Oliver North: Enabling Danger
Consider this exchange between Democrat Commission member Tim Roemer and former Clinton administration official Richard Clarke on March 24, 2004:
ROEMER (to Clarke): I want to know, first of all: Was fighting Al Qaeda a top priority for the Clinton administration from 1998 to the year 2001? How high a priority was it in that Clinton administration during that time period?
CLARKE: My impression was that fighting terrorism, in general, and fighting Al Qaeda, in particular, were an extraordinarily high priority in the Clinton administration -- certainly no higher priority.
"No higher priority?" Given what we learned this week from Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaffer, a retired U.S. Army intelligence officer, and newly declassified records from the State Department, Messrs. Roemer and Clarke may wish to -- in congressional parlance -- "revise and extend" their remarks.
LTC Shaffer was part of an undercover counter-terrorism unit code-named "Able Danger." When I spoke with him earlier this week he told me that the group, created in 1999, used open source "data mining" technology to identify and track terrorists. In 2000, the Able Danger unit identified the Al Qaeda cell led by Mohamed Atta, holed up in New Jersey . A year later, Atta and his fellow jihadists -- Khalid al-Mihdhar, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Nawar al-Hamzi -- would carry out the 9-11 attacks.
According to LTC Shaffer, on three separate occasions, officers in the Able Danger unit tried to pass information on the Atta-al Qaeda cell to the FBI but were blocked by military lawyers because of concerns about the legality of collecting information on foreign terror suspects in the United States. Atta had entered the U.S. on a legal visa, and the lawyers determined that he had to be treated like any U.S. citizen even though he was associating with suspected terrorists. "Our lawyers told us to leave them [the Atta cell] alone because that was the policy guidance at the time."
The "policy guidance" that kept intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement officials from exchanging information had been promulgated in 1995 by Jamie Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration and later a member of the 9/11 Commission. Would passing the intelligence on the Atta cell to the FBI have prevented the 9-11 attack?
Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) thinks so. After learning of the Able Danger unit, he said, "If we had taken out that cell, 9/11 would not have occurred, and certainly, taking out these three principal players in that cell would have severely crippled, if not totally stopped, the operation that killed 3,000 people in America."
