Common Sense Political Thought

The seventh congressional district in Pennsylvania includes parts of Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, all suburban counties surrounding foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia. While there are plenty of local newspapers serving the various townships, the newspaper of record for the entire area is The Philadelphia Inquirer. So, when a major story breaks concerning Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA 7), you’d expect to find the reporters of the Inquirer all over it, right? And if Congressman Weldon had approached the Inquirer, to give his “hometown” newspaper the scoop, they certainly couldn’t be surprised, could they?

The headline (if you could really call it a “headline;” it was on page one, but small and below the fold)[1] read:

9/11 attackers on radar in '00?

U.S. spy unit sought probe of 4 a year before attacks, Weldon says.
By Douglas Jehl,
New York Times News Service

WASHINGTON - More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military-intelligence unit identified Mohamed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of an al-Qaeda cell operating in the United States, according to Rep. Curt Weldon (R., Pa.) and a former defense intelligence official.

In the summer of 2000, the team, known as "Able Danger," prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the FBI, Weldon and the former intelligence official said yesterday.

The recommendation was rejected, and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Atta and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas.

Why would The Philadelphia Inquirer have brushed off such a story? Naturally, the editors of the Inquirer will never admit it, but the real reason was that the story clearly faults the policies of the Clinton Administration.

Military intelligence had identified Mohammed Atta and three of the other terrorist hijackers from September 11^th as al Qaeda cell members operating in the United States, and suggested that they be dealt with . . . a year before the September 11^th attacks. Because of legal concerns brought up by Clinton Administration policies, the report was quashed and nothing was ever done.

Because the Clinton Administration wanted to deal with terrorists with law enforcement means, the process was filled with the types of legalistic concerns that police have to hold when investigating a person and trying to prepare a prosecution against him. But Mr. Atta and his comrades had been keeping their noses clean: they weren’t out committing crimes prior to September 11^th, and thus there was no real reason to use law enforcement means against them.

The editors of The Philadelphia Inquirer are not exactly fans of Mr. Weldon, but they are huge fans of the Democratic Party. In October of 2004, the Inquirer did far more than endorse John Kerry; it ran a twenty-one day series of editorials (which they called a twenty-one gun salute), all of which endorsed Senator Kerry and various parts of his platform. The editors were also huge fans of President Clinton.

We can’t know that had Clinton Administration policy been different, more detailed investigations into Mr. Atta and his comrades would have prevented the attacks of September 11^th.

"Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision-makers options for taking out al-Qaeda targets," the former defense intelligence official said. He said that he himself had delivered the chart in the summer of 2000 to the Special Operations Command headquarters, in Tampa, Fla., and said it had been based on information drawn from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them," the former intelligence official said. The unit, which relied heavily on data-mining techniques, was modeled after those first established by Army intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center, now known as the Information Dominance Center, at Fort Belvoir, Va., the official said.

Well, perhaps we can’t know if investigating Mr. Atta would have prevented the attacks, but “taking out al-Qaeda targets” certainly would have.

It’s already well known that President Clinton declined an offer from Sudan in which the Sudanese government would have handed over Osama bin Laden to American custody.[2] And now it seems that President Clinton’s policies (there is no evidence that Mr. Clinton was personally involved in the decision) worked to prevent Mohammed Atta and his fellow conspirators from being taken out.

No wonder the sycophantic Philadelphia Inquirer didn’t want to pursue Congressman Weldon’s story.[3] It might make President Clinton’s policies toward terrorism look bad . . . and that might do what the editors of the Inquirer certainly don’t want to do: make President Bush’s policies toward terrorism look good.

[1] - And it was even more obscure on the Inquirer’s website.

[2] - Former President Clinton claimed, in an interview with Dan Rather in June of 2004 that reports he was offered custody of Osama bin Laden by Sudan were “bull” and “absolutely, flatly untrue.” But that contradicted Mr. Clinton’s own admission of just that, in 2002:

In February 2002, however, Mr. Clinton clearly admitted that the Sudanese offer had indeed taken place. And that he turned it down.

"Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan," Clinton told the Long Island Association on Feb. 15, 2002.

"He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan. And we'd been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start dealing with them again.

"They released him. At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.

"So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, 'cause they could have. But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn't and that's how he wound up in Afghanistan."

Source: Clinton: Claims I Turned Down bin Laden are 'Bull', NewsMax.com, Thursday, June 17, 2004 10:50 a.m. EDT

[3] - Congressman Weldon suggested on The Michael Smerconish Show, on WPHT-AM, on Tuesday, August 9, 2005, that the Philadelphia Inquirer was also reluctant to follow the story because the paper did not want to promote Mr. Weldon’s current book, Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information that Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America... and How the CIA has Ignored it.

Posted by Dana, Tuesday, August 9, 2005 @ 8:14 PM EDT Permalink