Two must read posts on Able Danger - 9/11 Commission

9/11 Commission Acknowledges Briefing On Able Danger and The Second Half Of 9/11.

What did Gorelick know, and when did she know it?

Update: Remember Sandy Berger? What did Berger know, and when did he know it?

Update 2: Here's another poignant question: Why Isn't Sandy Berger Going to Jail?

Update 3 (moving to top): Two posts were recommended, but this one (9/11 Commission Changes Its Story -- Again) is even more important than the original two recommended. Netting it out:

...And so now we come back to the National Archives -- and October 2003. One of Sandy Berger's last visits to the Archives where he took highly classified material out the door with him was in October 2003, around the time that the Commission first heard about Able Danger. Does this start to sound just a little too
convenient and coincidental?

Even without the possible Berger theft as part of the story, this constant shifting of the story underscores the massive credibility deficit that the Commission has now earned. First they never heard of Able Danger. Then, maybe a low-level staffer told them about the program but not the Atta identification. Next, the military met with the Commissioners but didn't specify the Atta identification. Now, we finally have confirmation that the Commission itself -- not just its low-level staff -- knew that military intelligence had identified Mohammed Atta as an al-Qaeda operative a year before 9/11. Instead of reporting it, the Commission buried it.

This points to some disturbing questions. It looks like the Commission decided early to pin blame on the intelligence community rather than the bureaucracy which stripped it of its ability to act in the interests of our security. Who benefited from that? Commissioner Jamie S. Gorelick. Who else stood to lose if the real story came out? The answer to that may well be the NSA director who conducted a clumsy raid on the National Archives in the middle of the investigation.

Congress needs to take this up immediately.

Update 4: John Podhoretz postsTHE 9/11 COMMISSION IN MORTAL DANGER:

In a story filed at 7:10 PM, the Associated Press is now confirming all the particulars of what will now forever be called the Able Danger disaster. The 9/11 Commission staff did hear about intelligence-gathering efforts that hit pay dirt on the whereabouts of Mohammed Atta -- in 1999 -- and deliberately chose to omit word of those efforts.

And why? Because to do so might upset the timeline the Commission had established on Atta.

And why is that significant? Because the Mohammed Atta timeline established by the Commission pointedly insisted Atta did not meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.

And why is that significant? Because debunking the Atta-Iraq connection was of vital importance to Democrats, who had become focused almost obsessively on the preposterous notion that there was no relation whatever between Al Qaeda and Iraq -- that Al Qaeda and Iraq might even have been enemies.

I was very skeptical of this Able Danger stuff about Atta, thought it was just s[0]me way Rep. Curt Weldon was trying to sell a book. No longer. This is clearly becoming the biggest story of the summer -- the fact that, as Andy McCarthy alluded to, the "intelligence wall" set up by 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick when she was in the Justice Department did, in fact, cause the linchpin of the 9/11 attacks to evade capture by American law enforcement.

So was the staff a) protecting the Atta timeline or b) Jamie Gorelick or c) the Clinton administration or d) itself, because it got hold of the information relatively late and the staff was lazy?

More important, what will co-chairmen Tom (pound his fist on the table) Kean and Lee (look sorrowful) Hamilton do and say in the next 36 hours about this calamity?