Oct 26 2005
Able Danger, Slade Gorton Returns!
TopDog has a post on the return of Slade Gorton claiming again Able Danger was, and is still, irrelevant:
Slade Gorton claims to already know the results of the Senate Intelligence Committee proceedings. He says they will agree with him – that Able Danger was historically insignificant. That it “didn’t have anything to do with 9/11” at all! Let’s hope Mr. Gorton is in for a rude awakening.
Gorton is apparently not the sharpest knife in the drawer. Why would he come out against Curt Weldon after Weldon’s excellent and honorable floor speech last week?
I guess Slade feels he did not look sufficiently foolish the last time around.
Weldon was on Laura Ingraham’s show Monday (10/24/2005) to discuss his “excellent and honorable” floor speech. He mentioned a nugget I had not heard before: Jamie Gorelick called his office in that first week in August when all this was hitting the press to relay that she “did nothing wrong”. He said she also contacted Specter’s Judiciary Committee staff to tell them the same thing. I subscribe to Laura’s website and made this transcript (did the best I could) of that portion of the interview:
————
Laura: What about Jamie Gorelick? Was Jamie…was…I seem to remember that she was at the Department of Defense ah during all of this.
Weldon: I’ve tried to be careful not to ah go after anyone personally and I haven’t but…
L: …right…
W: …some strange things have happened, Laura, ah first of all the week that the NY Times broke the story which was the first week of August on a Tuesday, they ran three straight stories and the 9/11 Commission changed its response to that story every day. But on the Friday of that first week she called my office. Now I’d never met her. She talked to my chief of staff desperately wanted to talk to me … she was on vacation up in Boston and I had my chief of staff call her back to ask what he could help her with and she said just tell Congressman Weldon that I did nothing wrong. Now I don’t know why she’d say that I didn’t accuse her of doing anything wrong…I never even knew who the woman is. But she also called Arlen Specter’s Senate Judiciary Committee staff twice and told them the same thing because I have since talked to them…she called them in August. Now why one commissioner out of nine would feel that they have to call and say they did nothing wrong when we’d never mentioned her name is beside me.
L: …hhmmm
W: But what I’ve since found out is that the staffer from the 9/11 Commission who debriefed Commander Philpott in July of ’04 ah was a guy named Dieter Snell. Dieter Snell worked for Jamie Gorelick on the 9/11 Commission. Now my hypothesis and my assumption is that Dieter Snell was the only…only one who debriefed this Scott Philpott uh in July of ah ’04 and Dieter Snell was the one who made the determination that ABLE DANGER was not historically significant. So the question you have to ask is, well if he worked for Jamie Gorelick and she’s the one who was involved in that firewall and worked both for Janet Reno as an assistant and also in DoD and was involved in the ah WACO incident which at the time the ABLE DANGER team was told was the reason why they had to destroy all the data because of the embarrassment that might occur that occurred after WACO you have to begin to ask questions. And those questions I can’t answer. But the 9/11 Commission should have looked in to all this. You can’t discount a team that developed that kind of data on al-Qaeda that in January of ’01 briefed the new ah General Shelton again with a three-hour briefing you can’t say that their work was historically insignificant because that’s a total fabrication.
Last Week …
I just happened to be listening to Mitch Albom’s radio show (I forgot and left the radio on after Rush) and heard him interview Cokie Roberts. The very rare conservative caller was allowed in and posed the following question to her:
CALLER: “What about ‘Able Danger’ and the Clinton Administration’s failure to act upon the intelligence information?”
COKIE ROBERTS: “Able Danger? I never heard of it.”
And this was NOVEMBER 3, 2005!
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