Another Blow to Able Danger Fantasy

My Caption: "I nearly caught a terrorist, and he was thiissss big."

From Yahoo News, Pentagon: Secret Unit Couldn't Stop 9/11

Another nail in the coffin for Weldon and Able Danger:

A Pentagon report rejects the idea that intelligence gathered by a secret military unit could have been used to stop the Sept. 11 hijackings.
The Pentagon inspector general's office said Thursday that a review of records from the unit, known as Able Danger, found no evidence it had identified ringleader Mohamed Atta or any other terrorist who participated in the 2001 attacks.

The report was ordered in response to Weldon's wild claims and rants that the Able Danger unit had identified Atta prior to Sept 11th, 2001.

This is on top of last year's previous findings on the same issue:

Last year, the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks dispensed with the issue by calling it "not historically significant."
Thomas Kean, the commission's co-chairman, said he hoped the report would put an end to discussion about Able Danger. "After this I don't know where it can go," Kean said.

In his continued refusal to accept reality over paranoia, "Weldon questioned the 'motives and the content' of the report and rejected its conclusions".

Weldon seems to have his own 5 stages of Denial:
1)Denial 2)Denial 3)Paranoia 4)Denial 5)Rinse and Repeat

Weldon claims the Pentagon cherry-picked testimony and trashed the reputations of witnesses, but "the report said those accounts 'varied significantly' and witnesses were inconsistent at times in their statements".

Much of Weldon's dubious claim revolves around a supposed chart that identified Atta pre-9/11, but then magically disappeared in some government conspiracy, so Weldon can't produce it or a single reliable witness. Weldon is engaging in his own version of The conspiracy dog ate my congressional homework.

William Bender, in his Delco Times piece, Report: Curt wrong about Able Danger, expands on the story and reveals more of Weldon's paranoia.

The 9/11 Commission has previously dismissed Weldon’s claims, which led the congressman to ratchet up his accusations that commission members and staffers conspired to exclude the Able Danger findings from their final report to shield the Clinton administration from embarrassment.
"This is a scandal, I think, bigger than Watergate," Weldon told the Daily Times in December.

So, Weldon believes that the Bush administration is engaged in a giant conspiracy, bigger than Watergate, just to protect Clinton from embarassment?? I think that it's time for Congress to begin mandatory drug testing of its members.

Weldon further questioned the timing of the release of this latest report, implying that it might be an attempt to influence the elections. Curt's the one that demanded this second investigation, when he rejected last year's conclusions on the same subject.


Curt:
How many more of our tax dollars are you going to waste pursuing your desperate fantasies and even more desperate bid for re-election?

Can you stop embarassing yourself and the 7th district for a few days?

Is your next "evidence" going to be a phone-book with Atta's name?