The MSM Wakes UP

When the 9/11 Commission was interviewing and investigating, the media and the left side of the Internet and blogosphere got all worked up about a Personal Daily Briefing concerning bin-Laden:

The PDB article did not warn of the 9/11 attacks," the White House said in a statement released Saturday night. "Although the PDB referred to the possibility of hijackings, it did not discuss the possible use of planes as weapons."

The memo, titled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S.," had been described by the White House as a largely historical document with scant information about domestic al Qaeda threats.

The memo includes intelligence on al Qaeda threats as recent as three months before the attacks.

That PDB mentioned bin-Laden and hijackings, that was pretty much the gist of it.

Well, it turns out that there's alot more to this story, it may involve lies and stolen documents that will further erode what's left of the Clinton legacy. With the investigation into 9/11 about to restart and the information being held back from the commission finally coming to light.

WASHINGTON - The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a spokesman acknowledged Thursday.

Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission's follow-up project called the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, had said earlier this week that the panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission had been aware of the intelligence.

The information 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, Felzenberg said.

Commission member Jamie Gorelick was the genius behind a Clinton administration policy that may have allowed Atta to continue his plans to hijack aircraft and fly them into the WTC and Pentagon as well as a failed attempt at the White House or Capitol:

On April 16, 2004, a Washington Times’ editorial questioned the presence of Jamie Gorelick on the Sept. 11 Commission investigating the worst terrorist attack against the United States in history. It was Gorelick who was “personally responsible for instituting a key obstacle [the so-called 'wall of separation memo'] to cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence operations before the terrorist attacks” and the Times editorial held that her presence on the Commission “raises disturbing questions about the integrity of the commission itself. Ms. Gorelick should not be cross-examining witnesses; instead, she should be required to testify about her own behavior under oath.”

...So, a year before the 9/11 attacks, a special unit in the U.S. military was aware of the presence of an al-Queda cell in Brooklyn, New York, and sought to share its information with the FBI but was stopped cold. Why? Because (as described in the April 16, 2004 Washington Times piece) “on March 4, 1995, [Jamie Gorelick, the then number 2 official in the Clinton Justice Department, sent a 4-page directive] to FBI Director Louis Freeh and Mary Jo White, the New York-based U.S. attorney investigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In the memo, Ms. Gorelick ordered Mr. Freeh and Ms. White to follow information-sharing procedures that ‘go beyond what is legally required,’ in order to avoid ‘any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance’ that the Justice Department was using Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants, instead of ordinary criminal investigative procedures, in an effort to undermine the civil liberties of terrorism suspects.”

So now we have a he said-she said with the timing of the information and who received what prior to releasing the report.

Meanwhile, Sandy Berger was caught with his pants up and stuff with documents that have not been fully recovered. What information was contained in those documents Mr. Berger, and why did you steal them?

Capt. Ed has more.

Update (8/12): A very comprehensive timeline here.