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 Unwelcome
Truths
The willful ignorance of liberals...
[Gordon Cucullu] 8/15/05
In mid-19th
century America a political party sprung up called the Know
Nothing Party. It got its name from a trait that more than
a century later would be called “plausible deniability.” Know
Nothings - when asked a relevant question - would deny knowledge
of the subject. It bemuses us as a quaint eccentricity from
a distant time until we realize that we’re doing the
same thing today. Recent revelations about covert Able Danger
operations conducted in the US against terrorism are forcing
certain people to deal with subjects that they had thought
swept fully under the carpet.
Because most
of the culprits in this astonishing story of willful ignorance
are either Democrats - most especially members of the administration
of disgraced President Clinton - or are media liberals, the
story is likely to be buried until it explodes on Internet
publishing, blogs, and talk radio. But this culpability exceeds
even the usual gap between left and right in that it includes
many in the so-called “realist” wing of the Republican
Party and Republican liberals (aka, “centrists” and “moderates” in
the MSM).
Contributor
Gordon Cucullu
Former
Green Beret lieutenant colonel, Gordon Cucullu is now
an editorialist, author and a popular speaker. Born
into a military family, he lived and served for more
than thirteen years in East Asia, including eight years
in Korea. For his Special Forces service in Vietnam
he was awarded a Bronze Star, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry,
and the Presidential Unit Commendation. After separation
from the Army, he worked on Korea and East Asian affairs
at both the Pentagon and Department of State as well
as an executive for General Electric in Korea. His
first major non-fiction work, Separated
at Birth: How North Korea became the Evil Twin,
is based in large part on his extensive experience
in Korea and East Asia as a governmental insider and
businessman. [website]
[go to Cucullu index]
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By now you
will have read many summaries of a recently released Able Danger
report.
The Able Danger operation is described by
former CIA operative and terrorism expert Wayne Simmons as “one
of our best covert operations.” The operation he continues,
was expert at “using open source intel to locate and identify
Islamic terrorists.” We can only surmise that a gold mine
of information lies yet unrevealed. The latest result was neatly
addressed by NY Post columnist Deborah Orin who wrote tellingly
of the incredible ineptitude of the highly-touted and endlessly
self-absorbed 9/11 Commission. Staffers - perhaps even the self-promoting
Commissioners themselves - intentionally ignored Able Danger
reports that were delivered on at least two separate briefings,
that provided detailed intelligence on terrorist Mohammed Atta
and three other hijackers years prior to the September 11 attack.
There are several
factors - none flattering to the Commission - that might explain
this appalling lapse. John Podhoretz summaries
them neatly: “So was the [911 Commission] staff a) protecting
the Atta timeline or b) Jamie Gorelick or c) the Clinton administration
or d) itself, because it got hold of the information relatively
late and the staff was lazy?” Options b and c are tightly
related. Then high-ranking Clinton Justice Department appointee
Gorelick wrote the infamous “wall” memo that forbade
interagency coordination of matters involving internal terrorism
investigations. Specifically DOD and CIA were prohibited from
exchanging relevant information with FBI. This produced much
of the harmful lack of intelligence coordination that the Commission
then used arrogantly and paternalistically to criticize the Executive
Branch - particularly the Bush administration, even though most
of the problems arose during Clinton and earlier. Regardless,
the eventual outcome of the Able Danger bombshell will tarnish
the image the 9/11 Commission burnished so brightly for itself.
But the really upsetting
matter is Podhoretz’s first note.
It requires a deeper reading. The Commission was “protecting” its
interpretation of Mohammad Atta’s international and domestic
US travels. Key in this “interpretation” in the minds
of GOP foreign policy “realists,” Clinton supporters,
and Bush haters, is the necessity to de-link any ties between
Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaeda operations. After all,
in the endless cacophony of criticism against the Iraq War, the
two steady drumbeats have been failure to find WMD, and no links
between Saddam and the September 11 attack. Till now they have
acted in the manner of modern day Know Nothings by deliberate
misinterpretations of a series of reports including the 911 Commission’s,
and WMD reports by David Kay and Charles Dueffler.
However the unimpeachable
Able Danger report, reluctantly acknowledged to be correct
by 911 Commission staffers, may well blow the lid
off the ability of the Know Nothings to continue to cloak the
truth. For the movements of Atta prior to the terrorist attack,
if acknowledged, will support statements by the Czech Republic
that link Atta, and hence the al Qaeda attack on America, irrefutably
to Saddam’s covert intelligence operatives. This is something
that surfaced very soon after the attack. The former Czech deputy
foreign minister, later ambassador to the UN, gave statements
that he personally expelled a high raking Iraqi embassy official
in Prague for being a covert foreign intelligence agent after
the latter was discovered having met with Atta in the international
lounge at the Prague airport in August 2001. There the Iraqi
transferred a large amount of cash to Atta, sufficient to fund
the completion of the September 11 attack.
Despite cruel pressure
from MSM, the hard left, and the US State Department and CIA,
the Czechs insisted that their report was
correct. Former Congressman John LeBoutellier was furious at
the Bush administration for bowing to CIA pressure to discount
the Czech report because it verified a vital deadly connection
within the covert terrorist community. Now it appears as if the
Czechs were right. Don’t hold your breath waiting for apologies
to be forthcoming from previous critics.
By acknowledging the Iraq-al Qaeda ties, not only to terrorism
in general but to the September 11 attack in particular the anti-Bush,
anti-war, anti-expansion of democracy and freedom assaults by
the critics are suddenly muted. In fact, the war becomes completely
acceptable under any and all circumstances. This outcome is so
repugnant to the hard left that it will justify even the most
extraordinary suppression of evidence or promulgation of an outright
lie in order to achieve its ends.
Furthermore, if the
Iraq-al Qaeda ties in one attack are proved then we must dig
deeper and investigate the possibility of previous
links and previous attacks. This brings us to the Oklahoma City
bombing, a too-hasty FBI investigation, and political pressure
to close the case once the “perfect” perpetrators
were arrested. Who other than Tim McVeigh could have been a more
ideal catch? A disgruntled white male redneck, ex-military, supporter
of the Branch Davidians, who read neo-Nazi books, McVeigh so
represented the left’s worldview that the investigation
was halted before it began. Janet Reno, perennial willing accomplice
to the Clintons, ordered the FBI to cease work after McVeigh
and Terry Nichols were in custody.
Gutsy Oklahoma City reporter Jayna Davis conducted her own contemporary
investigation that she details in her excellent book The Third
Terrorist, in which she tells of highly suspicious Iraqi behavior
in Oklahoma City. Further, she was stunned when the FBI and other
law enforcement agencies smugly dismissed her findings and insisted
that they had solved and closed the case. For its part, the FBI
was happy to wrap up a case quickly without the need to delve
into foreign terrorist matters. It was more expeditious to cut
away and discard loose ends than to pursue them. Acknowledgement
that Iraq and al Qaeda were involved in the bombing would have
necessitated a major military response to the attack that the
Clinton administration wanted to avoid. As long as the event
could be covered by the criminal justice system - as had the
1993 World Trade bombing - Clintons foreign policy aims were
accommodated.
Continued investigation by Davis showed that the top Iraqi in
question was a former senior Iraqi Republican Guard officer with
close Saddam regime ties. Further some of the members of the
Iraqi group that fled Oklahoma City when the bombing of the Murrah
Building took place moved to the Northeast. One later took a
job at Logan International Airport in Boston, the location of
two September 11 hijackings. He disappeared after that attack.
The Know Nothing philosophy is harming America, and has become
intolerable. It is long overdue for America to sweep away the
obfuscating cloud brought on by ludicrous political correctness
and the incessant bleating of the Know Nothings. A core principle
of war is that in order to win, you must know yourself and know
your enemy. We must insist that the truth be surfaced, discussed,
analyzed, and acted upon. Continual suppression of essential
facts emboldens our enemies and makes us increasingly vulnerable
to subsequent attack.
Able Danger reports must be made public to the extent possible,
and we must have a reinvestigation of the series of terrorist
attacks on America, preferably without the irrational partisanship
that has markedly hurt our war effort to date. That may necessitate
some harsh words from the White House toward certain opposition
politicians and toward the media. It also requires radical reform
of the dysfunctional State Department, CIA, FBI, and any other
of the Executive Branch agencies that consider themselves a separate
branch of government. The American people can handle the truth.
Procrastination - guaranteeing failure - is not an option. tRO
Curious
about North Korea? Learn more in Gordon’s
best-selling book Separated
at Birth: How North Korea became the Evil Twin became
the Evil Twin, Lyons Press available at bookstores now.
copyright
Gordon Cucullu 2005
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