The defunct, over rated and thankfully boarded up 9-11 Commission has come out with their Able Danger response – and it is a whopping loser [hat tip Ed Morrissey]:

“The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document,” the statement says, because Pentagon lawyers were worried about violating restrictions on military intelligence gathering in the United States.

But the commission statement said that because no documents or other evidence had emerged to support the claim, “the commission staff concluded that the officer’s account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation.”

Emphasis mine. This is the worst attempt at a CYA move I ever seen. And it is totally disrespctful to the memory of those who died on 9-11. What a lame ploy.

The incredibly faulty logic here is not using hindsight to realize the significance!! All that is required to make Able Danger credible of investigation is the fact they identified Atta and al- Shehhi 14+ months prior to 9-11, and asked for this info to be passed to the FBI. That is all! Once y0u realize someone was on their trail you go look into it. You do not dismiss it because it is too hard, you are too lazy, your schedule may get ruined, your pet theories will be busted or the politics will work against you. You go find out what happened.

There is no ‘credibility’ issues here! None. Able Danger is as credible as the other leads the government dropped and only realized post 9-11 they were missed. Ed Morrissey has more commentary on this – but I will say it again. Forget what the 9-11 commission of political has-beens has to say. We need answers from Congress, even if the 9-11 commission is required to come up one by one under subpoena. Someone needs to show them how this is done.

UPDATE:

Jim Geraghty has more on this CYA attempt here

Kean and Hamilton are good respectable men, and I’m not the kind of guy who runs around accusing men like this of being damnable liars. But earlier this week, they and at least three other commissioners were insisting they had never heard of this – suggesting that the staffers who were briefed on the unit never passed that information on to them.

Liars? No. Bumbling fools trying to cover up the fact they ignored the identification of two ring leaders and pilots because they couldn’t be bothered is damnation enough. Geraghty shows how an investigation is done by probing on the new details:

We also have some new information on how many names Able Danger found: “The former defense intelligence official, who was interviewed twice this week, has repeatedly said that Mr. Atta and four others were identified on a chart presented to the Special Operations Command. The former official said the chart identified about 60 probable members of Al Qaeda.” In an earlier interview, this official told Government Security magazine that the four names at issue were the only four they had found in the United States. Were the other 56 overseas?

Good points. In fact, we know Able Danger was directed to point its attention overseas after it was rebuffed on going to the FBI. Which allowed Atta and Al-Shehhi to disappear from our sites.

Geraghty seems rightly disgusted with this lame attempt to cover up their mistakes

I was hoping we would have had the staffers identified this week – and I was hoping that some of the Commissioners would begin skeptically questioning why these staffers withheld this information.

Instead, we’re seeing a unified front. “Our report is complete. Able Danger wasn’t ‘historically significant.’ Our staff is trustworthy. The military intelligence guys are lying; Weldon is a fruitcake. Nothing to see here. Move along. Move along.”

No wonder Gorelick was able to stay on the commission – the commission could do no wrong and would ignore anyone who could demonstrate otherwise. The level of denial here is shocking.

END UPDATE:

UPDATE II:

OK, having slid over to the Washington Post to read the reporting myself I am wondering what is going on here.

“None of the documents turned over to the commission mention Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers,” the commission statement said. “Nor do any of the staff notes on documents reviewed in the [Defense Department] reading room indicate that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers were mentioned in any of those documents.”

The documents were not handed over to the staff? That is the excuse? But as Ed Morrissey points out access top classified documentation cannot be provided by the witnesses, the anaysts and program workers. But why are they limiting themselves to their stash. If there was a request to alert the FBI that would be sufficient. The diagrams with the names on it have been produced at sometime since so many seem to have seen them.

One other interesting new tidbit on the timeline and relationship to Clarke/Berger:

According to the commission, the officer said he briefly saw the name and photo of Atta on an “analyst notebook chart.” The material identified Atta as part of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell and was dated from February through April 2000, the officer said.

My post on the timeline and environment in 2000 we see that the memo Clarke wrote which Bergler accidently stole and destroyed was written in spring 2000

The missing copies, according to Breuer and their author, Richard A. Clarke, the counterterrorism chief in the Clinton administration and early in President Bush’s administration, were versions of after-action reports recommending changes following threats of terrorism as 1999 turned to 2000. Clarke said he prepared about two dozen ideas for countering terrorist threats. The recommendations were circulated among Cabinet agencies, and various versions of the memo contained additions and refinements, Clarke said last night.

And from this Washington Post article:

The document, written by former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, was an “after-action review” prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration’s actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It contained considerable discussion about the administration’s awareness of the rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil.

And now we learn from today’s Washington Post a new time line regarding Able Danger and its reporting on Atta

According to the commission, the officer said he briefly saw the name and photo of Atta on an “analyst notebook chart.” The material identified Atta as part of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell and was dated from February through April 2000, the officer said.

“The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document,” the statement says, because Pentagon lawyers were worried about violating restrictions on military intelligence gathering in the United States.

So someone ordered this material deleted from the document at the same time Richard Clarke’s memo on 29 different ways to stop terrorists and the rising threat was being circulated. Does this makes sense to anyone?

Back to the 9-11 commission – they better be right there is nothing here. The naysayers are out there waiting for this to be another Weldon false alarm, and I do not blame them. If Weldon can produce even a minor paper trail then the commission is simply derelict in its duty, and incompetent to boot. The commission said they would have a response out on this in a week, and I said up front that is too quick to do a proper assessment of this matter. It seems they like to repeat their mistakes of haste and error. Did they just do the same thing they did the last three times with Able Danger or is there really nothing there?

I am watching the skeptics corner run by the MinuteMan. I am not ready to jump yet, but one of my conditions to back off was whether the Able Danger report included a whole host of names including Atta’s and three other terrorists. That could give enough room to reconsider actions of people through out this timeline. The reports above mention 60 names. Not enough to cause me to jump yet – but close. I really would like to hear from Weldon’s sources and see if they have enough detail to warrant all this upheaval.