Able Danger Atta Photo Mystery Solved

Sources close to the ongoing Department of Defense investigation into the controversial Able Danger data mining intelligence program, which purportedly identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers a year before the worst terror attacks in US history, say the mystery person who actually obtained a much-disputed photograph of Atta for the Able Danger team has now been identified.
Ever since the Pentagon-ordered destruction in 2000 of 2.5 terabytes of data unearthed by Able Danger - allegedly including a chart featuring Atta's photograph that revealed terrorist links and patterns when clicked on - skeptics have long raised doubt about the very existence of the chart and the photograph in question.
It has now been confirmed that a female contract employee of defense contractor Orion Scientific, which provided personnel and proprietary software to the original Able Danger operation, has been identified as a result of investigation by the Pentagon's own Inspector General.

Identification of the mystery woman lends more credence to claims by Able Danger members, such as team leader Captain Mark Phillpott, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, and Orion analyst J.D. Smith, among others, that the Able Danger program did in fact identify four 9/11 hijackers well before the attacks.
Despite their best efforts, however, Able Danger members were unsuccessful in several attempts to relay their information to the FBI for further investigation and/or action. And although the team did meet with staff members of the National Commission charged with investigating the 9/11 attacks, their data was largely ignored, dismissed as "historically insignificant" and "not fitting the story the Commission wants to tell." There is no mention of Able Danger, its identification of five active Al Qaeda cells and other pre-attack threat assessment information contained in the voluminous official account of the 9/11 attacks.

In addition, the Pentagon, at the very highest level, has gone to great lengths to quash public discussion of the Able Danger findings. DOD actions to cover up the Able Danger data include gagging, muzzling and threatening Able Danger team members, last-minute cancellation of permission for team members to testify before Congressional committees looking into the affair, holding up promotions of military personnel, and in particular the vilification of LTC Shaffer, a Bronze Star-awarded twenty-two year veteran of the US Army Reserve, after he went public with the Able Danger story despite Pentagon opposition.

The DOD Inspector General probe began at the behest of Representative Curt Weldon, (R-Pennsylvania) who was upset by the Pentagon retribution aimed at LTC Shaffer. Weldon, vice-chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and an avowed supporter of the Bush Administration, surprisingly went to war with the Pentagon and his own party in an effort to bring the truth about the Able Danger program to light.
Weldon's efforts finally resulted in hearings last week before the House Armed Services Committee. Although much testimony was offered only in closed session, Undersecretary of Defense Stephen Cambone did partially testify in open session. Notably, Cambone called the Able Danger program "an enormous success" - a far cry from the previous Pentagon stance that there was little of value discovered by the program.

Representative Weldon continues to push for full disclosure of what he has termed "a massive cover up much bigger than that of Watergate."

Bush Is Afraid to Nix the UAE Deal

Bush would rather insult the American people intelligence than to say NO to the UAE deal. I wonder why is that?

The oil-rich United Arab Emirates is a major investor in The Carlyle Group, the private equity investment firm where President Bush’s father once served as senior adviser and is a who’s who of former high-level government officials. Just last year, Dubai International Capital, a government-backed buyout firm, invested in an $8 billion Carlyle fund.

Another family connection, the president’s brother, Neil Bush, has reportedly received funding for his educational software company from the UAE investors. A call to his company was not returned.


Another administration connection, President Bush chose a Dubai Ports World executive to head the U.S. Maritime Administration. David Sanborn, the former director of Dubai Ports’ European and Latin American operations, he was tapped just last month to lead the agency that oversees U.S. port operations.


Then there is the cabinet connection. Treasury Secretary John Snow was chairman of railroad company CSX/. After he left the company for the White House, CSX sold its international port operations to Dubai Ports World for more than a billion dollars.
In Connecticut today, Snow told reporters he had no knowledge of that CSX sale. “I learned of this transaction probably the same way members of the Senate did, by reading about it in the newspapers.”


Is Bush going to scare the American people into "accepting" this deal by making us think UAE will retaliate by bombing us?

Is the Bush admistration Pimping itself?

Bush has done a good job of indoctrinating us with Fear, Terrorism, and Bombings. Now he wants us to forget those words and accept this deal. Is Bush SCHIZOPHRENIC.

Cheney May Be Coming to Rock Hill

Is Vice President Dick Cheney coming to Rock Hill?
A blog post on the Washington Post Web site says yes, as does a top official with the S.C. Republican Party.
According to the washingtonpost.com politics blog "The Fix" and Scott Malyerck, executive director of the S.C. Republican Party, Cheney is scheduled to be in Rock Hill later this month to attend a fundraiser for Ralph Norman, a state representative and Republican congressional candidate. Norman is seeking to claim the 5th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives now held by Democrat John Spratt.
Malyerck told The Herald on Wednesday his understanding was that the visit was set for March 17. But Jennifer Mayfield, a spokeswoman in Cheney's office in Washington, would not confirm the visit.
"We don't have anything to announce," she said.
Nathan Hollifield, Norman's campaign manager, said he could not comment.
"If the vice president's people don't have anything to announce at this point, then we don't either," he said.
Norman himself also was tightlipped Wednesday.
"I can't comment either ... that's pretty much out of our control," he said of Cheney's schedule.
Robert Hopkins, district coordinator for Spratt's Rock Hill office, said it is "not surprising" to see Cheney come to York County because "the White House recruited Ralph Norman."
Norman, 52, a developer and first-term state legislator, was recruited by top Republicans and is considered the party's best chance to defeat the veteran Spratt, who party leaders say is vulnerable because the district is becoming increasingly Republican.
But York County's top Democrat said Republican gaffes -- with Cheney at the fore -- have eroded Republican popularity and support.
"The Republicans, with Cheney's leadership, have gotten us in a mess in Iraq and in a mess with the budget deficit," said Jim Morton, chairman of the York County Democratic Party. "The administration's backing of Ralph Norman does not hurt John Spratt."
Spratt has held the 5th District seat since 1982. Malyerck said a Cheney visit would show how important Spratt's seat is to Republicans.
"My guess is later this year we may see Air Force One land in South Carolina somewhere," he said. "What it shows is the importance of this race and how John Spratt is a key target for Republicans nationally."
Republican Park Gillespie of Clover is also seeking the nomination to face Spratt.

In age of terror, U.S. fears tunnels pose bigger threat

SAN DIEGO — Special Agent Frank Marwood was showing a visitor the half-mile long, 80-foot deep smuggler's tunnel his agents discovered beneath the U.S.-Mexican border at Otay Mesa when his cellphone interrupted.

An agent was reporting in with a startling new find: another tunnel, this one shorter and more crudely built, but big enough to provide yet another subterranean port of entry into the USA.
These are busy days for the men and women who guard the nation's border — particularly for the team of federal agents charged with rooting out border tunnels.
The tunnel Marwood learned of last month was the 35th federal agents have found since Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorist attacks gave a new urgency to the search.
While drug smuggling and illegal immigration have long been border concerns, the threat of international terrorists entering the USA by burrowing under the border has made the effort to detect tunnels a national security priority.
"Of course they could" be used by terrorists, Marwood says of the tunnels his team unearths. "The potential is there, and that makes it unacceptable."
"It's a transnational threat," says Lt. Col. Steve Baker, an Army engineer who is part of a military effort to support the tunnel search. "You don't know that they're just bringing drugs through there."
No federal law prohibits building such tunnels. On Wednesday, a group of senators and House members introduced a bill that would make it a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison to build or finance such tunnels. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she pushed the idea after Marwood gave her a tour of the tunnel here.
"What I found was amazing: a sophisticated tunnel, with lights, ventilation, pumps and a concrete floor," she said. "This really illustrates the danger — that smugglers will use these tunnels to subvert our border checkpoints, trafficking drugs, humans and weapons under the border."
Marwood, 54, is deputy special agent in charge of the San Diego office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security. He is also in charge of the ad hoc task force of half a dozen agents from ICE, the Drug Enforcement Adminstration and the Border Patrol who have been detailed to work together to find and stop the tunnelers.
Agents from the three agencies agreed to set up the team three years ago and operate out of an office in a nondescript building among the many featureless industrial buildings and warehouses near a border crossing at Otay Mesa.
The team was created not on orders from Washington but out of concerns from agents. The Border Patrol officers were discovering tunnels when their trucks sunk into the dirt after the ground had collapsed over shallow passages.
The discovery in January of the sophisticated tunnel brought attention to the team's efforts and the remarkable string of discoveries over the past 4½ years.
The big Otay Mesa tunnel — with 220-volt cables and pumps for water drainage — likely took more than a year to build, Marwood said. It required sophisticated engineering and moving hundreds of truckloads of dirt. The money it would take to build it suggests it was financed by drug smugglers, he says.
Agents brought in sniffing equipment to test the tunnel for radiation and biohazards. They were relieved when the tests suggested no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons had been conveyed.
The tunnel discoveries raise the question, however, of how such large-scale construction projects can go undetected in a technological age when sonar and other methods can spot mineral veins or treasures of ancient civilizations.

Republican controlled Congress abdicated its Job

We wouldn't be in this quagmire over the ports, if The Republican controlled Cogress had done its jobe instead of following behind Cheney and Rove Admistration (Bush was and is AWOL) like LEMMINGS.

Republicans now are distancing themselves from Bush because of midterm elections. They should have distanced themselves before now. This is much too little too late.

The Republicans want "to show" they are listening to their constituents when they have been tone deaf from the start of this administration in '02.

Howling by the Republicans over this one issue is to show their constituents they GET IT so they can be re-elected. This should not be allowed to happen as long as Bush is in office.

There have been too many misques for both Bush and the Republicans.

Hurricane Katrina, Cheney's shooting, Privatization of Social Security, Bush's "slam dunk" Iraq War.

Bush wants to change the emphasis of why we went to war for WMD to giving democracy to people who never asked for it in Iraq. Bush shsouldn't be allowed to change WHY we went to war in Iraq. That is rewritting history ( borrrowing Bush's words).

If Bush is so TOUGH on National Security, Then Why?

Why isn't every container which comes into our ports screeened?

Oh yes, the Administration will say that to screen every container would stop the international commerce system. Bah!

Japan screens 100% of containers which come in its port. If we are so adept and smart then why do we only scrreen 5%?

Something is greatly amiss here. Either the trumpeters of this fallacy are "tone deaf" or Japan exaggerates.

Remember Japan makes reliable and affordable cars, something Detroit has forgotten how to do.

Bush would say that UAE has made "progress" on terrorism. However, how much is progress, what is progress, and how much will progress continue by UAE. Does progress by UAE means it went from 1% to 4%, is that progress? Once this deal is consummated, does progress stop by UAE afterall, UAE would have the cookie it wants?

Where was National Seurity on this deal? Where was Bush? If Cheney is so good on foreign policy, where was his voice? Oh yes, Cheney was out shooting his friends in the face.

CheNey Is On the "OUTS" with Bush

How so you ask?

Notice Bush is selling out Ports to UAE and not, Halliburton.