WELDON’S LAST STAND….I know, I know. It’s Christmas and I’m supposed to be on vacation. But in the spirit of wrapping up loose ends, I see that the Senate Intelligence Committee has finally finished its investigation of “Able Danger,” the secret Pentagon program that supposedly identified Mohamed Atta before 9/11. Last year, Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Crazy) claimed that Able Danger had produced a chart with Atta’s picture on it well before 9/11, and that the program had later been shut down — and a coverup launched — by ass-covering officials afraid of admitting that they had seen the chart and ignored it. The Senate panel disagreed:
Military analysts assigned to the effort did create charts with pictures of Al Qaeda operatives whose identities were known publicly at the time, the committee found. But the committee concluded that none of those charts depicted Atta, and that the claims of Weldon and others may have been caused by confusion.
….”One of these individuals depicted on the chart arguably looked like Mohammed Atta,” the committee concluded. “In addition, the chart contained names of Al Qaeda associates that sound like Atta, as well as numerous variations of the common Arab name Mohammed.”
Now, it’s not as if the Senate Intelligence Committee is the final word on all things 9/11. On the other hand, there were lots of reasons to suspect that the Able Danger story was mostly rubbish, one of which is that “Crazy” Curt Weldon is, well, crazy. He’s also going to be out of office in a few days, spending his retirement years trying to convince a grand jury that it was only a coincidence that his daughter got a million bucks worth of lobbying contracts from his pals.
So I think we can safely put a nail in this particular coffin. After 16 months of investigation, we’ve learned that there’s more than one guy named Mohamed who works for al-Qaeda. Shocking news, isn’t it?
