On the Homeland Security front...

"Rep. Curt Weldon, Republican vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, is hot on the trail of some 9/11 Commissioners who knew that a military-intelligence unit had identified terrorists Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi as leaders of a U.S.-based al-Qa'ida sleeper cell. The classified MI unit named "Able Danger," tasked with data analysis, uncovered the terrorist cell almost two years before the 9/11 attack, and recommended their immediate deportation, but that information was never shared with the FBI. Why? Because Clinton administration lawyers under the authority of Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick (who later was appointed to the 9/11 Commission in order to conceal Clinton's culpability) questioned the legality of collecting such intelligence.

As you recall, the Clinton administration classified Osama bin Laden and his al-Qa'ida operatives as "criminals" rather than "international terrorists." In 1995, Gorelick elaborated on this classification in regard to investigations: "We believe it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations." In other words, Gorelick insisted on a clear "wall of separation" between counter-intelligence and criminal investigations, thus information of the type collected by Able Danger could not be considered in criminal investigations of U.S. citizens or "U.S. persons" -- meaning any foreign national legally in the U.S.

The Able Danger finding was not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission's final report because certain details in the Able Danger analysis did not comport with Commission staffer's information. In other words, some Beltway pinhead figured his information was better than that of Special Operations Command military-intelligence analysts.

The Commission's chief spokesman, Al Felzenberg, had, until now, denied that the Commission knew anything of this vital pre-9/11 intelligence on Atta and his al-Qa'ida sleeper cell. Faced with the facts, Felzenberg could only say, "Even if it were valid, it would've joined the lists of dozens of other instances where information was not shared. There was a major problem with intelligence sharing." But wait -- isn't that precisely what the 9/11 commission was created to investigate? (This issue of not sharing critical intelligence on U.S. persons has since been rectified by the Patriot Act.)

Rep. Weldon concludes: "The commission's refusal to investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly withholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners and is evocative of the worst tendencies in the federal government that the commission worked to expose."

Indeed, The Patriot warned, when the 9/11 Commission was formed, that reverting to a Washington bureaucracy composed of political insiders to look into the failures of Washington bureaucracies was, at best, flawed. On that note, congratulations are in order for Commissioner Jamie Gorelick for the job she did protecting the Clinton administration from looking completely incompetent in its handling of al-Qa'ida in the run-up to 9/11.

Perhaps now we know the subject of classified documents from the National Archives that Sandy Berger, Clinton's national security advisor, stuffed down his shorts in order to keep them from the 9/11 Commission. As you recall, after the FBI showed up at his house with warrants last July, Berger coughed up some of the documents, but somehow all his handwritten notes regarding how the Clinton administration handled al-Qa'ida threat information in December of 1999 had disappeared. Coincidentally, Able Danger's intelligence on Atta's al-Qa'ida sleeper cell was posted in December of 1999."