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Reader 'Scotian' expresses a good point in comments to a post at Kevin Drum's site. It articulates what I've been mulling as I've listened to the media interviews of people in New Orleans expressing increasing frustration at the relief that has not arrived:
A nurse at Charity Hospital in New Orleans interviewed by CNN tonight, after describing conditions of trying to care for patients with no electricity and no running water and having to hand pump patients' ventilators, basically told the CNN host that she has been told for the past two days that the patients and hospital staff would be evacuated, but for some reason, help has not come. The nurse was almost in tears. A patient had died and been wrapped in a body bag because of the conditions. You basically can't provide modern medicine with no electricity and no running water. The nurse couldn't really understand why help had not arrived to one of only a handful of hospitals in the city. The host promised to put her plea to the FEMA director who she would be interviewing later in the program. Running downstairs later tonight, I heard a CNN reporter describing refugees from New Orleans moved to some other town in Louisiana that had not been equipped with anything, no portapotties, etc. I mean, talk about a way to start a health crisis.What really appalls me about all of this is that for the preceding 24-36 hrs before Katrina struck it had become obvious that this storm was going to wreak tremendous damage. So why then did not the federal government actually preposition as much as possible the obvious supplies, resources, and so forth? Take the ships that were just deployed to the region, if they had started their trip back then they would be in place a good two days earlier. No, there has been no leadership both before and after this hurricane struck, and I have to wonder how many avoidable deaths will end up having occurred because of this lack of thought/planning. I fear that though is an unanswerable question....
It's not like this is Darfur. As Scotian points out, there was some warning about this hurricane. And one would expect that federal, state and local agencies would be practicing as a matter of course for similar crises, admittedly perhaps not as severe as the way the flooding engulfed New Orleans. And all such crises are inherently unpredictable and full of constantly moving targets. But so many things are predictable -- people need to be evacuated, electricity will go out and therefore the power needed to run water will shut down, the infirm and hospitalized will need to be rescued, law and order will need to be secured, refugees will need to be sheltered and given access to food, clean water and washing facilities. There seems to be an eerie deer in the headlights reaction to the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans coming through from the media reports. It's hard to believe four years after 9/11 that the response is not more effective.
Update: I guess Bush tried to kill FEMA and didn't quite get around to replacing it with anything else. Isn't this the sort of crisis management responsibility governors are supposed to be good at? Incredible. Can he deputize Leavitt to be in charge?
(Thx to MP for the correction).
Still Able Danger. The Senate Judiciary committee to hold public hearing on Able Danger, the NYT reports. Also out today, a 10,000 word interview with lead Able Danger whistleblower LTC Anthony Shaffer from GSN.
"Extremely disappointing speech":
Daily Kos? Air America? Nope. A letter to National Review. More disappointment here, here, and here. This is bogus leadership, Bush is painfully out of touch, on total autopilot. More from Fred Kaplan....Doesn't he realize that more people may have died from this storm than died on September 11? I don't expect him to say he's gonna get Katrina "dead or alive" for what she's done to America. But for crying out loud, can he put off the laundry list of all the things his wonderful bureaucracy has done so far until the end of the speech and begin by addressing the pain we all feel as this tragedy is unfolding in slow-motion on live TV? We're talking death on a massive scale, and within 2 minutes he's thanking Texas for housing refugees (way to perpetuate that "I'm all about Texas" stereotype).
And don't get me started about how the first image of Bush coming back to Washington as thousands have died in a tragedy was him walking down the stairs of Air Force One with Barney tucked under his arm…
I love President Bush, but that was a pathetic performance and I agree with what Byron wrote about his vacation. And I'm with you: Bring in the troops. Lead! Don't tell me that the federal government will be working "with" state and local governments...
Cheap shots aside, even NRO's Byron York thinks President Bush should be spending more time governing from the White House:
Amen....There is a legitimate question here. Even given the wonders of modern communications which allow him to stay in touch with virtually everyone virtually all the time, does the president really need to spend five weeks of the summer based at his home in Crawford? What would be wrong with a two-week vacation? After all, he goes to Crawford at other times of the year, and, of course, he can spend all the time he wants there when he is no longer president.
According to a White House pool report, press secretary Scott McClellan was asked today whether, given the events of August, the president needs a vacation after his vacation. McClellan said, "This is not what you would call a vacation. This is the president's home. He always enjoys coming here. But when you're president, you're president 24/7." That last part is certainly true, but while he is president, shouldn't George W. Bush spend more time at the White House?
This month began with the deaths of 21 U.S. Marines in Iraq, continued through the Cindy Sheehan protest/media circus, and ended with Hurricane Katrina. There is no doubt that, if only from a political and communications perspective, the president would have been in a better position to deal with those issues if he had been based in Washington for much of the month. For one thing, he would have had the stage to himself, given the traditional absence of Congress. For another, he would have been better placed to make those more substantive comments about the war that David Frum and others have called on him to make. And lastly, his message would not have been subject to the distractions of all the vacation/nonvacation talk that inevitably comes up when he spends an extended period of time in Crawford.
There is a proper time for a president to leave Washington, but five weeks is just too much.
And here is the photo of Bush from yesterday accompanying the post.
Baghdad stampede kills hundreds:
...Rumors of a suicide bomber helped set off a stampede Wednesday among tens of thousands of Shiite Muslim pilgrims on a Tigris River bridge, killing at least 637 people as panicked worshipers hurled themselves off the bridge or trampled others underfoot, Iraqi authorities and survivors said.
The stampede was the single deadliest loss of life during the 2 ½-year Iraq war. While the disaster was not directly caused by attacks, tensions had been high because of an insurgent mortar-and-rocket attack upon pilgrims earlier in the day that killed seven. Crowding at checkpoints set up on the bridge to search pilgrims for bombs also directly contributed to the disaster, authorities and witnesses said.
...Members of the Mahdi Army militia stood guarding the belongings later in the afternoon. One Mahdi Army militiaman called out to passing pilgrims still streaming toward the shrine hours after the disaster, telling them not to take any food or water on the Sunni side of the bridge in case it were poisoned.
Many survivors and security officials blamed the Shiite security for the disaster, however....
Early Warning. From Romenesko:
Times-Picayune's 2002 five-part series warned of disaster
Wall Street Journal
The paper's "Washing Away" series began: "It's only a matter of time before south Louisiana takes a direct hit from a major hurricane. Billions have been spent to protect us, but we grow more vulnerable every day." Joe Hagan writes: "This week, the newspaper is living its own prophecy." Dan Shea, a Times-Picayune editor, tells him: "We will not miss a day of publishing, if the brave people whom I've lived with for the last two days can help it. Most of our readers are now outside of the city and we can reach them on the Internet."
> Times-Picayune repeatedly raised federal spending issues (E&P;)Posted by Laura at 10:59 AM
Katrina: Where to donate.
More.
National Guard trucks haul residents seeking refuge
through floodwaters to the Superdome. (Credit, CNN).
Wednesday am Update: Reprieve may be on the horizon:
...But the biggest ally in the fight to save the city may be nature itself, [US Army Corps of Engineers senior project engineer Al Naomi] said.
“The flow has pretty much eased mainly because the lake is dropping in elevation,” Naomi told Reuters.
In 36 hours, the lake, which was whipped high by the storm, should return to normal levels and the water now flooding New Orleans would begin to drain, Naomi said.
He said the historic French Quarter, the hallmark of New Orleans and the main draw for its huge tourist industry, should escape with only minor flooding because it sits five feet above sea level....
New Orleans slowly "filling with floodwater," after lake levee breaks. Terrifying. Bush is even cutting short his vacation to monitor relief efforts.
"Death sentence for millions." The LAT on Bolton at the UN:
And more from the New York Times:Bolton's amendments have been received like a wasp's nest at a picnic. Throughout the drafting process, a fragile consensus had been built; now everything may end up back on the table, and time is extremely short. A core group of 32 nations is scrambling to finalize a document by Friday, to be submitted to member states on Tuesday. U.N. diplomats fear that the only way to reach consensus will be to water down the draft until it is all but meaningless.
The original proposal spelled out internal U.N. reforms, such as creation of a new human rights panel that would exclude rights violators, as well as pledges of increased foreign aid, measures to combat climate change and calls for nuclear disarmament. Bolton's amendments focus on cutting references to international efforts the U.S. has opposed, such as the International Criminal Court, while strengthening sections on spreading democracy, freeing markets and fighting terrorism.
His most odious change was to delete all references to the Millennium Development Goals, which commit industrialized nations to cutting world poverty in half by 2015. Part of the deal was that rich countries would eventually contribute 0.7% of their gross national product to foreign aid. The goals were a world-changing burst of optimism from international leaders in 2000, a recognition that all people have the right to be free from misery, starvation and preventable disease and that those able to pay have some responsibility to alleviate needless suffering.
Most of Europe is moving closer to the 0.7% goal, but the United States has long lagged; last year it contributed 0.16% of national income to foreign aid. Bolton's amendments make it clear that the Bush administration would like to pretend the millennium agreement never happened. This is a slap in the face for the aid organizations and international donors that have been working for years toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals. But it's far worse than that for the Third World, where their abandonment would be a death sentence for millions.
Buyers' remorse? Or has this been Bush administration policy all along to destroy the Millenium Declaration?On Sept. 14, the leaders of more than 170 countries are to show up to sign an agreement, under negotiation for six months, to bolster the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which was drafted with great fanfare in 2000. Chief among the Millennium Declaration's goals was for developed countries, like the United States, Britain and France, to work toward giving 0.7 percent of their national incomes for development aid to poor countries by 2015.
Alas, if the American proposal is to be taken seriously, President Bush has had a change of heart. The draft document that Mr. Bolton shared with other diplomats calls for striking almost all mentions of the Millennium Development Goals, which also call for poor countries to adopt good governance.
It's official: Benjamin Netanyahu announces his candidacy to take on Ariel Sharon for leadership of the Likud party:
How much of his support is coming from anti disengagement forces in the States?...The move could set in motion an eventual split in the party, with Sharon bolting the Likud and starting a splinter faction of his own.
Netanyahu said Sharon, who founded the party in the early 1970s, had abandoned the path of the Likud, and had adopted the way of the Israeli left. "The man who got the votes turned his shoulder. He abandoned the principles of the Likud. He chose a different path, the path of the left," he told a mixed audience of reporters, supporters and a few vocal opponents...
Netanyahu was flanked by a varied group of supporters, including former cabinet minister Natan Sharansky, author Eyal Meged, Ze'ev Jabotinsky - grandson of the founder of Revisionist Zionism, and a number of anti-disengagement Likud "rebels," among them lawmakers Naomi Blumenthal, Michael Gorolovsky, and David Levy.
Rumsfeld asked to testify before Congress about Iraq. "...Mr. Warner has also said he will schedule a hearing in the next several weeks on whether the Pentagon has failed to hold senior officials and military officers responsible for the prisoner abuses that took place at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, and at other detention centers in Iraq, Cuba and Afghanistan."
New Orleans News: My friend Andras writes in, "...I've found most news reports really frustrating to listen to - reworded official statements and the same general, uninspired comments repeated over and over. I've found two amazing sources of online first-hand info:
-- BBC Online's "Talking Point" reader's blog:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/4193244.stm
-- Postings to a hurricane blog maintained by Times-Picayune reporters
inside a generator-equipped 'hurricane bunker' in the paper's offices
http://www.nola.com/newslogs/breakingtp/
http://www.nola.com/weblogs/nola/
Update: And go read Chris Mooney's prophetic piece from The American Prospect a few months ago, subheadline, "What would happen if a Category 5 hurricane were to hit New Orleans?"
Journalist death toll in Iraq exceeds that of Vietnam. Update: The latest killed, Reuters TV soundman, Waled Khaled, 35, was killed by US soldiers. "A cameraman with him was wounded and then detained by U.S. soldiers. Reuters is demanding the release of its wounded employee." More from Reuters' Luke Baker. (Via Romenesko)
Wednesday Update. US military holding one Reuters photographer in Abu Ghraib.
Able Danger Update. Mark Zaid, the attorney for former Able Danger official LTC Anthony Shaffer, clarifies a couple points. He is now representing several former Able Danger officials and contractors. According to Zaid, none of these former Able Danger officials ever asserted that Able Danger had identified Mohamed Atta as physically being in the US; rather the project had allegedly identified Atta as being linked in some fashion (not necessarily a direct one) with the Brooklyn-based Blind Sheik. Hence the 'Brooklyn cell' as a term of art.
If you subscribe to the State Department press lists, an e-mail would have popped into your inbox on Sunday attributed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. The text was a message from the Secretary congratulating the Iraqi people on finishing the draft of their new constitution. If you also read the Sunday papers, or perused the news on the internet, you would have probably already read that the “finished” constitution had been presented to parliament over the objection of the Sunnis, and the likelihood of its rejection in a referendum planned for October was now rather high.
But in the surreal world of the Bush administration, even bad news is now good news (once, at least, the administration only complained about the lack of media attention to the good news out of Iraq; not that bad news was actually good).
Anyone who has witnessed or experienced a dictatorship’s manipulation of the news (or watched too much of the Fox News Channel) would find the Bush administration propaganda on Iraq, and in particular Secretary Rice’s statement, uncomfortably close to the kind that totalitarian states employ. In totalitarian states, the people often assume that the government always lies and that its statements are not to be trusted. In America, where we tend to want to believe our government, we rely on the free press (or late night comedians) to expose government lies; a job the mainstream media seems to be finally warming up to. I wonder how much ridicule the Secretary of State will be exposed to in the coming week.
Update: More alarm from Freedom House's Nina Shea and John Cullinan.
Two new spy novels out in the UK, including a new one by The Company author Robert Littell.
Guatemala's war on women. Update: Reader AR notes, "The chief bad guy in Guatemala's genocide/femicide, Efrain Rios Montt, is a 'born again Christian' and his political comeback was supported by his good friend and spiritual advisor, the 'Rev.' Pat Robertson."
Darfur (via Kevin Drum). A general reader like myself might have been unaware that things have not gotten any better over the past several months. WTF? Update: 60 Minutes featured a long segment on the genocide in Darfur Sunday night.
A reader writes in to ask, what's happened to Baghdad based writer, Riverbend? No posts since July 15th.... Late Update: Readers write to say that Riverbend is in touch from the region.
This New York Post report on Able Danger is the most revealing so far. I had heard as well that Able Danger was shut down after it submitted papers for its budget review that included a huge China analysis that had the Pentagon review general scratching his head. But I had not heard about the Condoleezza Rice stuff, which would go a long way to explaining why Able Danger may have been shut down:
So Able Danger's data mining results seemed more all over the board, a kind of tinfoil hat producing adventure better left to freepsters and google?The private contractors working for the counter-terrorism unit Able Danger lost their jobs in May 2000. The firings following a series of analyses that Pentagon lawyers feared were dangerously close to violating laws banning the military from spying on Americans, sources said.
The Pentagon canceled its contract with the private firm shortly after the analysts — who were working on identifying al Qaeda operatives — produced a particularly controversial chart on proliferation of sensitive technology to China, the sources said.
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, the veteran Army officer who was the Defense Intelligence Agency liaison to Able Danger, told The Post China "had something to do" with the decision to restructure Able Danger.
Sources said the private contractors, using sophisticated computer software that sifts through massive amounts of raw data to establish patterns, came up with a chart of Chinese strategic and business connections in the U.S.
The program wrongly tagged Rice, who at the time was an adviser to then-candidate George W. Bush, and former Defense Secretary William Perry by linking their associations at Stanford, along with their contacts with Chinese leaders, sources said.
The program also spat out scores of names of other former government.
More on Able Danger contrator J.D. Smith:
...J.D. Smith, a defense contractor who claims he worked on the technical side of the unit, code-named "Able Danger" (search), told reporters Friday that he helped gather open-source information (search), reported on government spending and helped generate charts associated with the unit's work. Able Danger was set up in the 1990s to track Al Qaeda activity worldwide....
During Friday's roundtable with Smith, he was asked by reporters about Atta, who was using another name during 1999-2000. Smith said the charts Able Danger was using had identified him through a number of name variations, one being "Atta."
An independent terrorism analyst pointed out to FOX News that German intelligence had no record of Atta before the Sept. 11 attack; that's significant because Atta headed up the Sept. 11 Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg. The analyst also questioned how Atta could be connected to Rahman, who was in prison by the mid-1990s.
Smith claims that one way the unit came to know Atta was through Rahman. Smith said Able Danger used data mining techniques — publicly available information — to look at mosques and religious ties and it was, in part, through the investigation of Rahman that Atta's name surfaced.
Terry McDermott, author of Perfect Soldiers and a genuine authority on 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, weighs in on Able Danger and what was knowable about Atta back in early 2000:
Having interviewed lead Able Danger official LTC Anthony Shaffer a few times now, I think there may be something to this theory. Shaffer just strikes me as telling it how he understands it. But it's hard to figure out why no documentary evidence on Able Danger's findings has been forthcoming over the past half month of the highly publicized controversy over it, if there was anything decisive to put forward. Update: Reacting to earlier reports, Taciturn, who knows Shaffer from intelligence work, is skeptical of the Able Danger skeptics. His post includes this not-throw-away graph:Atta's academic, immigration, credit, transit and telephone records provide a fairly complete account from the time he left his native Egypt in autumn 1992 to his death. This includes the period during which Able Danger is said to have identified him as a terrorist in the United States. The story those records, and corroborating interviews, tell is that Atta was not in the United States and made almost no contact with the U.S. until June 2000.
In November 1999, Atta and three friends traveled from Germany — via Istanbul and Karachi — to Afghanistan, where they intended to receive military training before going to fight the infidels in Chechnya. They were, instead, recruited into Al Qaeda and assigned the Sept. 11 mission. Atta returned to Hamburg in late February, and the next month he made what is thought to be his first contact with someone in the United States. He e-mailed dozens of flight schools inquiring about commercial pilot training for "a small group of Arab men." He also e-mailed a friend from Egypt who was studying at a Florida university and asked about visa requirements. In May, he applied for a visa from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Six weeks later he landed in Newark, N.J...
Even if Able Danger somehow produced a name, "Mohamed Atta," that might not mean much. Variations of "Mohamed" are overwhelmingly the most common name in the Muslim world. It is James, John and Robert combined. Atta isn't Smith or Jones, but it isn't Einstein either. There are plenty of Mohamed Attas — and plenty of Mohamed el-Amirs too. The likelihood of mistaken identity is enormous.
But there is another possibility. Over the last four years I have interviewed dozens of people who swore they saw Atta somewhere he wasn't. This includes an assortment of waiters, students, flight instructors, taxi drivers and, more dramatically, two women who each claim to have been married to Atta, this despite the fact that they were never in the same city at the same time he was.
How could it be that so many people remember that they knew Atta, that they saw him or his name, when all the facts argue otherwise? I don't think they are all lying. Maybe none of them are. I think Atta entered an American psyche desperate for a name and face and an explanation. He came complete with what has become one of the iconic images of 9/11 — his Florida DMV mug shot, an image so memorable, so powerful and perfect for the moment that it allowed people to see in it whatever they needed to see. I think people subsequently, subconsciously placed that face where it made sense to them. There is no reason that a congressman or even two career military men searching for solutions are any less susceptible to seeing what they need to see, where they want to see it...
After it was killed as a program in March 2001, is it conceivable that Able Danger -- hardware, slides, etc. -- was recycled as parts and bytes in other Army Information Dominance Center programs? Could that be an explanation for the lack of documentary evidence on its findings? One reason I have been pondering this is the chart Weldon has been showing since 2002 and which he writes about in his book as having given to Stephen Hadley in 2001, he has only since June credited as coming from "Able Danger" rather than Army INSCOM/LIWA at Ft. Belvoir. For instance, no where in his book is Able Danger mentioned, and Shaffer told me he only briefed Weldon on Able Danger when he and Phillpott approached Weldon in May of this year to try to secure funding for a new Navy-headed data mining program, Project Able Providence. So...where is the 2002 chart from? Is it the Able Danger chart? Or did Weldon get ahold of the Able Danger chart in 2001 thinking it was somebody else's chart (Army INSCOM?) Has Able Danger been laundered? Or its real findings reimagined or reinvented after the fact?...The hardware used in AD might very well have been decommissioned and passed on for others to use. Depending on how this was done it could make recovery of the actual source data used difficult if not impossible. However, working papers and finished products don’t just up and walk away. They get passed around in email; they get pasted into PowerPoint slides; they get turned into Analyst Notebook charts; and they linger on computer workstations.
Ari Berman, the author of the much heralded The Strategic Class offers five ideas as policy alternatives to the 'daily outrages' he's been chronicling in his Nation blog.
Able Danger's LTC Anthony Shaffer and his attorney Mark Zaid are going to be on O'Reilly tonight.
WSJ:
Seems like the Dems should be inviting Cheney to appear on the stump for their GOP competitors in '06, huh?President Bush's job approval ratings are at their lowest point of his presidency as only 40% of U.S. adults have a favorable opinion of his job performance and 58% have a negative opinion, according to a Harris Interactive poll.
This is a decline from two months ago, when the president's ratings were 45% positive and 55% negative. The war in Iraq and the economy climbed to the top of a list of issues Americans say are most important for the U.S. to address. Social Security declined sharply.
At the same time, Vice President Dick Cheney's approval ratings slipped to 35% from 38% in June, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's approval ratings dropped to 40% from 42%...
Big comprehensive Plame/Fitzgerald story from the LAT. It's not that there's so much new in here as it has the whole chronology and teases out the details and the patterns. What the piece reiterates is how the Rovean strategy of Swift Boating critics of Bush administration policy -- trying to attack them personally rather than making an argument on the facts -- is what puts Rove in legal jeopardy in the Plame case:
And this worth noting, "Individuals close to the case say that Fitzgerald is likely to wrap up his inquiry this fall."...But it appears Rove was more focused on Wilson's background, politics and claims he ostensibly had made that his mission was initiated at the request of the vice president.
Rove mentioned to reporters that Wilson's wife had suggested or arranged the trip. The idea apparently was to undermine its import by suggesting that the mission was really "a boondoggle set up by his wife," as an administration official described the trip to a reporter, according to an account in the Washington Post.
This approach depended largely on a falsehood: that Wilson had claimed Cheney sent him to Niger. Wilson never made such a claim.
Libby reportedly told prosecutors that he did not know Plame's identity until a journalist told him. His lawyer did not return calls for comment.
Rove's lawyer has said his client did not know Plame's name or her undercover status when he first talked with reporters after Wilson's public statements.
"The one thing that's absolutely clear is that Karl was not the source for the leak and there's no basis for any additional speculation," attorney Robert Luskin said, adding that he was told Rove was not a target of the inquiry.
A Rove ally has said it was necessary for Rove to counter Wilson's exaggerated claims about the import of his mission.
However, some of Rove's colleagues say that he and others used poor judgment in talking about Wilson's wife.
"With the benefit of hindsight, it's clear our focus should have been on Wilson's facts, not his conclusions or his wife or his politics," said one official who was helping with White House strategy at the time.
Rival Shi'ite militias attack each other in Baghdad and Najaf:
...At least eight people were killed and dozens wounded, health officials said, in street battles in Najaf involving pro-government Badr Organization fighters and supporters of Sadr, who has joined Sunni Arabs in denouncing a constitution the Shi'ite-led government is preparing to force through parliament.
Secular Iraqi Shiite woman leader plans to flee Iraq:
Bet she won't be granted any more audiences with Bush. (Via Atrios)."This is the future of the new Iraqi government - it will be in the hands of the clerics," said Dr. Raja Kuzai, a secular Shiite member of the Assembly. "I wanted Iraqi women to be free, to be able to talk freely and to able to move around."
"I am not going to stay here," said Dr. Kuzai, an obstetrician and women's leader who met President Bush in the White House in November 2003.
Given the historical relationship between Weldon's pet projects and his daughter's company's lobbying clients, any hint of whether the Able Danger stuff is "doing well by doing good" for the home team?
The networks refuse to run an ad that highlights their meager coverage of Darfur compared to the Runaway Bride.
The Wisconsin Project's Gary Milhollin's NYT oped casting doubt on the pushed back NIE estimate on when Tehran might get nuclear weapons never references the most obvious point: the presumption that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program turned out to be totally wrong. Maybe the answer is, we can never know, we can't determine if the intelligence is accurate until it's too late one way or the other, there's an extraordinary degree of uncertainty about what we know and don't know that's prone to extraordinary politicization. So, then what? Can you craft a policy around the certainty of intelligence uncertainty?
Fareed Zakaria's foreign policy priority? A plan for greater energy conservation and independence:
And what's the one single thing that would make a difference? Not drilling in Anwar, of course, but our cars:...Reducing our dependence on oil would be the single greatest multiplier of American power in the world. I leave it to economists to sort out what expensive oil does to America's growth and inflation prospects. What is less often noticed is how crippling this situation is for American foreign policy. "Everything we're trying to do in the world is made much more difficult in the current environment of rising oil prices," says Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World." Consider:
· Terrorism . Over the past three decades, Islamic extremism and violence have been funded from two countries, Saudi Arabia and Iran, not coincidentally the world's first- and second-largest oil exporters. Both countries are now awash in money, and no matter what the controls, some of this cash is surely getting to unsavory groups and individuals...
Are American political constituencies such that this can never become part of the platform of a serious US political leader? As Zakaria concludes:It's true that there is no silver bullet that will entirely solve America's energy problem, but there is one that goes a long way: more efficient cars. If American cars averaged 40 miles per gallon, we would soon reduce consumption by 2 million to 3 million barrels of oil a day. That could translate into a sustained price drop of more than $20 a barrel.
With people like Ari Berman and others thinking about the Dems and foreign policy, perhaps not just a critique of the Democratic strategic class is in order, but a putting forward of some of the more innovative ideas and thinkers like Zakaria and Jeff Sachs on greater energy independence and debt relief/poverty reduction would be useful.We don't need a Manhattan Project to find our way out of our current energy trap. The technologies already exist. But what we're searching for is perhaps even harder: political leadership and vision.
Michael Crowley: "....Later today or tomorrow we'll look at a question that has largely slipped through the media cracks about Abramoff, Tom DeLay, and potential Russian arms dealers." Russian arms dealers? That kind of gets your attention.
Tuesday Update: Abramoff's emails (.pdf linked), including (on page 75) the ones with a Russian arms dealer Vadim, a secretary to Mrs. Nevskaya of Naftasib. The arms were for Israeli settlers near Hebron. All I can say is, you couldn't make this stuff up. More Sopranos than West Wing.
More Able Danger, you ask? Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott is going to be issuing some sort of public statement today, I'm told. The statement will supposedly assert how AD was allegedly able to identify Atta, (the 9/11 Atta, not the other Atta who was deported from the US to Israel), in early-mid 2000, and assert that the photograph of Atta the team allegedly came up with was not the visa one we have seen since the attacks, but from other sources. Able Danger was apparently stood up in 1999 even before the bombing of the USS Cole. And Able Danger was killed in March 2001, during the Bush administration, under whose orders, it's not totally clear. One thing I've heard today suggests that Phillpott's statement to the 9/11 commission in July 2004 involved allegations of linkages between Al Qaeda and the leadership of foreign countries, say the one where the majority of the 9/11 hijackers came from. So stay tuned.
Another source says that DoD did complete an investigation, interviewed everybody, and 'there's just nothing there. . . Able Danger never produced any kind of documents of the type being described.' DoD is going to brief various Congressmen and Senators, including Weldon's House Armed Services committee but not issue a public statement more definitive than the di Rita one I posted earlier. But I've also heard that there's a separate Army investigation of the Able Danger claims than the Pentagon one being led I believe by Steve Cambone's office.
(Editor's note: I've updated this post).
Update: Here's more on Phillpott's statement from the New York Times. And a third source has come forward as well:
The chart got stuck on the wall?...The officer, Scott J. Phillpott, said in a statement today that he could not discuss details of the military program, which was called Able Danger, but confirmed that its analysts had identified the Sept. 11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, by name by early 2000. "My story is consistent," said Captain Phillpott, who managed the program for the Pentagon's Special Operations Command. "Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000." [...]
The statement from Captain Phillpott , a 1983 Naval Academy graduate, who has served in the Navy for 22 years, was provided to The New York Times and Fox News through the office of Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania, who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a longtime proponent of so-called data-mining programs like Able Danger...
Representative Weldon also arranged an interview with a former employee of a defense contractor who said he had helped create a chart in 2000 for the intelligence program that included Mr. Atta's photograph and name.
The former contractor, James D. Smith, said that Mr. Atta's name and photograph were obtained through a private researcher in California who was paid to gather the information from contacts in the Middle East. Mr. Smith said that he had retained a copy of the chart for some time and that it had been posted on his office wall at Andrews Air Force Base. He said it had become stuck to the wall and was impossible to remove when he switched jobs.
The Fireman and the Arsonist. ChoicePoint stinks (via Kevin Drum). ChoicePoint not only sells crooks your pesonal information, it sells its identity theft victims their personal information that the company sold to the thieves and fraud artists in the first place! How about that. How can they possibly be allowed to profit from their irresponsibility and lack of accountability? As the LAT characterized the absurd arrangement, "Critics say buying such services seems like paying protection money to the thugs who pose the biggest threat." Isn't there a US governmental agency that sees fit to protect citizens from this? What about the equivalent of a "Do Not Call" list on selling citizens' sensitive/personal/financial data, that would allow an opting out or a voluntary opting in that if violated would hit offending companies with stiff penalties?
No Evidence (So Far). The AP reports on the Pentagon's current response to Able Danger claims:
(Thx to reader WA for the heads up).The Pentagon has been unable to validate claims that a secret intelligence unit identified Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta as a terrorist more than a year before the attacks, a Defense Department spokesman said Monday.
Larry Di Rita said that some research into the matter continues, but thus far there has been no evidence that the intelligence unit, called ''Able Danger,'' came up with information as specific as an officer associated with the program has asserted.
''What we found are mostly general references to terrorist cells,'' Di Rita said, without providing detail.
That officer, Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said Able Danger identified as terrorists Atta and three other future Sept. 11 hijackers in 2000. But, he said, military lawyers stopped the unit from sharing the information with the FBI out of concerns about the legality of gathering and sharing information on people in the United States.
His assertions have been publicized by Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees.
Di Rita said Pentagon researchers have found no evidence that Able Danger had Mohamed Atta's name. He said he was unsure whether the unit came up with the identities of the other three hijackers but then said that none of Shaffer's specific claims had been validated...
After visiting the US military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay last month, The New Republic's Spencer Ackerman argues (in a subscription only piece) that better than simply transferring the extralegal practices of Gitmo to other facilities around the globe, better to bring Gitmo up to international legal and human rights code, for among other reasons, making the information it gleans from terrorism suspects there admissable in court:
It's a complicated piece worth getting ahold of. After September 11th, the Bush administration condemned the Clinton administration for allegedly having treated terrorism as a law enforcement problem. But Spencer traces the evolution of Gitmo and the war on terror to show how the military campaign against terror has produced suspects that in the end need to be processed through some sort of judicial/law enforcement system that Gitmo is currently incompatable with, and how its current extrajudicial operations ultimately undermine the war on terror. At the point we've already come to, that makes Bush administration's insistence that enemy combatants can be held indefinitely outside any legal norm or precedent not just a moral problem or image problem as it certainly is, but a practical problem:...But Guantánamo is more than just an image problem; it is a moral, legal, and strategic one as well. Indefinite detention and the embrace of torture as policy are betrayals of fundamental American principles. Sometimes in war, moral tradeoffs are necessary, but that's not the case at Gitmo, which yields intelligence of little value and where suspect interrogation techniques threaten the legal prosecution of terrorist suspects--an increasing problem as the war on terrorism morphs into more of a law-enforcement struggle. Simply shutting down the facility would do nothing to address these issues. After all, Guantánamo may be the flagship of the post-September 11 enemy-combatant detention apparatus, but the system extends to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, and other far-flung corners of the globe that the administration doesn't disclose. The only way to "solve" Guantánamo is to introduce human rights protections and due process for its inmates--and, more importantly, to abandon the principle that underlies the Bush administration's entire post- September 11 U.S. detention system: that the only way to win the war on terrorism is to grant nearly limitless authority to the president...
Al Qaeda's increasing European profile suggests that Guantánamo is providing little useful intelligence. But Guantánamo and the rest of the U.S. detention apparatus are also actually undermining prosecution of the war on terrorism, because Europe won't accept evidence procured via torture or duress...As London's then-police chief, Sir John Stevens, explained, information American officials had shared with their British counterparts indicated that the men were truly dangerous...There was only one problem: No information from Guantánamo Bay was admissible in British court, because it had been obtained under dubious legal circumstances...
The appeal of jettisoning established law in favor of broad executive prerogative during wartime, and especially during asymmetric or unconventional wars, is nothing new. "There is a very strong temptation in dealing both with terrorism and with guerrilla actions for government forces to act outside the law, the excuses being that the processes of law are too cumbersome, that the normal safeguards in the law for the individual are not designed for an insurgency, and that a terrorist deserves to be treated as an outlaw anyway," Sir Robert G. K. Thompson, the architect of the successful British counterinsurgency in Malaya and adviser to the U.S. command in Vietnam, warned in the mid-'60s. "Not only is this morally wrong, but, over a period, it will create more practical difficulties for a government than it solves."
Indeed, the real danger--to the war on terrorism, American values, and the rule of law--is unchecked executive authority. There would be nothing wrong with keeping detainees at Camp Delta and elsewhere if they were provided legal protection and their interrogations were restricted to the Geneva Conventions-compliant Army Field Manual on interrogations. Nor would there be any harm to national security. Senator Graham, a former Air Force JAG, stated two weeks ago that, when he recently visited Guantánamo, he asked "all the interrogators there: Is there anything lacking in the Army Field Manual that would inhibit your ability to get good intelligence? And they said no. I asked: Could you live with the Army Field Manual as your guide and do your job? They said yes." Whether the Bush administration can live within those rules is another matter.
Susie Madrak offers the time honored advice to those sleuths trying to get to the bottom of Able Danger-gate: Follow the moolah, straight to the King of Prussia outpost of the giant defense contractor, SAIC..
Time: 9/11 commission chair Thomas Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, calls on Stephen Hadley, the White House and the Pentagon to respond definitively to Congressman Weldon's allegations that they were presented with evidence that the Pentagon had identified Mohamed Atta a year before the attacks:
More from Newsweek. And also from Time, more allegations about Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the San Diego hijackers who rented a room from an FBI informant and was watchlisted in August 2001:"I'm offended, because people say, 'Well, why didn't you do anything?'" says Kean.
"This was information that was not given us." After largely declining comment for nearly two weeks, a Pentagon spokesman told TIME last week that the Defense Department has been "aggressively looking into these allegations" but has yet to find documentation to support them.
Meanwhile, another possible gap in the 9/11 report has emerged. The panel found that hijacker Khalid Almihdhar had left the U.S. from the summer of 2000 until two months before the attacks. But USAID Systems, a Florida ID firm, confirmed last week that he was issued a card—reproduced in a book last year—in New York or New Jersey exactly six years before its expiration date of Dec. 30, 2006. Kean says there was solid evidence that Almihdhar was out of the U.S. at that time but any indication to the contrary "would be important to follow up."
Update: Eric Umansky has more on the administration's non-response to Weldon's claims.
Geez, what does the conservative National Review have against Congressman Weldon?
Fox News seems to have the latest on the state of play of the Able Danger claims, and there do seem to be some important inconsistencies:
For one, hasn't Shaffer said in other recent interviews that he himself didn't remember if Atta was on the Able Danger analyses, but was reminded of it after the September 11 attacks by a colleague? So is he now saying he directly was dissuaded by a SOCOM two star from focusing on Atta because he supposedly had the legal protections of a US person? Reported Dan Eggen today:...Shaffer said in an interview on FOX News' "Hannity and Colmes" Thursday night that he and a fellow officer — a Navy captain — briefed the commission on Able Danger's findings.
"The fact is this — they were told not once but twice," he said.
Although Shaffer conceded that during his own personal briefing of Sept. 11 commission staffers in Afghanistan in Oct. 2003, he didn't specifically name the terrorists. Instead, he detailed how Able Danger had uncovered information about three terror cells with the use of then-advanced data-mining techniques.
Shaffer also claims that Able Danger members were basically dissuaded from further investigating Atta because he was here as a foreign visitor. He said a two-star general above him was "very adament" about not looking further at Atta.
"I was directed several times [to ignore Atta], to the point where he had to remind me he was a general and I was not ... [and] I would essentially be fired," Shaffer told FOX News.
The former chairman of the Sept. 11 commission said in a telephone interview that he believes the onus is on the Pentagon to do a speedy evaluation of the claims by Shaffer and others that Atta and three other hijackers had been identified one year before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
"The files are in the possession of the Defense Department, so really nobody else besides the administration can get to the bottom of it ... if there exists a file on Able Danger," said Chairman Tom Kean.
While making no judgment on the veracity of the claims, former commissioner Tim Roemer said inconsistencies are appearing between the story and the facts that the commission knows.
For one, Roemer asked how Able Danger got a photo of Atta in 2000 for its alleged chart of terrorists when he had not yet applied for a U.S. visa.
"If Atta's name is mentioned, you send off a host of fire alarms, neon lights, people's hair gets on fire and you're going to find out what that's all about. But you also need evidence, you can't just say here's my recollection of something I thought I saw in a notebook. You've got to say, 'Here is the chart,'" Roemer said...
"We'll be mad as hell frankly if stuff was withheld from us. That would be terrible. So I, you know, until we have the answer from the administration, I don't think anybody is in a position to say something is true or not true," Kean said...
Kean said the commission had initially been promised a statement from the Defense Department last week.
...Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who has been on paid administrative leave from the Defense Intelligence Agency since his security clearance was suspended in March 2004, said a Navy officer and a civilian official affiliated with the Able Danger program told him after the attacks that Atta and other hijackers had been included on a chart more than a year earlier.
But because he was not intimately familiar with the names and photographs of suspected terrorists, he did not realize that hijackers were listed until it was alleged to him after the attacks, Shaffer said. All of the charts that could support his claims have also disappeared, he said.
"I did see the charts, and I did handle the charts, but my understanding of them was like a layman," Shaffer said. "We had identified them as terrorists. But even now I do not remember all the names."
Knight Ridder's Jonathan Landay reports on a new al Qaeda-funded Taliban emerging as a serious security threat in Afghanistan:
Instead of collapsing, however, the movement transformed itself. When the snows melted this past spring, the Taliban surprised Afghan and U.S. commanders with its renewed insurgency.
"We were all under the assumption that things in the country were under control," Defense Minister Wardak said.
Afghan and Western officials alleged that the escalating insurgency is being aided by Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.
Islamabad, they charged, seeks a weak government in Kabul that it can influence. It also wants to keep tensions boiling in Pashtun-dominated areas on the frontier to block a settlement of a decades-old border dispute that the new Afghan Parliament is expected to try to end, they said.
"Pakistan is ... fanning the flames," charged Latfullah Maashal, the chief spokesman of the Afghan Interior Ministry. "The Pakistanis ... do not want to see a strong, peaceful and prosperous country (Afghanistan)."
Wishful thinking. A former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer writes in response to Bruce Jentleson's suggestion that the SFRC take the lead in holding hearings on how the US might draw down in Iraq without creating a wake of further instability, the following:
I only wish Jentleson was correct about the influence/prestige of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee! However, I suspect he may be engaged in wishful thinking. To a very real degree, the SFRC has labored for several decades to re-attain the "glory days" of the Fulbright era, when Chairman Fulbright single-handedly initiated official Washington's push-back against the Vietnam War and President Johnson's policies in support thereof. Yet, that was a very different time. Committee chairmen were genuine power brokers -- yet today, the real power and influence lies more with the party leadership in the Senate. Also, the more centralized and limited media options in the '60s made Fulbright's break all the more jarring. Yet, today, we are awash in news analysis and blog musings about "Whither Iraq" -- a set of SFRC hearings are not going to dramatically change the dynamic.
Other reasons for my skepticism:
1) The SFRC has already tried to initiate a national conversation, with limited results. In the summer/fall of 2002, during the year-long lead-up to the war, the Committee held a robust series of hearings to explore some of the likely issues that would arise after the initial U.S. military action. The Administration refused to send any witnesses, arguing that to do so would imply that the decision to go to war had already been made when, in fact, the Administration was awaiting the results of the UN inspections process. (Insert appropriate joke here.) Senator Biden, then the Chairman, assembled an illustrious set of witnesses, but apart from some media coverage, it mostly met with yawns and silence. Ditto a series of hearings in the spring of 2004, when the insurgency was beginning to turn nasty. Dick Lugar, then the Chairman, again put together an impressive set of witnesses, but any recommendations or insights were ignored by the Administration.
2) That leads to the second reason -- this Administration could care less about Congressional counsel. Unless Bush hears criticism from someone inside his inner circle, or one of his genuine conservative allies in the Congress (a Santorum or Frist or Kyl or Hastert), it's not going to penetrate. As it is, Administration conservatives already distrust the SFRC, because it is led by a moderate Republican and a Democrat running for President in 2008. The John Bolton episode didn't help.
3) The final reason is Dick Lugar. Lugar, a genial man and very knowledgeable on the issues, will not cut and run from his President. He prefers to be a good soldier rather than break with the White House publicly. We saw this during the Bolton hearings and we would see a similar reaction during any Iraq hearings: Lugar hemming and hawing in a long-winded series of statements, touching on all the faults of the Administration policy in a "on the one hand, on the other hand" approach, but then lining up with the White House, taking care to ensure any criticisms are made in the softest tone possible. Biden alone criticizing the policy in a forceful and assertive manner is not enough -- for the SFRC to matter, its Chairman has to be on board.
Getting In, Getting Out. Foreign Affairs' Gideon Rose in the New York Times:
Go read. (Via Greg Djerejian)....The Bush doctrine has collapsed, and the administration has consequently embraced realism, American foreign policy's perennial hangover cure...
And echoing the "grow up" theme of Rose's piece aimed at the Bush administration, the Post's David Ignatius has some advice for Democrats:
Bruce Jentleson proposes that the task of thinking how to get out of Iraq without leading to greater instability be a bipartisan endeavor lead by the Senate Foreign Relations committee. With Republicans such as Walter Jones, Chuck Hagel, and Democrats like Russ Feingold talking about how to get out, it seems this could be the way to go....America doesn't need more of the angry, embittered shouting matches that take place on talk radio and in the blogosphere. It needs a real opposition party that will lay out new strategies: How to withdraw from Iraq without creating even more instability? How to engage a world that mistrusts and often hates America? How to rebuild global institutions and contain Islamic extremism? How to put the U.S. economy back into balance? A Democratic Party that could begin to answer these questions would deserve a chance to govern.
Meantime, writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, my friend Jason Vest explores how the Pentagon unlearned the lessons of how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq.
Tom Maguire and Mickey Kaus on the theory of "two Mohamed Attas":
But wouldn't the two briefcases of documents turned over by the Pentagon to the 9/11 commission have already indicated if this was all the result of a misunderstanding? (Hat tip Nick S. for the links).If you send NEXIS the following request
it will turn up a 1/28/91 Atlanta Constitution story with the following initiallly astonishing paragraph:mohammed atta and date bef 09/11/01
There was a report on "60 Minutes" in which an expert said that Abu Nidal cells were in the United States. Is that true?It turns out that this is not the same Mohammed Atta who flew a plane into the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's a Mohammed Atta who was (as the story says) an Abu Nidal terrorist extradited to Israel to face charges of fire bombing and machine-gunning a bus.Yes, In New York, Dearborn a Michigan city with a large Arab population and Los Angeles. But that doesn't mean they're terrorists. They're support groups, and for the FBI to uncover enough about them and to go through the business of trying to deport them is a long and difficult matter that is not at all easy to accomplish. In 1987, the FBI arrested an Abu Nidal organization member Mohammed Atta in New York on an Israeli warrant charging him with participating in an attack on a bus carrying civilians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 1986. They're around.
Update: More from Eric Umansky, Kevin Drum, and Tom Maguire, who writes to point out, the difficulty (for the Pentagon, for the commission, for the press) in trying to prove a negative.
Able Danger Late Update: The reason the details on what Able Danger actually found have been so frustratingly vague may not be just because the information is lost or compartmentalized but because LTC Shaffer concedes he's not very familiar with its findings. See this. For instance, he says he didn't realize on 9/11 the Able Danger team had actually identified its lead hijacker Mohamed Atta a year earlier, but an Able Danger team member told him. It's anticipated that two other individuals associated with Able Danger may come forward in coming days. 'Dr. Able Danger,' the PhD statitician who allegedly alerted Shaffer of the fact that Able Danger had identified Atta after the attacks, and a Navy expert in futuristic warfare, Capt. Scott Phillpott, with whom Shaffer has been working recently to try to get funding -- from Weldon and the Hill -- for a new Able Danger-like data mining program. (Presumably, Phillpott is the Navy official who approached the 9/11 commission's Dieter Snell in July 2004 and said that he had briefly seen a chart that showed AD had ID'd Atta a year in advance of the attacks). As to the timing of why this is all coming out only now, Shaffer revealed in his appearance on NPR's Talk of the Nation Wednesday that it was Weldon's idea to make a fuss over Able Danger being shut down, only after Shaffer and Phillpott recently approached him to get support for funding their new data mining proposal. But, still I'm confused about the timing of this coming out now, as, I've said like a broken record for two weeks, Weldon's been showing some such chart from an Able Danger like program for more than three years. So the question of the timing of Shaffer's being pushed forward now by Weldon is still a mystery. Weldon's comments on Fox yesterday suggest he doesn't appreciate the focus turning now on what the Pentagon knew and whether it shared all it had with the 9/11 commission. It turns out the 9/11 commission requested any documents on Able Danger from the Pentagon not once, but three times, according to Republican former chair of the commission, Thomas Kean, who's also not sounding very happy about having the commission's integrity challenged by Weldon. (Where's the White House on this? Anything?)
Weldon's had the Able Danger inspired chart for more than three years now (according to his book, since weeks after September 11th), so what is going on? And contrary to his recent pronouncements, he didn't apparently give his only copy to Steve Hadley in October 2001 because he was showing another copy at this talk in May 2002. So....why won't he produce the chart now?
Inteldump's Jon Holdaway has some more insights on the Able Danger story. (Holdaway's original post on the Able Danger subject last week attracted the comment of then still anonymous LTC Shaffer, so it's particularly worth paying attention to). Shorter Holdaway: the recent revelations would seem to point to internal-SOCOM issues, which apparently are not unknown in Holdaway's Army-JAG world. E.g. if you listen to Shaffer really carefully, who suppressed Able Danger's findings were not just "DOD" lawyers (and certainly not DOJ lawyers), but SOCOM lawyers, and even SOCOM command, which apparently (according to Shaffer) was inhibited in the post-Waco atmosphere from being exposed as doing anything that could be perceived as legally controversial on US soil. See Shaffer's comments from the NYT yesterday:
(emphasis added)....The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the bureau...
"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001...
"It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.
It seems likely DIA and even OSD may not have known anything about Able Danger or its findings, especially at the time. But what happened when the 9/11 commission requested all documents on Project Able Danger from the Pentagon and the administration in October 2003 -- and then a second time -- is a key and unresolved question here. Did the commission get all the documents, and if not, why not? There's been a hint from Shaffer's camp of documents going missing, including from his office.
Holdaway also cautions that he still has a lot of concerns with the whole story, and particularly the fact that Shaffer can only be providing a "limited, albeit important" side of the story, given his role was providing support to the Able Danger team, not at the center of it. Stay tuned, I don't think we've heard the end of this story, and anticipate we could see it evolve quite a bit.
More here.
Go read Kevin Drum on Iraq and the Democrats:
...Our current policy in Iraq is a disaster that's virtually certain to fail — and Clinton, Biden, and Kerry know it. So why continue supporting it? The fact is that a timed withdrawal is probably good policy and good politics. On a substantive level it's the policy most likely to work, and on a political level it's the policy most likely to differentiate a future candidate from both the Bush administration and the gray hordes of the Democratic foreign policy establishment. It's also popular. Although only a third of Americans favor immediate withdrawal, nearly two-thirds want to see us withdraw within the next year...
The Able Danger ball moves into the Pentagon's court:
More soon.Shaffer said he was told the commission obtained only two briefcase-size loads of documents from at least 15-plus boxes of information on Able Danger.
Lt. Col. Chris Conway, a Pentagon spokesman, said Wednesday an investigation into Able Danger was under way.
The department "has been working to gain more clarity on this issue. Accordingly, we continue to interview a number of individuals associated with Able Danger," Conway said.
Conway said it was too soon to comment on findings related to the program.
Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission's follow-up project, said the commission is awaiting the results of the Pentagon's investigation.
Update: More thoughts on the Able Danger saga from Captain V, who knows Shaffer.
Able Danger official Ltn. Col. Anthony Shaffer and 9/11 commission chair Thomas Kean are on NPR's Talk of the Nation now.
Here's the Delaware County Daily Times' Gil Spencer column on his interview with Able Danger official, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer. There's a hint more on what AD had on the Brooklyn cell, and also the reiteration of something I wasn't clear on: that US Army Delta force had been involved in advising the team that conducted the disastrous siege at Waco:
What do we know about the US military's role at Waco?"We were able to identify two of the three cells that conducted 9/11. We didn’t ID everybody in the cell, we didn’t know how they were organized or their objective, just their connections to al Qaida."
Yet when he tried to share this information with the FBI, he said he was blocked from doing so by Department of Defense. Part of the reason was recent history and the lack of trust that existed between the federal agencies.
The Branch Davidian debacle in Waco that left 70 people dead was still in the memory banks of all those who had been involved in it, including the U.S. Army Delta Force that advised the siege team.
When it came to al-Qaida, Shaffer believes the mindset of the military was "if we pass the information on to the FBI and they do something with it and if something goes wrong (we’re) going to get the blame for it."
Late Update: It turns out readers know a lot about the advisory role of Special Ops/Delta force at Waco. See here, here and here.
Slate's Fred Kaplan on the reincarnation of diplomacy in Bush's second term, and the merits of trying with two tough nuts, North Korea and Iran.
Able Danger official identified. Delco Times columnist Gil Spencer, who has long covered Curt Weldon's Pennsylvania district, has just interviewed the Able Danger official who is going public tonight on Fox News. Spencer is the first journalist I am aware of to reveal the identity of the Able Danger official who originally briefed the 9/11 commission staff about Able Danger's findings back in October 2003 at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. That official is DIA civilian and Army reservist Ltn. Col. Tony Shaffer. He served in a liaison capacity between Able Danger and the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, Florida, and he flew into Afghanistan with special ops in a boots on the ground capacity. (Shaffer confirmed to Spencer that he is indeed the "Anonymous" who has posted some comments about Able Danger over at Inteldump, by the way.) More soon on their interview. It's still a bit vague as to what exactly on Atta and the "Brooklyn cell" the Able Danger team came up with, but Shaffer did tell Spencer that the Able Danger team briefed then Special Ops commander, now Army Chief of Staff Pete Schoomaker on their findings. Shaffer also told Spencer that he had met with Pentagon intel czar Stephen Cambone in the E-ring today about the Able Danger issue, so clearly the Pentagon is paying attention. Stay tuned.
Update I: Talked to Shaffer's attorney, Mark Zaid. Shaffer apparently is on administrative leave from the DIA...Zaid said over a pretty trumped up clearance issue that may have to do with his role in trying to brief the 9/11 commission on Able Danger, though Zaid says Shaffer had permission from a 2-star general to do so.
A couple thoughts. It seems the next object of scrutiny resulting from the Able Danger revelations may be questions about whether documents from the Able Danger project were somehow blocked from getting from the Pentagon to the 9/11 commission, or even destroyed.
But it's also disturbing that it's so hard to understand even now that Shaffer has gone public what exactly Able Danger came up with in terms of information on Atta and the other "Brooklyn cell" individuals they allegedly identified. I have talked to three different journalists who have all interviewed Shaffer (two before he went public, a third -- Spencer -- after, and a fourth by email), and this is the case in every single interview, a kind of vagueness about what exactly they found. I asked Zaid about it and he said it had to do with classification issues, that he himself isn't cleared for. But it seems to me that without establishing just what exactly Able Danger came up with that might have been actionable regarding 9/11, the value of Able Danger and the whole question of whether information on its findings were somehow withheld from the commission, etc. will be very difficult to judge.
Update II: A bit more....
Shaffer says that the Able Danger team identified these individuals (previously reported as having included Atta, al-Shehi, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi) as part of the "Brooklyn cell," but what exactly they had on them, even if they had their names, is still very murky and unclear from this interview. He says he briefed then 9/11 commission executive director Philip Zelikow and commission staff in Afghanistan about Able Danger. But he expressed to Spencer the sense that explaining to the 9/11 commission staff what Able Danger had accomplished was “like showing a wristwatch to a pig.” (Perhaps the vagueness on the details about what Able Danger actually identified may have been an issue in this regard. Calls to the 9/11 Public Discourse Project haven’t been returned yet).
Shaffer says he was trying to broker a connection between SOCOM and the FBI. Shaffer told Spencer that one reason that Able Danger got denied permission to brief the FBI on their findings was that there was a fear not just among Pentagon lawyers but among Special Ops command that if things went badly with any FBI operation to take out the al Qaeda cells they had identified, it would be “another Waco."
Spencer says, “He didn’t blame the DoD lawyers so much, but the command” (for blocking the team from sharing their findings with the FBI). “Not Schoomaker….It rose to the level of a 2-star, 3-star general,” who he didn’t name...
So....Did SOCOM or other military command block dissemination of Able Danger's findings because.....they didn't want it to be uncovered that the US military had been given US person data to mine? Or they didn't see the value of what Able Danger had found? Fear of another Waco? Some other reason?
Update III: The NYT's Philip Shenon interviews Shaffer. As Kevin Drum points out, it seems someone at the Pentagon has some explaining to do.
I hear that one of the former Able Danger officials is going public and will be on Fox News tonight. I also hear this is partly a result of Weldon's office becoming concerned late last week that they didn't have the documentary evidence to back up some of their claims about AD's identification of Atta, just the word of this defense intel official. The key question in my mind, is what specifically on Atta and the other three 9/11 hijackers they allegedly identified did they have; and if they had something, why didn't the Defense Department forward it in the documentation on Project Able Danger that it sent on to the 9/11 commission at the commission's request?
Nibras Kazimi on corruption in the Iraqi defense ministry:
Hands down, the best reporting coming out of Iraq is being done by the 26-year-old Baghdad bureau chief of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain, Hannah Allam. Last week, she filed a lengthy follow-up to a story she broke a month ago, the upshot of which was that a sum in excess of $500 million went missing in the space of eight months somewhere within Iraq's Ministry of Defense. That amount accounts for about half of the ministry's budget.
So let's do a bit of math: In the span of about 240 days, some $4 million was spent each day. Half that money went to line the pockets of a web of about 15 Iraqi embezzlers in league with probably another 15 non-Iraqi middlemen. The other half went to equip, clothe, feed, and pay the salaries of 100,000 members of Iraq's newly minted armed forces. Could low Iraqi troop morale be explained by these men going unpaid for several months while armed with guns that keep jamming?
A report conducted by Iraq's Supreme Board of Audit on all of this was delivered to Prime Minister Jafari's office on May 16. But don't expect him to do anything about this just yet; the man is still getting around - after being in office for four months - to hiring the deputy ministers of his cabinet. These deputies will serve only for another four months come election time, but hey, what's the hurry, right?
Meanwhile, the former acquisitions manager for the defense ministry, Ziad Tariq Cattan, has left town. He carries dual Iraqi and Polish citizenship and has a legal-residency permit in Germany. In July, days after he told Ms. Allam that he would be back in Baghdad to answer allegations and clear his name, Mr. Cattan took a flight from Damascus bound for Germany. His two brothers picked him up from the airport and slaughtered sheep in celebration; he had just eluded an Iraqi arrest warrant issued a couple of weeks earlier...
Isikoff on the Abramoff case. Apparently Tyco turned over its documents on him to the Feds, demanding Abramoff repay $1.5 million it paid him to lobby Karl Rove (whose secretary, coincidentally, formerly worked as Abramoff's secretary).
Ron Brownstein pokes around the question of permanent US military bases in Iraq:
Link....Leaks from the Pentagon have deepened the uncertainty. In May, the Washington Post reported that military planning did not envision permanent bases in Iraq but rather stationing troops in nearby Kuwait. But the report noted that the Pentagon was also planning to consolidate U.S. troops in Iraq into four large fortified bases.
On the theory that concrete speaks louder than words, critics see such work as a sign the administration is planning to stay longer than it has acknowledged.
John E. Pike, a defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, points to another indication. Although the United States is systematically training Iraqis to fight the insurgents, he notes, the Pentagon has not taken key steps — like making plans for acquiring tanks or aircraft — to build an Iraqi military capable of defending the country against its neighbors.
To Pike that means that although the United States might reduce its troop level in Iraq, the fledgling nation, like Germany or South Korea, will require the sustained presence of a large American contingent, perhaps 50,000 soldiers. "We are building the base structure to facilitate exactly [that]," he says....
Eric Umansky interviews Weldon about Able Danger/Atta. It seems he still can't recall whether Atta was on the chart he gave to then deputy NSC advisor Stephen Hadley in the weeks after September 11th (supposedly his only copy). But I have a question: how did Weldon get his chart back in time for the May 2002 briefing at Heritage I attended?
(Photo from Political Animal).
Anyone read Not a Good Day to Die? (I'm linking to Phil Carter's amazing review of it, and this transcript of an event with its author, Sean Naylor). What'd you think of it?
Dept. of Blogs Are Cool. Over at Intel-Dump, Weldon's source or one of his former Able Danger collleagues appears to be posting as Anonymous. (Hap tip Tom Maguire). I am intrigued. But Anon does nothing in his post to convince that they had the goods on Atta. He just continues with the screed against the lawyers and the bureaucrats and the commission. That just strikes me as weird. If I had been in a position to tell the US government a year in advance of 9/11 about its key hijacker, and I had been blocked, I think I would sound more like Colleen Rowley -- the former Minneapolis FBI agent -- e.g. devastated, public and angry, not like a salesman for a datamining program that didn't in the end save anybody's life. Wouldn't 9/11 and the 3,000 lives he could have saved have emboldened this person to come forward in a very public way? But this is someone who seems most interested in furthering a grudge, anonymously. I don't find it very convincing that they had the goods. Update: Two cheers for JPod.
Disengagement Day. The time for Israeli settlers to depart Gaza has arrived:
As some 50,000 Israeli security forces are deployed to enforce withdrawal of the last of the 8,500 Israeli settlers from Gaza's 21 Jewish settlements, Palestinians looked on:...At the isolated Morag settlement, hundreds of residents blocked troops at the gate. One man burst into tears as he pleaded with officers not to remove him from his home. ''I am not your enemy. I served as an officer under you,'' the man told Brig. Gen. Erez Zuckerman, the commander of the army unit waiting at the gate.
Zuckerman listened and wiped sweat off his brow, then hugged the young man. ''We love you, you are part of us,'' he told the assembled settlers...
Ha'aretz has blanket coverage.Thousands of Palestinian police, meanwhile, moved into positions near Jewish settlements to keep away Palestinian crowds and prevent attacks by militants during the pullout -- something that Israel warned would bring harsh retaliation.
Palestinian residents watched settlers packing up, and seeing moving trucks leave settlements dispelled the skepticism many Palestinians felt until the last minute.
Hundreds of supporters of the militant Islamic Jihad group celebrated in Gaza City on Sunday, with gunmen firing in the air, and teens setting off fire crackers and distributing sweets. The violent Hamas group organized special midnight prayers of thanks at Gaza mosques.
Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas offered the Israelis reassurance.
''We tell the Israeli people, `You have chosen the right path,''' he told Channel 10 TV.
Israeli soldiers enter the Jewish settlement of Neve Dekalim as tires burned after being lit by protesters (Credit: Oded Balilty, AP).
Murray Waas has the latest on the Plame investigation, and interestingly, the decision to appoint a special prosecutor in the first place:
Go read....The combination of Ashcroft's close relationship with Rove, the omission of critical information from the FBI by Rove during his initial interview with agents, that Ashcroft had been briefed about that interview in particular, and the-then recent appointment of Comey, all allowed for a forceful case being made by career Justice Department employees be made that the attorney general should step aside and a special prosecutor be named.
But says one government official familiar with the process: "When Ashcroft was briefed on Rove, that ended the argument. He was going to be removed. And there was going to be a special prosecutor named." ...
Able Danger claims seem to dissolve. Kevin Drum has all the latest "much ado about nothing," as one source characterized the recent claims to Time. More from Eric Umansky. Late Update: Is the jury still out after all? Time for the defense intelligence official to have some courage and come forward publicly. After all, his silence the last time did nobody any good, did it? This hiding behind Weldon's skirts is not serving the cause of resolving what Able Danger was able to achieve. Let's see the goods and how it worked. Update II: I suspect JPod is right here.
Further lowering of US expectations in Iraq. Frank Rich on the endgame. Update: More from Nadezhda.
Steve Clemons is right on here. The fact that President Bush shows contempt for the families of those killed in Iraq, that he and his handlers treat them as a partisan nuisance when they don't abide by Karl Roveian designed photo ops, shows in what shameful political times we live in. It's hard to find the words. Cindy Sheehan had some on a poster she held up as Bush drove by without stopping en route for a $25,000-a-plate fundraiser: "Why do you make time for donors and not for me?"
Update: Here's a link to the folks at "Camp Casey."
No Proof of Atta ID. The successor organization to the 9/11 commission sent this memo around tonight (.pdf document linked). I am going to post most of it, since it has the whole sequence of events and claims. The way I read it, there's no proof the 9/11 commission was ever provided with documentary evidence that the Able Danger project identified Mohammad Atta in advance of the attacks:
If you go back to Weldon's comments from 2002 about the same project, you'll notice he doesn't mention Atta. That seemed to get entered into the story later.On October 21, 2003, Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, two senior Commission staff members, and a representative of the executive branch, met at Bagram Base, Afghanistan, with three individuals doing intelligence work for the Department of Defense. One of the men, in recounting information about al Qaeda’s activities in Afghanistan before 9/11, referred to a DOD program known as ABLE DANGER. He said this program was now closed, but urged Commission staff to get the files on this program and review them, as he thought the Commission would find information about al Qaeda and Bin Ladin that had been developed before the 9/11 attack. He also complained that Congress, particularly the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), had effectively ended a human intelligence network he considered valuable.
As with their other meetings, Commission staff promptly prepared a memorandum for the record. That memorandum, prepared at the time, does not record any mention of Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers, or any suggestion that their identities were known to anyone at DOD before 9/11. Nor do any of the three Commission staffers who participated in the interview, or the executive branch lawyer, recall hearing any such allegation.
While still in Afghanistan, Dr. Zelikow called back to the Commission headquarters in Washington and requested that staff immediately draft a document request seeking information from DOD on ABLE DANGER. The staff had also heard about ABLE DANGER in another context, related to broader military planning involving possible operations against al Qaeda before 9/11.In November 2003, shortly after the staff delegation had returned to the United States, two document requests related to ABLE DANGER were finalized and sent to DOD. One, sent on November 6, asked, among other things, for any planning order or analogous documents about military operations related to al Qaeda and Afghanistan issued from the beginning of 1998 to September 20, 2001, and any reports, memoranda, or briefings by or for either the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Commanding General of the U.S. Special Operations Command in connection with such planning, specifically including material related to ABLE DANGER. The other, sent on November 25, treated ABLE DANGER as a possible intelligence program and asked for all documents and files associated with “DIA’s program ‘ABLE DANGER’” from the beginning of 1998 through September 20, 2001.
In February 2004, DOD provided documents responding to these requests. Some were turned over to the Commission and remain in Commission files. Others were available for staff review in a DOD reading room. Commission staff reviewed the documents. Four former staff members have again, this week, reviewed those documents turned over to the Commission, which are held in the Commission’s archived files. Staff who reviewed the documents held in the DOD reading room made notes summarizing each of them. Those notes are also in the Commission archives and have also been reviewed this week.
The records discuss a set of plans, beginning in 1999, for ABLE DANGER, which involved expanding knowledge about the al Qaeda network. Some documents include diagrams of terrorist networks. None of the documents turned over to the Commission mention Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers. Nor do any of the staff notes on documents reviewed in the DOD reading room indicate that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers were mentioned in any of those documents.
A senior staff member also made verbal inquiries to the HPSCI and CIA staff for any information regarding the ABLE DANGER operation. Neither organization produced any documents about the operation, or displayed any knowledge of it.
In 2004, Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) and his staff contacted the Commission to call the Commission’s attention to the Congressman’s critique of the U.S. intelligence community. No mention was made in these conversations of a claim that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers had been identified by DOD employees before 9/11.
In early July 2004, the Commission’s point of contact at DOD called the Commission’s attention to the existence of a U.S. Navy officer employed at DOD who was seeking to be interviewed by Commission staff in connection with a data mining project on which he had worked. The DOD point of contact indicated that the prospective witness was claiming that the project had linked Atta to an al Qaeda cell located in New York in the 1999-2000 time frame. Shortly after receiving this information, the Commission staff’s front office assigned two staff members with knowledge of the 9/11 plot and the ABLE DANGER operation to interview the witness at one of the Commission’s Washington, D.C. offices.On July 12, 2004, as the drafting and editing process for the Report was coming to an end (the Report was released on July 22, and editing continued to occur through July 17), a senior staff member, Dieter Snell, accompanied by another staff member, met with the officer at one of the Commission’s Washington, D.C. offices. A representative of the DOD also attended the interview.
According to the memorandum for the record on this meeting, prepared the next day by Mr. Snell, the officer said that ABLE DANGER included work on “link analysis,” mapping links among various people involved in terrorist networks. According to this record, the officer recalled seeing the name and photo of Mohamed Atta on an “analyst notebook chart” assembled by another officer (who he said had retired and was now working as a DOD contractor).
The officer being interviewed said he saw this material only briefly, that the relevant material dated from February through April 2000, and that it showed Mohamed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn. The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document (“redacted”) because DOD lawyers were concerned about the propriety of DOD intelligence efforts that might be focused inside the United States. The officer referred to these as “posse comitatus” restrictions. Believing the law was being wrongly interpreted, he said he had complained about these restrictions up his chain of command in the U.S. Special Operations Command, to no avail.
The officer then described the remainder of his work on link analysis efforts, until he was eventually transferred to other work. The officer complained about how these methods were being used by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and mentioned other concerns about U.S. officials and foreign governments.
At the time of the officer’s interview, the Commission knew that, according to travel and immigration records, Atta first obtained a U.S. visa on May 18, 2000, and first arrived in the United States (at Newark) on June 3, 2000. Atta joined up with Marwan al-Shehhi. They spent little time in the New York area, traveling later in June to Oklahoma and then to Florida, where they were enrolled in flight school by early July.
The interviewee had no documentary evidence and said he had only seen the document briefly some years earlier. He could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification. Nor could the interviewee recall, when questioned, any details about how he thought a link to Atta could have been made by this DOD program in 2000 or any time before 9/11. The Department of Defense documents had mentioned nothing about Atta, nor had anyone come forward between September 2001 and July 2004 with any similar information. Weighing this with the information about Atta’s actual activities, the negligible information available about Atta to other U.S. government agencies and the German government before 9/11, and the interviewer’s assessment of the interviewee’s knowledge and credibility, the Commission staff concluded that the officer’s account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation.
We have seen press accounts alleging that a DOD link analysis had tied Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi (who had arrived in the U.S. shortly before Atta on May 29) to two other future hijackers, Hazmi al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, in 1999-2000. No such claim was made to the Commission by any witness. Moreover, all evidence that was available to the Commission indicates that Hazmi and Mihdhar were never on the East coast until 2001 and that these two pairs of future hijackers had no direct contact with each other until June 2001.
Update: Here's a good analysis from Kevin Drum:
More from the Post's Dan Eggen....The Able Danger program was classified, of course, so we may never know exactly what it was and what it found out — especially since if the Pentagon was aware of Atta in 2000 it's not likely to want to admit it in any case. However, I'm going to stick with my original guess: it produced some general information about al-Qaeda, but nothing specifically about Atta or the other 9/11 hijackers. That's why no one ever mentioned Atta in the original reports. Later on, frustrated because their story wasn't getting enough attention, Weldon and his source embellished it to suggest that Able Danger had specifically uncovered actionable intelligence about an al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn headed by Atta. The 9/11 Commission, which was days away from finishing its report, didn't believe this suddenly revised story and chose not to include it in its report...
The Nation's Ari Berman has at the national security Democrats, for their not unambivalent support of the Iraq war:
Shaped especially by long experiences in Bosnia and Kosovo, I am pretty much a card carrying member of the national security Democrats, the group being condemned by Berman. That said, I don't necessarily disagree with him that the position of what he calls the Democratic "strategic class" on Iraq didn't help the party resolve its dilemma - was it saying it could do Iraq better? Or that we should never have gone in the way we did, or both. Go read.Owing to their distinction, the Democratic strategic class, consisting of the party's leading foreign policy thinkers, could have provided a powerful check on a reckless Administration intent on rushing to war. Instead, it bears partial responsibility for the war's costs: more than 1,800 American fatalities, thousands of maimed and wounded US soldiers, many more dead Iraqi civilians, spiraling worldwide anti-Americanism, surging world oil prices, a new breeding ground for Al Qaeda, multiplying terror attacks abroad and mounting economic insecurity at home.
At the same time, talking tough on Iraq has been a disastrous moral, tactical and political miscalculation for Democrats. A recent Democracy Corps poll found that Iraq tops the list of factors motivating voter discontent toward President Bush. "This is a country almost settled on the need for change," political consultants Stan Greenberg and James Carville write. Yet Democrats will only prosper if they pose "sharp choices," something the strategic class has been unwilling or unable to do. A few small progressive think tanks, helped by the dissident establishment, have tried to pry open badly needed institutional space for a bolder national security policy. A few courageous elected officials are attempting to drum up Congressional support for withdrawal. Thus far, the hawks have drowned them out. Unless and until the strategic class transforms or declines in stature, the Democrats beholden to them will be doomed to repeat their Iraq mistakes.
Able Danger, the 9/11 Commission, and Mohammad Atta. Reader RMS reminds me of something interesting, given the recent allegation that the 9/11 commission staff was briefed on and for some reason did not include in its report mention of the claim that a classified military intelligence data mining unit had allegedly identified Atta as a member of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell a year before the September 11 2001 attacks (something which we haven't seen real evidence of yet). RMS points out that, as the New York Times reported in February 2004, the 9/11 commission was the first to reveal that the CIA was given 9/11 hijacker Marwan al-Shehi's first name and telephone number -- back in 1999 -- by German intelligence and still did not give that information apparently to the FBI. (Al-Shehi is one of the four hijackers Weldon claims Able Danger identified a year in advance of the 2001 attacks, and importantly, he was Atta's roommate in Hamburg). It's worth noting that 1999 is a whole year before this alleged Able Danger ID of Atta, which we know wasn't shared with other US agencies. As the NYT's James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported:
A couple points worth amplifying here: a) the 9/11 commission has already established an earlier and potentially more significant instance of the US government and intelligence community having some of the 9/11 attackers' identities and not following through on it and b) the failure identified in this German-US al-Shehi case is potentially more relevant because it was reported through normal intelligence channels that did not have the constraints on them that Able Danger did. (The fact is, if a pre-9/11 US military unit was really given US visa applications, bank records, flight manifest information, and other not classified but certainly not "open source" information to datamine, they might not want to have advertised their existence much less been discouraged by DoD lawyers from advertising their findings. But one obvious question is, why did AD not share the non-"US persons" members on its Al Qaeda terrorism chart with the FBI and CIA?) The Able Danger program sounds to have been so experimental, classified and constrained from revealing its activities that it was effectively unknown to the US counterterrorism community. The fact is, the commander who apparently signed off on the directive authorizing its creation, Hugh Shelton, can't even recall authorizing it. Of course, it's also worth remembering that two of the other 9/11 hijackers allegedly identified by the Able Danger data mining project, Nawaq al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar, actually rented rooms from an FBI informant in San Diego and still were not able to be found by the Bureau after they were watchlisted in August 2001.American investigators were given the first name and telephone number of one of the Sept. 11 hijackers two and a half years before the attacks on New York and Washington, but the United States appears to have failed to pursue the lead aggressively, American and German officials say.
The information — the earliest known signal that the United States received about any of the hijackers — has now become an important element of an independent commission's investigation into the events of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said Monday. It is considered particularly significant because it may have represented a missed opportunity for American officials to penetrate the Qaeda terror cell in Germany that was at the heart of the plot. And it came roughly 16 months before the hijacker showed up at flight schools in the United States.
In March 1999, German intelligence officials gave the Central Intelligence Agency the first name and telephone number of Marwan al-Shehhi, and asked the Americans to track him.
The name and phone number in the United Arab Emirates had been obtained by the Germans by monitoring the telephone of Mohamed Heidar Zammar, an Islamic militant in Hamburg who was closely linked to the important Qaeda plotters who ultimately mastermined the Sept. 11 attacks, German officials said.
After the Germans passed the information on to the C.I.A., they did not hear from the Americans about the matter until after Sept. 11, a senior German intelligence official said.
"There was no response" at the time, the official said. After receiving the tip, the C.I.A. decided that "Marwan" was probably an associate of Osama bin Laden, but never tracked him down, American officials say.
The Germans considered the information on Mr. Shehhi particularly valuable, and the commission is keenly interested in why it apparently did not lead to greater scrutiny of him.
The information concerning Mr. Shehhi, the man who took over the controls of United Airlines Flight 175, which flew into the south tower of the World Trade Center, came months earlier than well-documented tips about other hijackers, including two who were discovered to have attended a meeting of militants in Malaysia in January 2000.
The independent commission investigating the attacks has received information on the 1999 Shehhi tip, and is actively investigating the issue, said Philip Zelikow, executive director of the commission.
Coup in Baghdad. The Badr organization has installed itself as mayor now. Incredible.
MaDo is back. Why no tea and sympathy, indeed:
...Cindy Sheehan, a 48-year-old Californian with a knack for P.R., says she will camp out in the dusty heat near the ranch until she gets to tell Mr. Bush face to face that he must pull all U.S. troops out of Iraq. Her son, Casey, a 24-year-old Army specialist, was killed in a Sadr City ambush last year.
The president met with her family two months after Casey's death. Capturing W.'s awkwardness in traversing the line between somber and joking, and his love of generic labels, Ms. Sheehan said that W. had referred to her as "Mom" throughout the meeting, and given her the sense that he did not know who her son was.
The Bush team tried to discredit "Mom" by pointing reporters to an old article in which she sounded kinder to W. If only her husband were an undercover C.I.A. operative, the Bushies could out him. But even if they send out a squad of Swift Boat Moms for Truth, there will be a countering Falluja Moms for Truth.
It's amazing that the White House does not have the elementary shrewdness to have Mr. Bush simply walk down the driveway and hear the woman out, or invite her in for a cup of tea. But W., who has spent nearly 20 percent of his presidency at his ranch, is burrowed into his five-week vacation and two-hour daily workouts. He may be in great shape, but Iraq sure isn't.
It's hard to think of another president who lived in such meta-insulation...
One strange thing about this claim by Congressman Curt Weldon that he has defense intelligence sources who a year before 9/11 identified Mohammad Atta as a member of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell is that, by some accident of fate, I was at a talk Weldon gave at the Heritage foundation back in 2002, where he was making the same claim and showing the same chart of the al Qaeda cells. (Start at around minute 24, minute 31 starts the claim, minute 33:33 is the chart). I even went up afterwards and asked if it would be possible to get a copy of the chart that accompanied his talk and that he's been showing recently, but it proved elusive. So why is this coming forward in a more prominent way only now? After all, the 911 commission had more than a year of hearings when it could have investigated these claims, and the commission's report has been out for more than a year now. I don't know the answer. But it's worth noting that The Hill reports today that Weldon hopes to use the August recess to secure the chair of the House Homeland Security Committee.
How does this guy still have a job?So I would say that the truly cardinal sin was not the war itself but the decision to go to war without adequate preparation or support: leaving Iraq to burn in chaos in the days and weeks after Saddam fell, having no effective plan for the postwar period, not having nearly enough troops, not giving them nearly enough protection and equipment, not having fully mobilized our own country for the scope of challenge we were clearly going to face in the postwar period. It was war on the cheap, war without sacrifice except by the soldiers and families asked to risk--and too painfully often to make--the ultimate sacrifice. It was war without any fiscal discipline or sense of urgency; "we're at war--let's party" as Tom Friedman wrote in a column in the months leading up to the invasion. This was truly sinful and inexcusable, what I call in the book (speaking metaphorically and morally, rather than legally) criminal negligence. I think history will render a harsh judgment on all of those responsible in this Administration.
On vacation with medieval telecom/computer situation. Back in business next week.
A Jewish Israeli man in an Israel Defense Forces uniform opened fire on passengers on a bus in a Druze neighborhood of the Israeli Arab town of Shfaram on Thursday afternoon, killing four people and wounding 12. The terrorist was killed by a mob that boarded the bus after the shooting.
The victims of the attack were identified as bus driver Michel Bahus, 56; passenger Nader Hayak, 55 and Hazar Turki, 23 and her 21-year-old sister Dina.
The attacker - Eden Natan-Zada, 19 - was a newly religious man, an IDF deserter from Rishon Letzion who recently moved to the West Bank settlement of Tapuah. He was an activist in the outlawed extreme-right Kach movement and went AWOL a month ago to protest the disengagement plan.
Natan-Zada's mother said Thursday night that the family had begged the IDF to take his gun away...
The police sent hundreds of reinforcements to the north of Israel, fearing possible riots in Arab towns, similar to those in October 2000, in which 13 Arab citizens were killed...
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attack, with Sharon calling it "a sinful act by a bloodthirsty terrorist."
Newsday's Tim Phelps on the killing of Steven Vincent and the new threat in Iraq coming not from the Baathists from roving criminal gangs and religious militias:
There are three levels of danger to a foreigner in Basra. The smallest threat there is the biggest one to people elsewhere in Iraq: the Sunni insurgency tied in with the former regime. Sunnis are a fearful - not feared - minority in Basra now, and their terrorist activities are limited.
A greater threat is from the criminal gangs that roam Basra almost unhindered, kidnapping Iraqis for ransom and hijacking their cars.
The greatest threat here for those with any political connections, past or present, are the religious militias that work for the political parties governing Basra - and Iraq - and overlap with the police force. They have undertaken a campaign of assassinations against former members of Saddam Hussein's regime, as well as intellectuals, secular politicians and women who work for the U.S. or British governments or companies.
Vincent wrote about this - not just last weekend, but over several months - and stayed to face the consequences.
Judd Legum argues that the huge explosion that killed 14 Marines in Anbar province yesterday underscores the urgent need for better equipment for US troops in Iraq. As Judd writes, "The Marines that were killed were traveling in vehicles that were 'lightly armored.' As the President takes an extended vacation, our troops are still in Iraq without the equipment they need." It's pretty sickening, esp. if you go back to the articles about the kind of heavily armord tanks Rumsfeld makes available to himself and other dignitaries when he deigns to visit the troops.
The US is not the only country revising backwards its estimates on when Iran would have nuclear weapons, Marc Perelman reports.
NPR's Cheryl Corley remembers one of the Marines killed yesterday in Iraq, Lance Corporal Edward Schroeder.
Must Read: Joseph Galloway, "The Soul of Republican Party at stake in prison-abuse scandal debate":
Go read the whole thing. I was talking with someone on the Hill about this the other day, he and his colleagues were genuinely surprised at the lengths the White House went to threaten to kill a McCain-proposed amendment to a defense bill that would have recommended a commission to look into the detainee treatment issue. He said the White House threatened to veto the whole bill, so they went to recess with no bill and no clear date when it would be brought for a vote. Cheney's passion for government conducted in secrecy should not extend to Americans tolerating cover ups of detainee abuse....Three senior Republican senators wrote a small amendment into the Defense Appropriations bill this summer that outlaws cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of all detainees in American custody...
The Bush White House is doing all that it can to stop this legislation from passing. Vice President Dick Cheney took the three senators to the wood shed and told them that their law would tie President Bush's hands in the war against terrorism. His bombast carried no weight with the three senators.
On the floor of the Senate, before everyone left on vacation, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., sounded the administration line: There is no need for this legislation because we are not dealing with prisoners of war but "terrorists."
John McCain stood up and responded that the debate was not "about who they are. It's about who we are." We are Americans, the senator said, and we hold ourselves to a higher standard than those who slaughter the innocent in Iraq or Afghanistan, or in London or on 9/11 here at home.
This debate has a special resonance as investigation after investigation into the outrages against prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and others into the mistreatment of detainees held in American custody at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, continue to focus all blame at the lowest possible level. This in spite of new testimony that strongly suggests that the blame, like cream, settles much nearer the top...
The administration has stonewalled, bobbed and weaved and hidden from the truth with the acquiescence, at least until now, of a Republican-controlled Congress that has failed to follow up even when there is evidence people have been lying right to their faces.
The senators - Warner, McCain and Graham - have taken the first step toward shedding some light in the darker corners of the dungeon. Don't be surprised if that light finds a lot of people who rank much higher than specialist 4 or staff sergeant cowering in the corners...
Read this and this. It's hard not to conclude that Ahmad Chalabi is closely allied with those that assassinated Steven Vincent on Tuesday, the Shiite police militias who Vincent exposed being involved in assassinating Baathists and others. From the Christian Science Monitor:
Here's what Chalabi's spokesman told Spencer Ackerman yesterday about Chalabi's alliance with Shiite thug Moqtada al Sadr.At around 6:30 p.m. he and his Iraqi translator Nouraya Itais Wadi (also known as Nour al-Khal) left a money-changer's shop on bustling Istiqlal Street. Then, police say, four gunmen jumped out of a white car (Lt. Col. Karim al-Zaidi told Associated Press that it was a police car, something confirmed by eyewitnesses) and hustled the pair inside, shouting to bystanders, "Don't interfere, we're the police," according to witnesses interviewed by an Iraqi journalist, who has worked for American news media and feared retribution if he was identified in this story...
In an opinion piece published in The New York Times on Aug. 1, Vincent wrote about Shiite political parties that maintain their own militias in the city, and he reported allegations that off-duty police are used to assassinate former members of Saddam Hussein's regime and other political opponents.
"An Iraqi police lieutenant confirmed to me the widespread rumors that a few police officers are perpetrating many of the hundreds of assassinations - mostly of former Baath Party members - that take place in Basra each month," Vincent wrote. "He told me that there is even a sort of 'death car': a white Toyota Mark II that glides through the city streets, carrying off-duty police officers in the pay of extremist religious groups to their next assignment."
We're at war, it's not going well, so it's discouraging to see President Bush headed to a five week vacation.
When is the US going to seriously deal with detainee abuse? This from the Washington Post's Josh White:
Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush was being stubborn with his American captors, and a series of intense beatings and creative interrogation tactics were not enough to break his will. On the morning of Nov. 26, 2003, a U.S. Army interrogator and a military guard grabbed a green sleeping bag, stuffed Mowhoush inside, wrapped him in an electrical cord, laid him on the floor and began to go to work. Again.
It was inside the sleeping bag that the 56-year-old detainee took his last breath through broken ribs, lying on the floor beneath a U.S. soldier in Interrogation Room 6 in the western Iraqi desert. Two days before, a secret CIA-sponsored group of Iraqi paramilitaries, working with Army interrogators, had beaten Mowhoush nearly senseless, using fists, a club and a rubber hose, according to classified documents...Senior officers in charge of the facility near the Syrian border believed that such "claustrophobic techniques" were approved ways to gain information from detainees, part of what military regulations refer to as a "fear up" tactic, according to military court documents.
Steven Vincent, the journalist who authored the interesting Basra oped in the New York Times on Sunday, has been killed, shot multiple times after getting abducted with his translator. (He blogged here as well). NPR's Philip Reeves says that Vincent and his translator were abducted outside his hotel by people in a white pick up with "police" written on it, but no license plate. (Vincent describes a similar vehicle used by police loyal to radical Shiite clerics to commit sectarian assassinations in his oped). His translator Ward al-Khal was shot through the chest, and is hospitalized.
Fourteen Marines were killed today in Anbar province.
Iran financing new airport in neighboring Iraq:
The facility, which [Iraqi transport minister Salam] Maliki said would cost an estimated $20 million to $25 million, would largely serve religious pilgrims traveling to and from Iran...
Maliki, 32, once served as a representative of Moqtada Sadr, a Shiite cleric whose militia battled U.S. troops in Najaf and Baghdad a year ago. Last week, Maliki ordered the duty-free store at Baghdad International Airport to stop selling alcohol to travelers, calling the airport a "holy and revered" part of Iraq.
Airport administrators initially flouted his order, and one official said a local court had backed their stance, an assertion that could not be independently confirmed. But the duty-free store is closed for renovations until its operators can meet with Maliki about the issue, the airport official said.
"Before the war, the US trained Iraqi paramilitary unit," the Scorpions, the WaPo reports:
So much for oversight.Before the war in Iraq began, the CIA recruited and trained an Iraqi paramilitary group, code-named the Scorpions, to foment rebellion, conduct sabotage, and help CIA paramilitaries who entered Baghdad and other cities target buildings and individuals, according to three current and former intelligence officials with knowledge of the unit.
The CIA spent millions of dollars on the Scorpions, whose existence has not been previously disclosed, even giving them former Soviet Hind helicopters. But most of the unit's prewar missions -- spray-painting graffiti on walls; cutting electricity; "sowing confusion," as one said -- were delayed or canceled because of poor training or planning, said officials briefed on the unit. The speed of the invasion negated the need for most of their missions, others said.
After Baghdad fell, the CIA used the Scorpions to try to infiltrate the insurgency, to help out in interrogations, and, from time to time, to do "the dirty work," as one intelligence official put it.
In one case, members of the unit, wearing masks and carrying clubs and pipes, beat up an Iraqi general in the presence of CIA and military personnel, according to investigative documents reviewed by The Washington Post and according to several defense and intelligence officials.
Post inquiries about the case prompted the CIA to brief the House and Senate intelligence committees on the unit, said several members of Congress and two defense officials...
Authorized by a presidential finding signed by President Bush in February or March 2002, the Scorpions were part of a policy of "regime change" in Iraq. The covert members, many of whom were exiles recruited by the Kurds, were trained in target identification, explosives and small arms at two secret bases in Jordan, according to one U.S. government official..
Via Kevin Drum, I noticed this interesting tidbit about Susan Ralston, Karl Rove's "right hand" personal assistant who testified to the Plame grand jury last Friday. Ralston apparently used to be the right hand to...Jack Abramoff. And since we're drifting down memory lane, this Ron Suskind article's introduction to Ralston and Rove is worth revisiting:
Link....Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ’s famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported. Rove’s assistant, Susan Ralston, said he’d be just a minute. She’s very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove’s modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.
Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. "Come on in." ...
Update: More on the testimony at the Plame grand jury last Friday of the two Rove aides, Ralston and Israel Hernandez.
The whole package.
Anti evolution, anti stem cell research, pro steroids!Dan Froomkin: White House Briefing
BUSH SUPPORTS ROVE, PALMEIRO
In free-wheeling interview with Texas print reporters, president also backs "intelligent design."
Like the bad old days. Russia expels ABC News from the country, for interviewing Chechen leader Shamil Basayev.
Thirty US troops killed in Iraq this week. The US death toll in Iraq has now passed 1800, NPR's Philip Reeves reports from Baghdad.
The WaPo's Dafna Linzer has another blockbuster on the consensus from the US intelligence community putting Iran's getting a nuclear bomb another decade away. But it's the discussion of Bush administration consideration of different policy options for Iran that is most interesting:
These estimates would seem to give breathing space to those who support the US supporting democratic regime change in Iran, rather than focusing solely on Iran's emerging nuclear capabilities.The NIE, ordered by the National Intelligence Council in January, is the first major review since 2001 of what is known and what is unknown about Iran. Additional assessments produced during Bush's first term were narrow in scope, and some were rejected by advocates of policies that were inconsistent with the intelligence judgments.
One such paper was a 2002 review that former and current officials said was commissioned by national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, who was then deputy adviser, to assess the possibility for "regime change" in Iran. Those findings described the Islamic republic on a slow march toward democracy and cautioned against U.S. interference in that process, said the officials, who would describe the paper's classified findings only on the condition of anonymity.
The new estimate takes a broader approach to the question of Iran's political future. But it is unable to answer whether the country's ruling clerics will still be in control by the time the country is capable of producing fissile material. The administration keeps "hoping the mullahs will leave before Iran gets a nuclear weapons capability," said an official familiar with policy discussions.
Update: ArmsControlWonk says the estimate doesn't appear to have changed all that much (hat tip, RZ). But the way I read the piece, Linzer's sources were noting to her the significance of the subtle shift in language from an estimate that Iran would have a nuclear bombs "early next decade" to "early-mid next decade."
Via Greg Djerejian, a fascinating article by the Nixon Center's Robert Leiken in Foreign Affairs, about Europe's Muslims.
Writer Azadeh Moaveni on Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji, who has been on a prison hunger strike for the past fifty days. The sad point, is that while Ganji has become something of a cause celebre in the West, most people in Iran don't know about his plight. Tuesday Update: Ganji's wife speaks out.
Were the two sets of London bombers linked? Still unclear. But the Washington Post reports this strange coincidence:
The only tangible link between the two sets of bombers, according to officials, is a brochure for a white-water rafting center in northern Wales. The brochure was discovered in a backpack containing undetonated explosives that one of the alleged July 21 attackers, Muktar Said Ibrahim, 27, left behind on an east London bus. Two of the July 7 bombers from Leeds had participated in a rafting trip with the center in early June.
