Posted 5:19 PM by steve

Why should I care, why should I care?* about Able Danger, that is...

While Ace or Tom Maguire, and Jim Geraghty are doing a nice job following what may and may not have happened, I am wondering if there is anything to be gained from continuing to flog the story.

To recap, there are three aspects to the storyline:
(1) did the Able Danger team gather information of some of the hijackers in advance of their attack?,
(2) if so, whether that information was not passed along because the 'wall' Jamie Gorelick's built between intelligence and law enforcement groups and
(3) what, if anything, about (1) and (2) was relayed to the 9/11 commission.

Well, Gorelick's 'wall' has been consigned to the dustbin of history... and should never again keep information out of the hands of the people who need it. Part of our response to 9/11 was to enable more sharing of information between different agencies. I don't know how well it is working, but never again should the DIA be kept from passing info along to the FBI, CIA or Homeland Security.

The 9/11 Commission was a big waste of time and money and the sooner they are forgotten, the better. Its work was nothing more than one partisan taking shots at another partisan. Continuing to debate what they were told and what they weren't told only delays their well-earned trip to obscurity and keeps people from focusing on what is important.

Recriminations about what might have been are a waste of time and energy. We know the country wasn't taking seriously enough the threat from terrorists. We know both the Clinton and Bush Administrations had opportunities to pre-empt the attacks and failed to do so. What is important now is what we do going forward to identify and kill the terrorists that are doing their best to kill us.

Thus, the only aspect of the Able Danger story that matters is the part that is getting the least attention, and that is whether the techniques the team used to identify the likes of Atta are still in use today. If they are, great, let's keep using them and look for ways to improve upon them. If they aren't, why not?


* And bonus points for those who know from what I am so shamelessly using out of context....

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