Month: September 2005

Zarqawi Losing More Aides

Iraqi terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi lost another key aide this weekend with the death of Abu Azzam, the US confirmed last night. Abu Azzam died in an American raid on a Haditha safehouse:

A man believed to be al Qaeda’s No. 2 operative in Iraq has been killed, a U.S. Defense Department official confirmed to CNN.
Abu Azzam was a “significant” figure in the al Qaeda network in Iraq, the official said. …
Just last week, U.S. and Iraqi officials announced that two men described as top al Qaeda leaders in the northern city of Mosul were captured during a September 5 raid.
One of those captured in that raid was said to be responsible for supervising and directing the day-to-day operations of the group, and was responsible for numerous attacks against Iraqi security and coalition forces. Officials hailed the capture as a blow to al Qaeda’s operation in northern Iraq.
A senior leader of the terrorist group was killed in a September 17 raid on a terrorist safehouse in the western city of Haditha, officials added.

The intelligence keeps getting better and better, and the noose grows ever tighter. Zarqawi may replace these positions as fast as we capture or kill the incumbents, but each time that happens he has to use people with less skill and experience as replacements. That means more mistakes, less communication with external units, both of which forces the terrorists to simplify strategy and tactics to remain successful on their missions.
Even capturing or killing Zarqawi will not end the insurgency. Another fanatic will rise to take his place. However, the continual losses by the nutcases and their increasing desperation will turn off the flow of recruits into the network. We have already seen that with the “drafting” of either unwitting or unwilling people to carry the suicide bombs in Iraq, and now we can add a new atrocity: killing schoolteachers. Terrorists murdered six teachers in Muwalha, south of Baghdad, by herding them into a room and shooting all of them.
They want to keep the children of Iraq ignorant and ill led, all the more to recruit them later on. Ignorance is their stock in trade, after all, just as with any other bigots and racists. This demonstrates the “plan” that the foreign terrorists have for the future of Iraq: a blighted, ignorant mass under the thumb of an autocratic caliphate that will cough up its children for suicide missions because they have no hope of any better life. The Iraqis have better plans for their children, and they know that the Americans do as well.

Courage!, Say The Cowards

Just when we thought the anchorman model for news broadcasts had died out, leave it to al-Qaeda to bring it back on the Internet. The Washington Post reports this morning that al-Qaeda has begun its own news program, bypassing such outlets as al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, which edited its copy in the past, and going out directly to the world on an Internet stream:

An Internet video newscast called the Voice of the Caliphate was broadcast for the first time on Monday, purporting to be a production of al Qaeda and featuring an anchorman who wore a black ski mask and an ammunition belt.
The anchorman, who said the report would appear once a week, presented news about the Gaza Strip and Iraq and expressed happiness about recent hurricanes in the United States. A copy of the Koran, the Muslim holy book, was placed by his right hand and a rifle affixed to a tripod was pointed at the camera.
The origins of the broadcast could not be immediately verified. If the program was indeed an al Qaeda production, it would mark a change in how the group uses the Internet to spread its messages and propaganda. Direct dissemination would avoid editing or censorship by television networks, many of which usually air only excerpts of the group’s statements and avoid showing gruesome images of killings.

Its first broadcast focused on news from Iraq, repeating the pledge made by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to make war on Iraqi Shi’ites, the “great victory” of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and a claim that Zarqawi’s network had fired chemical-weapon missiles at an American compound in Baghdad. It even featured a commercial for an English-language movie called “Total Jihad”, which unfortunately does not star Sylvester Stallone but appears to be a recruitment video for English-speaking Muslims. The maiden broadcast finishes with delight over the destruction wrought by Hurricance Katrina on New Orleans, to which the Islamofascists refer as the “city of homosexuals”.
It does not say whether the anchorman with the bandolero and the ski mask had a quirky yet memorable signoff for his viewers.
All this really does is provide a clear channel for AQ to broadcast its propaganda, rather than just deliver the videos to al-Jazeera and wait for them to rebroadcast it. AQ must have tired of having their copy whittled down by the editing process and decided to go direct, especially since their production values have never been particularly high in the past anyway. The choice limits the audience for their videos to those who know where and when to look for them, whereas AJ and other Arab networks would typically play the edited clips over and over again.
One drawback for the West is that this will allow AQ’s entire message to get out on the Internet. If these videos contain coded instructions, law enforcement agencies won’t have the ability to cut them out prior to broadcast — a probable reason for the change in tactics. The Internet always gave AQ a clear distribution channel for that kind of broadcast, though. Coded messages have appeared on Usenet boards for years, and websites and blogs have also performed that function for at least as long.
If AQ gets a bit too wrapped up in its celebrity, on the other hand, it may make a mistake and give away information that will tip the authorities to their plans and their whereabouts. In that case, we look forward to the eventual and abrupt cancellation of the Al-Qaeda Evening News and its sister show, 60 Martyrs.

Scandals Shall Come, Moral Relativism Shall Follow?

One of the more blog-conscious members of the mainstream media comes from the Philadelphia Inquirer. Frank Wilson, the book editor of the Inquirer, has not only encouraged bloggers in general (and myself in particular), he now has his own blog — Books, Inq. Frank loves books, but he also has a deep and abiding Catholic faith and writes provocatively and passionately about it.
Today, Frank reviews the issue that has faced the Catholic Church over the past decade and more, sexual abuse, in light of a new grand jury report on the crimes and abuses from the Philadelphia diocese. He writes that the report makes the Starr Report on Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky “seem wholesome by comparison”. But what disturbs Frank more than the crimes committed by the priests is the excusing of sin by the Church as mental disorders, waiving any spiritual responsibility for these crimes from both the priests who committed them and the Church hierarchy that ignored them:

In Saturday’s Inquirer, Cardinal Rigali was quoted as saying that “in every single case reported to Archdiocesan officials, action was taken based on the best medical attention available.” What about sin, your Eminence? I realize that, for many, it’s an archaic term, but I believe it is still used in Catholic moral theology. Even if one admits that the moral failings of the priests in question were to some extent mitigated by a measure of psychiatric disorder — and I think it’s a stretch myself — those moral shortcomings remain both obvious and grievous. …
Why, confronted with acts the Church designates as sinful — rape, corruption of innocents, abuse of authority, to say nothing of blasphemy — did they evince no moral response? I go to confession and tell the priest I’m having an affair and I’ll be told to repent and clean up my act, not see a shrink. Bishops and priests seem ready enough to bloviate about sin to the laity, but when it comes to their wayward colleagues — oh, they need treatment. What the priests cited in the grand jury report needed was arrest, prosecution and conviction. Moreover, even if Archdiocesan officials had a hard time discerning the moral dimension of the problem, what about their plain duty as citizens? When you know that a felony has been committed, padres, you’re supposed to report it.

I know for a fact that this betrayal runs deeper for many members of the faithful than the acts themselves. Most people understand that criminals retain primary responsibility for their crimes, and the sinner for his sins. Those who enable such acts must take responsibility for their acts of commission and omission as well. Where we have an issue is when the Church that teaches us this makes excuses for their own, and hides behind the psychobabble and moral relativism against which they inveigh in every other possible situation. That betrayal of their own doctrines appears hypocritical and oddly convenient, and strips the hierarchy of its moral standing to identify sin and demand repentance, both of its members and of society in general.
Read all of Frank’s post, and be sure to blogroll Frank and keep him on your spiritual reading list.

Broussard’s Holy Grail Moment

Jefferson Parish President Aaron Broussard has apparently decided that the best defense is to be really offensive. Tim Russert and Meet the Press invited Broussard back on the NBC show yesterday to get an update on the status of its recovery from Hurricane Katrina. Russert also wanted to get Broussard’s explanation for his earlier contention that the federal government allowed an associate’s mother to drown rather than rescue her from a nursing home when it turned out that she had drowned a week earlier — and that Broussard had lied about what his associate told him.
Russert played his words back to him:

Mr. Broussard: Sir, they were told, like me, every single day, “The cavalry is coming.” On the federal level, “The cavalry is coming. The cavalry’s coming. The cavalry’s coming.” The guy who runs this building I’m in, emergency management, he’s responsible for everything. His mother was trapped in St. Bernard Nursing Home and every day she called him and said, “Are you coming, son? Is somebody coming?” And he said, “Yeah, Mama. Somebody’s coming to get you. Somebody’s coming to get you on Tuesday.” “Somebody’s coming to get you on Wednesday.” “Somebody’s coming to get you on Thursday.” “Somebody’s coming to get you on Friday.” And she drowned Friday night. She drowned Friday night.

After complaining several times that Russert took him back to a “sad place” by replaying that clip and expressing surprise about seeing it, Russert got to the point:

Mr. Russert: …that our viewers see that again because MSNBC and other blog organizations have looked into the facts behind your comments and these are the conclusions, and I’ll read it for you and our viewers. It says: “An emotional moment and a misunderstanding. Since the broadcast of [Meet the Press] interview…a number of bloggers have questioned the validity of Broussard’s story. Subsequent reporting identified the man whom Broussard was referring to…as Thomas Rodrigue, the Jefferson Parish emergency services director. …Rodrigue acknowledged that his 92-year-old mother and more than 30 other people died in the St. Rita nursing home. They had not been evacuated and the flood waters overtook the residence. … When told of the sequence of phone calls that Broussard described, Rodrigue said `No, no, that’s not true. …I contacted the nursing home two days before the storm [on Saturday, Aug. 27th] and again on [Sunday] the 28th. …At the same time I talked to the nursing home I had also talked to the emergency manager…to encourage that nursing home to evacuate…’ Rodrigue says he never made any calls after Monday, the day he figures his mother died… Officials believe the residents of St. Rita’s died on Monday, the 29th, not on Friday, Sept. 2, as Broussard has suggested.”

In other words, Rodrigue said that Broussard lied about what Rodrigue had told him. Rather than just admit he got the sequence wrong, and that Rodrigue had never called the federal government to rescue his mother, Broussard instead attacked the federal government again:

Mr. Broussard: … Listen, sir, somebody wants to nitpick a man’s tragic loss of a mother because she was abandoned in a nursing home? Are you kidding? What kind of sick mind, what kind of black-hearted people want to nitpick a man’s mother’s death? They just buried Eva last week. I was there at the wake. Are you kidding me? That wasn’t a box of Cheerios they buried last week. That was a man’s mother whose story, if it is entirely broadcast, will be the epitome of abandonment. It will be the saddest tale you ever heard, a man who was responsible for safekeeping of a half a million people, mother’s died in the next parish because she was abandoned there and he can’t get to her and he tried to get to her through EOC. He tried to get through the sheriff’s office. He tries every way he can to get there. Somebody wants to debate those things? My God, what sick-minded person wants to do that? …
Mr. Russert: Mr. Broussard, the people who are questioning your comments are saying that you accused the federal government and the bureaucracy of murder, specifically calling on the secretary of Homeland Security and using this as an example to denounce the federal government. And what they’re saying is, in fact, it was the local government that did not evacuate Eva Rodrigue on Friday or on Saturday. … And, in fact, the owners of the nursing home, Salvador and Mable Mangano, have been indicted with 34 counts of negligent homicide by the Louisiana state attorney general. So it was the owners of the nursing home and the local government that are responsible for the lack of evacuation and not the federal government. Is that fair?
Mr. Broussard: Sir, with everything I said on Meet the Press, the last punctuation of my statements were the story that I was going to tell in about maybe two sentences. It just got emotional for me, sir. Talk about the context of everything I said. Were we abandoned by the federal government? Absolutely we were. Were there more people that abandoned us? Make the list. The list can go on for miles. That’s for history to document. That’s what Congress does best, burn witches. Let Congress do their hearings. Let them find the witches. Let them burn them. The media burns witches better than anybody. Let the media go find the witches and burn them. But as I stood on the ground, sir, for day after day after day after day, nobody came here, sir. Nobody came. The federal government didn’t come. The Red Cross didn’t come. I’ll give you a list of people that didn’t come here, sir, and I was here.

Burn the witches. It’s an unfortunate reminder of what people do when they don’t want to take responsibility for their own failings. Broussard’s comments about “black-hearted” people second-guessing his accusations sound pretty damnable when one considers that had we taken him at his word, the nursing home owners who neglected to arrange for the evacuation of their patients would now be off scot-free. Public officials such as Broussard exist to get the facts out, not run around spewing urban legends and getting hysterical on national TV.
One could excuse it in the first instance, especially if his staff got the story wrong as he implies in a portion of his response, but this appearance is now three weeks past the emergency. He has had time to get his facts straight and to act responsibly. Broussard just proved once again that Louisiana has to take some responsibility for the disaster just in the competence of the people they elected to office in their local and state government.
For a great explanation of how burning witches allows idiots to make themselves feel good while doing nothing to solve real problems, one could do worse than the classic skit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
UPDATE: Aaron, not Allen. (h/t: several CQ readers)

Poland’s Conservatives Sweep Into Power

For the first time since joining the EU, the Polish Left has collapsed, with Polish conservatives winning a sweeping victory in parliamentary elections yesterday. The former leading political party, the Democratic Left Alliance that descended from the former Communists that ran Poland during the Soviet era, dropped from 41% in the previous election to 11% yesterday, not even qualifying as the official opposition:

Voters in Poland’s parliamentary elections shunned the nation’s scandal-prone government of ex-communists to embrace two center-right parties that have promised tax cuts and clean government, partial results showed Monday.
The conservative Law and Justice Party had nearly 27 percent of vote in Sunday’s parliamentary election with 60 percent of ballots counted. The free-market Civic Platform had 24.
The two parties, made up of former activists in the Solidarity movement, say they will form a coalition enabling them to claim more than 270 seats in parliament’s 460-member lower house.

This comes as good news for the US, and bad news for the autocracy of Belarus. The new Polish government wants to implement free-market reforms that will address its crisis in unemployment, which sits at almost 18%, and will lower taxes in order to jump-start its economy. It will also purge old Soviet-era Communists from its government with the idea that people working from market-based principles will allow the government to work that much quicker to solve these problems.
The new regime also will likely strongly support the US on foreign policy. They have declared themselves open to negotiating an extension on the Polish commitment for their troops in Iraq, while the previous government had quietly informed us that they intended to leave in December when their initial agreement ended. They will also keep the pressure on in Belarus, pushing for democratization in what has been called Europe’s last dictatorship.
One has to wonder what the EU will make of the new Polish government. They will have to deal with Warsaw’s new commitment to tax cuts and free-market economics at a time when its central states (France and Germany) both turn away from such painful but necessary adjustments. While they may welcome Polish prosperity, the EU nations may have a lot of explaining to do if the Poles successfully transform their economy with their free-market approach. Brussels might have to take a hard look at whether the nanny-state can sustain itself for much longer, or whether Western Europe faces an economic calamity from the Ponzi schemes that comprise their social systems.

Spanish 9/11 Trial Nears Its End

Spanish authorities expect a verdict soon in their prosecution of three alleged 9/11 conspirators, in a case that has received scant attention in the American media — and even less from the 9/11 Commission report. Twenty-four defendants will find out whether a panel of Spanish judges will rule that they gave material support to Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks:

Three men accused of helping to plot the Sept. 11 attacks waited to learn their fate Monday as Europe’s biggest trial of alleged al-Qaida members neared its finale. …
Binalshibh is alleged to have met in the Tarragona region of northeast Spain in July 2001 with Mohamed Atta, believed to be one of the suicide pilots, for a last-minute planning session.
The lead suspect in the Spanish trial, alleged al-Qaida cell leader Imad Yarkas, 42, a Syrian-born Spaniard, is accused of having set up that meeting along with another suspect, Moroccan Driss Chebli, 33. Both denied knowing Binalshibh or Atta or having anything to do with the terror attacks. …
The third suspect facing specific Sept. 11 charges is Ghasoub al-Abrash Ghalyoun, another Syrian-born Spaniard, who was indicted over detailed video footage he shot of the World Trade Center and other landmarks during a trip to several American cities in 1997.

This may come as news to many Americans, who have not seen or heard much about the Spanish proceedings. The Washington Post covered the start of the trial in April in some detail, when they presented details of the case that never made it into the 9/11 Commission’s final report. The Commission insisted that Atta and Binalshibh never met with anyone else while Atta traveled to Spain, and only relegate Yarkas and Ghalyoun to footnotes, mostly on page 530 of their final report. In those footnotes, the Commission wrote:

Although U.S. authorities have not uncovered evidence that anyone met with Atta or Binalshibh in Spain in July 2001, Spanish investigators contend that members of the Spanish al Qaeda cell were involved in the July meeting and were connected to the 9/11 attacks. … Although we cannot rule out the possibility that other facts will come to light as the Spanish case progresses to trial,we have not found evidence that individuals in Spain participated in the July meeting or in the 9/11 plot.

And one other for Yarkas on page 499:

Notwithstanding persistent press reports to the contrary, there is no convincing evidence that the Spanish al Qaeda cell, led by Imad Barkat Yarkas and al Qaeda European financier Mohammed Galeb Kalaje Zouaydi, provided any funding to support the 9/11 attacks
or the Hamburg participants.

However, the Post reported that the Spaniards thought the evidence against Yarkas looked pretty good, including a conversation caught on a wiretap that informed Yarkas that the caller had “entered the field of aviation”, “classes were going well,” and that “the throat of the bird has been slit.” This conversation took place two weeks before 9/11, but the Commission only mentions it in the footnote to dismiss it as irrelevant.
Spanish authorities also contend that Yarkas passed a phony passport to Binalshibh while in Spain, a contention that once again raises the spectre of Atta’s true travel schedule. The position of the Commission and the timeline of the report depends on the conclusion that Atta never traveled under an assumed identity; it is how the Commission ruled out the trip to Prague in April 2001 that Czech intelligence still insists took place, with a meeting between Atta and a member of Iraqi intelligence.
The Spanish also have on trial a man named Dress Chebli, who allegedly assisted Yarkas in setting up the meeting. Chebli never gets any mention by the 9/11 Commission despite being part of the same indictment.
The report from the Spanish judges should be released today. We will soon see how much it differs from that of the 9/11 Commission, and also see how the media reports it.

Hamas: Oops. Our Bad.

The BBC reports that Hamas has cried “Uncle!” in its first-ever outright war against Israel after two days of one-sided fighting. Hamas now says it will refrain from launching rockets out of Gaza after watching the IDF pound Gaza in an unprecedented show of force, with the Israelis no longer handcuffed by the standards of occupation:

The Palestinian militant organisation Hamas has announced an end to rocket attacks on Israel from the Gaza Strip.
At least 30 rockets have been fired at Israel in recent days, following Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza earlier this month.
In response to the rockets, Israel resumed its policy of targeting militant leaders in air strikes.
On Sunday, an Israeli missile strike killed two Islamic Jihad militants, including a top commander.
At a cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon ordered “unrestricted” strikes against Palestinian militants. … Overnight on Saturday, Israeli forces launched air strikes against alleged weapon storage sites, and a school linked to the militant group Hamas. At least 19 people were reported injured in the strikes.
The Israeli army said it arrested more than 200 militants in West Bank, including activists from Hamas and Islamic Jihad. It also test-fired artillery rounds into northern Gaza.

If one tried to construct the most foolish strategy possible on the part of Hamas and the Palestinians, it would have been to use Gaza as an attack site immediately after the withdrawal of the occupation. Hamas just found out that not only does that constitute an act of war, it also makes Hamas at best partisans, not covered under the Geneva Convention. The Israelis have no responsibility to treat them as POWs once captured, but as spies — unless Mahmoud Abbas wants to claim them as the Palestinian Army, which would then make the West Bank a legitimate theater of war as well as Gaza.
On the plus side for Hamas, the operation has given them an opportunity to look for new leadership, since Israel captured theirs during the operations in the last two days. Perhaps that will improve their strategic thinking, but somehow I rather doubt it.

GunScam – The Next Canadian Scandal

The Winnipeg Sun reports that the Conservatives in Canada await more than just one report next winter that could alter the trajectory of Canadian politics. While Judge Gomery writes his report on the Sponsorship Programme, the auditor general has quietly performed her investigation into the controversial gun registry that the Liberal Party imposed on its citizens, and the results could produce some uncomfortable moments of its own for the Grits and the Martin government:

Critics of the gun registry are eagerly awaiting Auditor General Sheila Fraser’s “Canadian Firearms Program” audit which is scheduled to be released in February — if we’re not in the midst of a federal election campaign.
Fraser isn’t doing interviews about the audit, which has been underway for months.
The last time her office attempted to look into gun registry spending was 2002 and the results were explosive. In fact, her team was forced to abandon its attempts to follow the spending on the gun registry because of the absence of records.
“The information on cost recovery provided to the government changed as the program developed,” Fraser wrote at the time.
Originally expected to be self-financing by 1999-2000, Fraser and her auditors discovered the target for the firearms program to break even was pushed to 2013 — an assumption that the program collect $419 million in fees in 2002-03 and about $828 million by 2007-08.

Canadians can expect the Conservatives to attack the gun registry on two bases: its cost overruns and its ineffectiveness. Like most gun-control programs, it has done little to remove weapons from the hands of criminals, making the overall effect of the registry more onerous on law-abiding gun owners. It also cost much more than the Liberals acknowledged at the initiation of the program; the registry has drained finances from other law-enforcement efforts.
Some Conservatives will say that this was the entire point of the Gun Registry all along. The RCMP, which administers the Gun Registry, has the only law-enforcement portfolio to independently investigate the Canadian executive. In the Canadian political system, the executive comes from Parliament and does not have checks or balances as the American executive does in Congress and the judiciary. The only such check comes in a no-confidence motion, which a majority party can easily squelch, or in the national law-enforcement agency of the RCMP. However, burdened by an underfunded mandate in the Gun Registry and the loss of high-ranking professionals over the last few years, the RCMP no longer has the resources nor the clout to exercise that check on executive power.
What happened as a result? Some would point to Adscam, which put a lot of money into the pockets of Liberal Party backers as well as the Party itself.
Conservatives hope that Adscam and the Gun Registry audit will provide a one-two punch that will inspire a no-confidence motion in the Commons to launch new elections. If so, they had better hope that the electorate has a longer attention span that they did with the initial Gomery revelations, which only provided a window of a few weeks this past spring where the Tories could have grabbed control of the government.

Frist’s Smoke And Fire

Stephen Bainbridge and Power Line have done excellent work in examining the charges of insider trading that have prompted an investigation of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. That should surprise no one, of course; Stephen and Paul Mirengoff have outstanding legal minds and a wealth of knowledge on the regulations surrounding stock trading.
However, both Stephen and Paul miss two aspects of this story. The first involves a separate legal question in my original post, but not referenced in either of their responses. The AP reported separately from the Washington Post that Bill Frist knew that he owned the HCA stock despite the trust supposedly being blind. His trustees informed him by letter that they had purchased a significant amount of the stock two weeks before he told people that he had no idea what kind of assets he had in that portfolio:

Frist, asked in a television interview in January 2003 whether he should sell his HCA stock, responded: “Well, I think really for our viewers it should be understood that I put this into a blind trust. So as far as I know, I own no HCA stock”
Frist, referring to his trust and those of his family, also said in the interview, “I have no control. It is illegal right now for me to know what the composition of those trusts are. So I have no idea.”
Documents filed with the Senate showed that just two weeks before those comments, the trustee of the senator’s trust, M. Kirk Scobey Jr., wrote to Frist that HCA stock was contributed to the trust. It was valued at $15,000 and $50,000.
The documents filed by the trustees of Frist’s blind trusts were obtained by The Associated Press on Friday.

Frist’s defenders claim that the Senator never saw the letter, but that seems rather lame as an excuse. A blind trust should not have its trustees communicating about the components of the portfolio under any circumstances; the need for the blind trust is to ensure that the owner does not take actions that benefit his own finances. If Frist had truly set up the trust as blind, why did the trustees send updates about purchases and sales? What would be the point of the blind trust with that kind of communication going on, whether or not Frist ever personally read the letters? The only assumption one can reasonable reach is that Frist’s trustees had orders to keep him informed of the transactions.
That brings us to the other aspect that Paul and Stephen miss: the political aspects. In January, he told his constituents that he had no clue whether he owned HCA stock. If the AP documents prove authentic, he had set up his trust to keep him informed of the components of his portfolio. That means he lied about the blind trust. That may not rise to a violation of the law, but it certainly amounts to a violation of the trust that Frist needs between himself and the voters. Under those circumstances, Frist doesn’t belong as a party leader in the Senate, and perhaps his constituents might want to rethink his representation of him there in any capacity.
As I posted earlier, we need to ensure that those documents are authentic. If they are — which is what I said earlier — then Frist needs to step down as Senate Majority Leader, regardless of whether he engaged in insider trading. Lying about the blind trust will give us enough headaches, and given Frist’s generally lackluster performance in his leadership role anyway, he isn’t worth the political capital that the GOP will have to spend defending him.

Hadley Denies Weldon’s Claims In An Able Danger Sideshow

Rep. Curt Weldon’s credibility may have taken a minor hit in yesterday’s Washington Post with a rather passive denial from National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that Weldon gave Hadley a chart showing Mohammed Atta as a member of al-Qaeda either before or after 9/11. Weldon claimed in his book that he gave Hadley a copy of a chart two weeks after the attacks, produced in 2000 by the Able Danger team showing the Atta connection and explaining the data-mining project to Hadley. According to the Post, Hadley gave this response yesterday:

But a spokesman for Hadley, who has previously declined to comment on Weldon’s claims, said yesterday that a search of National Security Council files produced no such documents identifying Atta and that Hadley was not given such a chart by Weldon.
“Mr. Hadley does not recall any chart bearing the name or photo of Mohamed Atta,” said the spokesman, Frederick L. Jones II. “NSC staff reviewed the files of Mr. Hadley as well as of all NSC personnel” who might have received such a chart.
“That search has turned up no chart,” he said.
Hadley does recall seeing a chart used as an example of “link analysis” — the technique used by the Able Danger program — as a counterterrorism tool, but is not sure whether it happened during a Sept. 25, 2001, meeting with Weldon or at another session, Jones said.

First, notice the rather weak wording in the denial. Hadley does not recall seeing any such chart, and the chart doesn’t exist in their files. In fact, the Pentagon used this same kind of language initially when pressed for a response after the public revelation of Able Danger. It allows for a non-specific denial which can later fit into further corroboration of Weldon’s claims as well as Hadley’s. It says very little, other than Hadley doesn’t recall it.
Now, one can argue that if an NSA saw such a chart, it should be highly memorable. However, in the first few weeks after 9/11, many theories and hypotheses floated through DC and the media, and it could be that Hadley saw any number of charts and reports with similar kinds of connections. It also could be that Hadley knew about Able Danger (or found out about it later), couldn’t discuss it then and had the chart shredded. Using “I don’t recall” leaves all sorts of possibilities open without tying one to any specific outcome.
What we do know is that the Pentagon admits it has five witnesses who do specifically recall seeing Mohammed Atta identified as a potential AQ operative well before the 9/11 attacks, as well as three of his fellow hijackers. Four of the five recall his picture being on the chart. Whether Hadley recalls the incident that Weldon describes is a side issue at this point. We need to hear from the Able Danger team themselves to see whether they will testify to that identification, how those connections worked, and why the Pentagon would not allow them to coordinate with the FBI to target Atta prior to the attacks.