Dan Hopsicker on "Able Danger"

No reporter knows the ins-and-outs of Mohamed Atta's strange sojourn in the US better than Hopsicker:

The importance of this week’s revelation that an Army intelligence unit was tracking Mohamed Atta’s movements in the U.S. during 1999 and 2000 is so mind-boggling that it seems nobody quite gets it yet...

You’ve been hearing it for three years in articles in the MadCowMorningNews, and in “Welcome to TerrorLand.”

Now you can hear it from an elite Army intelligence unit, one with at least several patriots with very large cojones. Their testimony is clear, explicit, and uncompromisingly contradicts the FBI's official story. Only one conclusion can be drawn from it...

The FBI has been telling a massive lie to the 9.11 Commission and the American people, a lie whose result has been to halt in its tracks, as a Commission spokesman freely admitted on Thursday, the investigation into the murder of almost 3000 people.

People go to jail for that sort of thing, don’t they?

God willing, we may be about to find out.

The Dog Ate the 9.11 Commission's Homework

9.11 Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg on Thursday excused the Commission’s decision to withhold from their Report any mention of the Army Able Danger intelligence unit in Tampa which was tracking Mohamed Atta and other members of his terrorist cadre during 1999 and 2000.

Felzenberg cited the fact that the information provided to them by military officers in the unit did not agree with the FBI’s timeline concerning Atta’s arrival in the U.S.

Information provided by a military officer from Able Danger did not make it into the final report, “because it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks,” Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said.

Staff investigators became wary of the officer, Felzenberg stated, after he stated that the military unit had identified Atta as having been in the United States by late 1999 or early 2000. 'The investigators knew this was impossible, since travel records confirmed that he had not entered the United States until June 2000.”

"There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report."

Forget Jamie Gorelick. Forget trumped-up allegations that former Clinton Administration officials were weak on terror...

Al Felzenberg is lying. So is the FBI.

Hopsicker primarily sticks to the angle that the FBI is lying, and that is important.

However, I still think that the importance of "Able Danger" is that it shows SOMEONE was protecting the hijackers from further investigation (not simply that the FBI is covering something up). Who would that someone be? Possibly the Army itself, some other defense organization, the FBI or the CIA. Whoever it is, we need to know the truth, and this will get us much deeper into what happened on 9/11 than is possible to know right now.