The blogosphere is alive and buzzing over the revelation that our military intelligence, via data mining, had identified Mohamed Atta and three or four other members of the 9/11 attack more than a year before they flew planes into the World Trade center. Dr. Sanity has done some brilliant speculation about the role of Sandy Berger, he of the misplaced top secret documents that somehow got stuffed down his pants. (Just go to her site and scroll down.) Captain Ed has more and brings in some interesting Iraq-al Qaeda connections that the 9/11 Omission left out of their final (non) report. Jim Geraghty has a nice summary of what we know so far.
I would like to throw in my little contribution to the mix. As the title suggests, my discussion of PC, and the excellent comments, are germane. There are really only a few possible explanations for the Able Danger story.
One possibility is that it could all be bogus and Representative Weldon, the motive force behind this, might have drifted into tin foil hat territory. This can be easily dismissed by the fact that all sorts of confirmation is starting to make its way into the MSM (though don't look for anything interesting in the Old York Times.)
More likely is a combination of factors. The Clinton administration liberals clearly did not see al Qaeda as a significant threat to cause harm on our shores. From that perspective, they could plausibly have argued that protecting our privacy was a more important consideration than allowing military intelligence to communicate across the wall of separation (which had been strengthened by Jamie Gorelick, later to be a member of the 9/11 Omission) with the FBI. I do not doubt that if they had thought it through, and I would give them the benefit of the doubt that they did, the civil liberties groups, among whom was William Safire at the time, would have come to this conclusion and acted accordingly. It would have then taken great courage for the architects of the wall to have admitted the existence of the Able Danger reports. Sadly, courage is in short supply in Washington.
Their initial disastrous decision was compounded when the 9/11 Omission refused to investigate this information. Jamie Gorelick and her ilk had to realize that if this information became public, it would be devastating to the Democrats. After all, they set up the wall. Furthermore, at the time, Sandy Berger was an adviser to John Kerry and helping his Presidential run. If Berger was found to be the one who reinforced the wall in 2000, it would have reflected rather poorly on Kerry. Since part of the Politically Correct world view is to divide the world between the Peace loving, all nurturing Mother-State and the evil, warlike Father-Oppressor, it was literally life and death to many of the Democratic supporters to have Kerry win the election. Thus, they could rationalize leaving out such crucial information, believing that the good of the country required a Democratic victory. They truly believed they were not pitting narrow partisanship above the nation's well being.
Finally, in order to maintain the fantasy of a peace loving, nurturing world, it was absolutely necessary to deny and minimize any connection between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. If there were a connection, the rationale for war with Iraq would be unassailable. We would not now be arguing about missing WMD or counting American bodies to determine if the war was worthwhile or justified. This is by far the most benign view of the 9/11 Omissions' omissions.
I can only conclude that the mental set of the 9/11 Omission members either actively or passively lead them to not see crucial information that would have changed the entire discussion of 9/11, the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, and almost everything else that has gone on since the World Trade Centers came crashing down.
[For more information on the data mining techniques the Able Danger team was using, Technology Review had an excellent article in March 2003, Can Sensemaking Keep Us Safe? by M. Mitchell Waldrop. This article is available on line. Scientific American has had two articles in the last few years on the techniques involved. In the March 2003 issue was a disucssion of the TIO project, SA Perspectives: Total Information Overload, and in the May 2005 issue was an article on the use of data mining the human genome, Molecular Treasure Hunt, by Gary Stix. Neither Sci AM article is available for free; there is just a brief abstract.]
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