For those who want a concise update on the Able Danger story and Curt Weldon’s recent press conference the Norris Town Times Herald has a great article here. Our blow-by-blow post is here. The big news is the new name Bob Johnson who worked on a parallel data mining effort at the time called the Garland Unit (I suppose because his work was in Garland, TX). This new wrinkle is interesting. There was a reshuffling of responsibility from the original Orion-LIWA group to another SOCOM unit in Texas or Florida (I need to find the reference I saw months back) after the big purge in spring of 2000. The data acquisition and initial data mining processing functions were the focus of the transition. If Bob Johnson was part of this new organizational structure, and also hit on Atta the other 9-11 terrorists – then there is really going to be some embarrassed people at CIA and elsewhere. Atta (or Mohamed el-Amir at the time in Germany) must have been fairly easy to detect as Al Qaeda from public records if that is the case.

I tripped over this post on Free Republic highlighting March 2001 “Inside The Ring” article by Bill Gertz and Warren Scarborough worth further study:

Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote to all DIA personnel this week to explain the protest resignation of a DIA analyst in October. The analyst, Kie Fallis, quit the day after the USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers in Aden, Yemen. Mr. Fallis charged that a report he had written on the threat of a terrorist attack in Yemen was suppressed by senior DIA officials.

Mr. Fallis’ resignation letter stated that he had “significant analytic differences” with DIA superiors over a terrorist threat assessment produced in June.

U.S. intelligence officials said there were warnings, but they arrived too late. The National Security Agency issued a report shortly after the Cole was bombed warning of attacks in the region —too late to be useful.

Adm. Wilson said he asked the Pentagon inspector general (IG) to investigate Mr. Fallis’ charges. In an awkwardly worded statement, the three-star admiral said on Wednesday the IG “found no evidence to support the public perception that information warning of an attack on Cole was suppressed, ignored or even available in DIA.” What about the private perception?

The admiral’s statement drew smirks from several intelligence officials. It relied on a dodge often used by intelligence analysts to dismiss unwelcome information. Saying there is “no evidence” —like that presented to a court of law — is often used to mask the fact there is lots of intelligence to the contrary that spooks would rather not talk about in public.

Someone alert Weldon and Co.!

UPDATE:

More on Kie Fallis at TopDog from a post he did in September.

END UPDATE:

I caught a bit of Mary Mapes on Hardball showing off how incredibly dumb she is. How could anyone be so technically ignorant about computers and yet have any credibility about documents forged on computers? Must be her media peers are as ignorant as she is. I design computer systems and I know that most people are not computer geeks like some of us are. But I also know they would not say things like [paraphrasing]: “the documentation analysis is so technically detailed it makes ones eyes glaze over”. Sorry Mary, it is not that difficult. The flashing image of a MS Word document and the supposed documents from a typewriter is all you need to focus on. It is very difficult to the point of nearly impossible to force a word processor to create a document that could be mistaken for a type-written page. And the opposite is also true. The day CBS can come up with a typewritten page that matches the default MS Word settings is the day they can say the documents may be real.

Powerline had an link to one of CBS’s document analysts who finds it necessary to correct Mary Mapes’ portrayal of events on Rathergate! Why am I not surprised. An example of details getting in Mary Mapes’ way of a good fiction story:

Fiction-Mapes: Page 167: “Concerned, I asked her what the trouble was. She said she had done research on the Internet about President Bush’s military record and found that he had been in Alabama at the time those documents were written, so there was no way they could be true.”

Reality-Emily Will: Book version is ABSOLUTELY FALSE. What did happen is that in our conversation on Sunday I outlined several problems with two questioned signatures, and with the typescript of the documents, including the superscripting and the proportional spacing, and I said that I had been researching online to determine the earliest date of production of typewriters offering those features.

The Mapes tour should be an example to journalists and wannabe journalists on what not to do.

Fiction-Mapes: Page 167: “I was taken aback. Will wasn’t supposed to be doing research on her own about the facts of the story. She was suppose to be looking at the memo’s typeface and signatures for signs of authenticity and forgery.”……

“I told Will that we could handle the information end of the investigation and asked her to confine herself to what she saw on the face of the documents. I recall her telling me “I always work on the whole thing.” She saw her job as doing research and reaching conclusions on the total package, she said.

Reality-Emily Will: Book version is INCORRECT. What did happen is:

As part of my examination, I arranged the known and questioned documents in chronological order, and in the course of the examination, I read them. I noticed some discrepancies in the chronology of events as outlined by the group of documents and pointed these out to Ms. Mapes. This upset her. I did say that it was my practice to examine all parts of documents and that having noticed contradictions in the timeline it seemed appropriate to mention them to her.

The King of Clubs is dead – and good riddance. Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, one of Saddam’s most trusted sadists and one of the last of his regime not yet in custody, has apparently died. And while liberals attempt to go back and re-write history about the march to war in Iraq – all the right has to do is go back and keep reminding the left they wanted to trust Hussein and his psychopaths with WMD technology, billions of hidden dollars and terrorist associates (like Zarqawi, who was in Iraq after he fled for sanctuary there from Afghanistan). When the left brings up the fact intelligence is not science, all we have to do is explain what we do know [hat tip Powerline]:

The red-haired veteran Baathist, with a well-earned reputation for brutality, was credited with helping to finance and arm the resistance against American troops, which has blossomed into a full-scale insurgency. In the pack of playing cards issued by American forces to hunt down Saddam’s acolytes, Al-Douri was the King of Clubs.

He was accused of masterminding the alliance between remnants of the Baathist military and security forces with militant Islamic fighters loyal to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the man responsible for the bloodiest attacks of the conflict.

Al-Douri was implicated in the brutal “Anfal” campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s. Thousands of civilians were killed, including an estimated 5,000 in the town of Halabja, which was attacked with chemical weapons.
…
He also had direct involvement in the suppression of the Shia Muslim uprising in southern Iraq in 1991. He was quoted as warning the Kurds not to follow the same path as the Shias. He said: “If you have forgotten Halabja, I would like to remind you that we are ready to repeat the operation.”

Yep, these are the kinds of people we should have trusted to behave after 9-11…

In one hopeful sign the GOP has not totally imploded yet, the fundraising picture for the dems is looking pretty bad.

The Democratic National Committee under Howard Dean is losing the fundraising race against Republicans by nearly 2 to 1, a slow start that is stirring concern among strategists who worry that a cash shortage could hinder the party’s competitiveness in next year’s midterm elections.
…
Now, the latest financial numbers are prompting new doubts. From January through September, the Republican National Committee raised $81.5 million, with $34 million remaining in the bank. The Democratic National Committee, by contrast, showed $42 million raised and $6.8 million in the bank.

This is not all good news. back in July it was 4 to 1 in favor of the reps. But the dems are close to what I predicted in June:

12/06:

RNC raising $106M, $65.2M in the bank

DNC raising $45.2M, $16.4M in the bank

That means the Republican pace has dropped off since summer. The good news is the dems are spending heavy and have nearly 2/3rds less than expected.

And yes, France is still burning. Emotional frustration by a disenfranchised minority usually burns itself out by now. Something else is sustaining this. Could it be hope that France will fall to Islamist pressure? Does France truly care enough to fight back? Or have they become so subservient to the government they have lost the will and desire to fight for their country? I fear France, being the most strident socialistic state in Europe, will fall. After decades of dealing with problems via policy and government fiat, the will to do something may not be there. At least it has not been there to date. Watch for France to sue for peace soon. And pay attention to the terms of surrender.

UPDATE:

Capt Ed sees the continuation of rioting as I do:

The peak of the rioting passed as the wannabes and the bandwagoners have gone back to their own lives. The core of this uprising has not left at all, and in fact appear to be once again gaining momentum despite more police in the streets. These riots have organization, resilience, and structure — and where those elements exist, so does strategic thinking. The media may chalk this up to youthful frustration over unemployment and discrimination, but that fails as an explanation more with each passing day.

If, as I suspect, this is a coordinated and sustained effort by Jihadists, then France probably already has the terms for stopping the riots by now. It would also explain France’s limp response to date. The leaders probably fear a threatened escalation and are trying to find a ‘process’ way through this mess. Is France negotiating a settlement with the terrorists? A worthy question to ask. If this is a sustained effort it can only result in some form of capitulation by France. It cannot lead to the overthrow of France (and in fact will lead tothe hard line right wing taking over) so it must serve some broader hidden purpose.

END UPDATE

Finally, this story says GOP moderates turn from Bush.

REPUBLICANS in Congress this week suffered an implosion unprecedented in the Bush era, as moderates in both Houses rebelled against a budget measure in which the leadership tried to combine cuts in programs for the working poor with new tax cuts for the rich.

The fact is the anti-miers attacks were so over the top, and so anti-moderate that moderates feel no allegiance to far right partnerships anymore. There was no realistic foundation to the anti-miers attacks, so they ended up spilling over and being felt by one and all who did not see this supposed threat to humanity. And in fact there never was one. Miers was an unknown, and that spooked the far right and the punditry. But these folks have never toned down their attacks on conservatives who are simply a few degrees less radical than they are. I heard Michelle Malkin and Laura Ingraham on Laura’s show yesterday and they cannot understand what is wrong with the GOP. Well, the GOP is more than the far right. And when the far right viciously attacked Miers it was felt far and wide. When the far right corrects their mistakes and holds out peace offerings instead of insulting tirades, then things will move forward again. The right needs to respect the moderates and their right to voice their opinions and ideas. Treat them with professional courtesy.

UPDATE:

Powerline is confused as to what happened too.

So what has happened in the past twelve months to terrify so many of our Republican office-holders? Two hurricanes struck, and some observers accused a federal agency of responding too slowly to one of them. Tom DeLay was indicted, in what was basically a bad joke, by an absurdly partisan and utterly discredited Texas Democrat DA. An aide to the Vice President has been accused of lying to a grand jury about telling the truth to the press about a mountebank Democrat’s lies about the administration. And the President’s poll ratings–more or less irrelevant, given that he can’t run for office again–have dropped into a range occupied, at one time or another, by every President from Lyndon Johnson to the present.

These are pathetic reasons for our representatives in Congress to be in a Chicken Little mode.

These are not the reasons. Folks, to ignore or underestimate what the message sent by the anti-miers crowd is going to permanently impact the conservative movement. Miers deserved respect! And she was not afforded that respect. All conservatives who deviate even fractionally from what is perceived as the party line felt those attacks on Miers. So is it a surprise they pull back support now and push for their demands? Of course not. They would be stupid to assume they had the respect of the far right and had any chance of getting their piece of the policy pie now. This is not about events outside the party – it can weather all of these. This is about the spirit and heart and commeraderie of the party being destroyed by the punditry in this country. When tactics and comments that would be associated with Carville and Begala were leveled at inpure conservatives from NRO, George Will and the such they destroyed the unity of the party in their one issue panic.

Get a clue folks. The injury to the party was real, was deep and is still festering.