Last week, the 9-11 Commission thought they could away with shoddy work (or worse) in the matter of Mohammed Atta and Able Danger, since no credible figure involved in the project had gone on the record. Bad move by the Commission. Since then, and as we suggested was necessary, Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer has come forward publicly. But the Commission last week made the mistake of thinking that would not happen. Here’s what came out under the name of Thomas Kean last week as a 9-11 Commission CYA press release, as we previously reported in detail:

So the Commission staff took it upon themselves to ignore Able Danger and the information about Mohammed Atta, even though, as we reported, all they had to do was make one single phone call to confirm or hurt the credibility of the information they were receiving.

What a difference a week makes. Now that Lt. Colonel Shaffer has come forward, and Mary Jo White has come forward with her memo, and the Wall is crumbling, Commission co-head Thomas Kean is singing a different tune about that which last week was not “historically significant” (via NYT):

“If they identified Atta and any of the other terrorists, of course it was an important program,” Mr. Kean said, referring to Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian ringleader of the attacks. “Obviously, if there were materials that weren’t given to us, information that wasn’t given to us, we’re disappointed. It’s up to the Pentagon to clear up any misunderstanding.”….Mr. Kean said he found it difficult to imagine they would have failed to follow up on any information about Mr. Atta. “The name Mohamed Atta was electric,” he said.

Electric indeed, Governor Kean. Ignoring information on Atta being given by uniformed officers in intelligence activities is evidence of negligence or worse, specfically when there was a trivially easy path to confirming the credibility of the information. Kean seeks to point fingers at the Pentagon, but he should start by looking at the Commission’s staff itself, whose press release, drafted by these staffers to go out under his name, reflected on Kean’s own credibility. That CYA BS press release, artfully crafted to appear like it was giving thorough and painstaking detail, is a mini cover-up all on its own, as we said at the time. It relentlessly sought to belittle the information that the Commission staff received and take shots at the credibility of the officer offering the information — all the while trying to draw attention away from the Commission staff’s huge failure to perform the most trivial due diligence on them.

We are delighted that the 9-11 Commission has moved from the “denial” stage to the “pointing fingers” stage. In the land of bureaucracies, that counts as progress.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 18th, 2005 at 6:35 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.