Able Danger," is the story about a U.S. Army military intelligence program that had supposedly used data mining techniques to identify the al-Qaeda cell run by Mohamed Atta a year before 9/11. Unfortunately, as the story goes, nothing was done about it because Defense Department lawyers prevented the Able Danger team from telling the FBI about the Atta cell.
Now right-wing pundits are complaining that a legal "wall" enacted during the Clinton administration (written by April Gorelick, who presided on the 9/11 commission) is what the Defense Department lawyers were referring to when they prevented "Able Danger" from telling the FBI about the Atta cell. As Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and the New York Post are so adept at pulling off, this complete lie is making the rounds across America.
As Slade Gordon (Republican Senator from Oregon and 9/11 Commission member) stated in a recent letter to the Washington Times:
The one witness who did name Atta came to our staff shortly before the commission's report went to the printer. He said he thought he had seen something showing Atta in Brooklyn early in 2000. We knew, in fact, that Atta first arrived in the United States in June 2000 with a visa. For this and other reasons, the witness simply was not credible on this subject.Additionally, the assertion that the commission failed to report on this program to protect Ms. Gorelick is ridiculous. She had nothing to do with any "wall" between law enforcement and our intelligence agencies. The 1995 Department of Justice guidelines at issue were internal to the Justice Department and were not even sent to any other agency. The guidelines had no effect on the Department of Defense and certainly did not prohibit it from communicating with the FBI, the CIA or anyone else.
Media Matters has the complete rundown on this new lie being fabricated by the right-wing press machine. So if you see or hear this lie again, you'll know the truth: The Defense Department was not legally denied access to the FBI. Which leads to the question (if Able Danger was indeed accurate) - why didn't they share the information?
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