9-11 COMMISSION FUMBLE ...

I want to talk about this big story revolving around the military’s intelligence operation … ABLE DANGER.

Here’s the story …

Yes, it appears that the military intelligence knew, fully a year before 9-11, about a terrorist cell in Brooklyn, NY – and knew that Mohammed Atta, the leader of the 9-11 hijackings was a member of it. The military experts who were a part of ABLE DANGER even alerted their superiors and asked that the FBI be informed to take out that terrorist cell. But somehow the lawyers decided they didn’t want to “violate” any of Mohammed Atta’s rights, so they declined to inform the FBI about him. The rest is history, Mohammed Atta and his little cell of terrorists went on to plan and execute – unmolested by our federal government – the worst attack on the United States in history.

But to me – that’s NOT the story here. It’s no surprise to me that this happened. In the pre-9-11 world, we did a lot of stupidly politically correct stuff like this. We can’t undo this stuff folks – so who cares? We SHOULD learn from it – we should make sure it doesn’t happen again – but beating ourselves to death over it will do no good. So this is not a big story in itself in my opinion.

No, the story here to me is … WHY DIDN’T THE 9-11 COMMISSION REPORT THIS?

Man, the fingers are REALLY being pointed this morning. A report yesterday said that staff members of the 9-11 commission WERE briefed on ABLE DANGER – they were told everything but apparently they “neglected” to tell the 9-11 committee members about it.

Hmmm, that sounds a little weird to me folks. I can’t imagine a staff member getting this kind of information and then failing to tell the committee about it. I mean, the final report points out stupid minutia such as deficient communications in the New York City police and fire departments – you would think that the fact that we knew about Mohammed Atta a year before the attacks would be at least as important as that right?

Now a report comes out this morning that the staff DID brief the committee members – and may have even unsuccessfully URGED them to include the ABLE DANGER information in the 9-11 Commission Report.

Then a few minutes ago I see another report saying that the commission is denying that anyone ever told the staff about ABLE DANGER!

So who knows where this is all going folks – or where it will all land! But it looks to me like the genesis of a cover-up.

Let me tell you folks – this 9-11 Commission was a BAD idea from the start – for the following reasons …

1. The Committee members chosen, with few exceptions – were intellectual idiots. I’m surprised that CHER wasn’t put on this panel! To be bi-partisan here I’ll just single out two idiots on this commission from each of the major parties - Richard Ben-Veniste (Democrat) and former Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman (Republican – or rather RINO). Neither of these guys is even remotely qualified to sit on this commission – Ben-Veniste is a political clown and Lehman is a mentally imbalanced idiot. So my first complaint with that commission is why would you put idiots in charge of trying to figure out what happened on 9-11?

2. The 9-11 Commission was nothing more than an exercise to find blame for the attacks here in the U.S. Let me tell you folks – the blame for these attacks lays squarely on the shoulders of Osama Bin Laden. We were an innocent nation before 9-11 – we had no clue this guy was going to attack us in this manner – or even if he could. Of course we weren’t ready for it. Of course we were ill prepared for it. Why did we need a commission to point out all of our errors and throw it out there for the whole world to see? What good does it do to beat Rudy Gulianni up because the police had inadequate radios? The REAL terrorists just sat back and laughed themselves silly while they watched us flog ourselves to death with “second guesses” and “Monday morning quarterbacking”. The committee’s report – took the eyes of American’s off who was really to blame (the terrorists) and put our attention on our own good government servants here. The report had the effect of removing some of the blame for the attacks off the shoulders of the terrorists – and put it on us! Stupid. Let me tell you folks – the people who live in Montreal, Canada aren’t ready for a hurricane – because they don’t get them up there! If they ever do (and it’s remote but possible) – it’s going to cause them some MAJOR damage. Would that really be their fault for not being prepared for a calamity they have every reason not to expect? They’ll be ready for the SECOND one – you can bet that – but not the first. This is analogous to America in the pre-9-11 age.

3. The final report of the 9-11 Commission is nothing more than a “Terrorist’s Guide to the Galaxy”. You can bet Osama has a copy of this report in his cave right now. The report pointed out all of these holes in American security – many of which are still there! This is not Bush’s fault – the fact is – no one can possibly fix all these “holes” overnight, and we don’t have the $$ to do so even if we could. It will take a decade to fix all these problems. If we wanted a 9-11 commission report – it should have been entirely SECRET – and only the President and Congress should have ever seen it. By making it public, they not only made it POLITICAL – but they also gave terrorists a “cook book” to attack us again!

4. Any report generated by the 9-11 commission and publicly released was going to become POLITICAL. And liberals have used the 9-11 report to beat the hell out of Bush (much to Osama’s happiness here I might add). When the 9-11 Commission said there was no “link” between Sadaam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden – the liberals ate it up! Of course now that statement from the commission is in serious doubt because – if they “missed” the information on ABLE DANGER – they most certainly could have “missed” any information pointing to a link between Sadaam and Osama! So now we know that the 9-11 report was INCOMPLETE – and an incomplete report doesn’t help us become any safer in the future. The report is nothing more than a POLITICAL BASEBALL BAT to beat up incumbent politicians and government officials with. What good is that?

So there you have it. I don’t know how much money and effort we spent on the FIRST, INCOMPLETE 9-11 report – and I don’t know how much terrorist propaganda value came out of it (though it was certainly a SIGNIFICANT amount). Now, to go back and make it more complete – we’re going to go through at least a portion of the pain and cost and humiliation that we went through the first time.

Let’s bury this 9-11 Commission – it was a bad idea – a BAD DREAM!