs on them. That's a point in favor of the otherwise pointless Clinton Administration.

It then turns out that Able Danger subsequently found three of the 9/11 hijackers within the borders of the continental United States several years prior to 9/11 (I don't know the exact number). Able Danger acted upon this information: it attempted to pass it on to the FBI. Defense Department lawyers, however, nixed the idea. Federal law prohibited the sharing of intelligence information between federal agencies. This "wall" was put in place by the Clinton Justice Department by Jamie Gorelick, a Clinton appointee. The information that Mohammed Atta and two of his later accomplices were on a terrorist watch list, believed to be members of Al-Qaeda and in the United States (and somehow legally, to boot) fell by the wayside, booted down the memory hole by a high-level apparatchik armed with a memo.

On September 11, 2001, Mohammed Atta flew a Boeing 737, Flight 11, into One World Trade Center. The CLinton Administration just lost that point I so graciously awarded them.

Now we all know that the government screwed up in connecting the dots prior to 9/11. This is not news. Able Danger, didn't pinpoint the date of the attack nor did it give any cluse as to what form that attack might take. It merely pointed out that a suspected terrorist with links to a known security threat was floating around free, and would someone please pick him up?

Fast-forward to the 9/11 Commission Hearings.

One of the officers in charge of Able Danger, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, offered to send his files to the 9/11 Commission. Those files would have included the facts mentioned above, and would have shed much more light on what the various organs of government knew and when they knew it. Shaffer was firmly, but politely, told, that he and his files would not be needed.

It also came to light this week that former Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, he of the famous "Pantsgate" scandal in which documents related to 9/11 intelligence "mysteriously" disappeared into his suit jackets, socks and underwear (i.e. were smuggled out of the National Archives), was presented a plan to nab UBL on four separate occassions prior to the end of the Clinton Administration, and never once gave the go-ahead to do so. Most sources on this cite that there was no legal basis for kidnapping or otherwise eliminating UBL. A consequence of treating terrorism as a law-enforcement, and not a national security, issue. Anyways, those documents were supposed to be sent to the 9/11 Commission. They never made it there. Or if they did, they were not the originals. In other words, history may have been rewritten so as to cast a better light on Mr. Berger and the Clinton Administration.

These revelations raise some very important questions:

1. Since Jamie Gorelick was the author of the policy by which government intelligence agecies were prohibited from sharing information, and was a 9/11 Commission member, just why hasn't she been hung for treason yet? Did she have anything to do with having Col. Shaffer and his deadly files being kept in the shadows? Why was she allowed to sit on the COmmission, even though it was publicly known she had a conflict of interest.

2. Able Danger never appears once in the 9/11 Commission Report. Why and who suppressed the information?

3. Why hasn't Mr. Berger not been dragged back out from under his rock to explain just what it is he did, and badgered to death until he tells the truth?

4. Is ot just me or does anyone else smell a post-haste attempt to re-write the record on anti-terror policy in the 1990's to cover BillyJeff's tracks and to cast the worst possible light upon GW Bush?

I have often written here, and ranted elsewhere in public, just what a disaster the Clinton Administration was for this country. I've been proven right every time. I wonder if any of this will be remembered in 2008 when another Clinton attempts to get herself into the White House.