Current Events: August 2005 Archives

The Dallas Morning News continues to be AWOL on the Able Danger story. A search of the Dallas Morning News website reveals only 2 Able Danger stories from the Associated Press. Compare this with a search of the site for the phrase “Cindy Sheehan,” which turned up 71 entries at the time of this posting.

Not every listing from the searches actually made it into print, so the search may be somewhat misleading. I didn’t physically see either of the Able Danger stories in the paper but they may have been there and I missed them. To be fair, the paper probably has not actually printed all of the 71 Cindy Sheehan stories either. Nevertheless, the results of the searches show the relative importance that the Dallas Morning News assigns to these stories.

Bless Cindy Sheehan’s heart, but her Crawford camp-out has been wholly manufactured and funded by the radical left. The Dallas Morning News was intensely interested in who was funding the Swift Boat Vets (this story, for example) but the only interest in who is funding Cindy Sheehan has been a single, positive story.

Mr. Jawad met Ms. Sheehan this month after she spoke at the Veterans for Peace convention in Dallas. When he learned of her plans to travel to Crawford the next day, he gave her a key to the Peace House.

Ms. Sheehan has said she was so touched by his pledge to support her cause, despite the all-but-empty bank account, that she wrote a $250 check so the telephone could be turned back on.

Now the Peace House can pay its bills on time for a while, as well as expand and improve Ms. Sheehan’s camp. The house has spent thousands on food for the hundreds of visitors and $20,000 to rent a tent that can shade 1,000 people. The tent used for concerts is on a private 1-acre lot owned by a landowner who also opposes the war, about a mile from the original campsite.

Mr. Jawad said he expects donations to continue even though Ms. Sheehan left Thursday to be with her ailing mother in California. She is expected to return to Texas this week.

The Dallas Morning News isn’t even interested that Cindy Sheehan’s media event is being funded by radical left-wing groups like Code Pink even though other media organizations are beginning to ask that question:

There is real reluctance to talk about who’s paying, and the P.R. machine that’s promoting Cindy Sheehan, but not everyone here is completely comfortable with it.

Gold Star mother Karen Meredith came here from Mountain View. Her son Ken Ballard died last year.

Karen Meredith, Gold Star mother: “Sometimes things don’t feel quite right to me. They don’t feel wrong, but maybe that’s how they do it in the marketing business.”

ABC7’s Mark Matthews: “You feel you’re part of a marketing business?”

Karen Meredith: “Possibly. Yeah I think so.”

Maybe the Dallas Morning News needs a little prodding to do the right thing. Feel free to contact some of their reporters and editors below and ask them why they’re ignoring the Able Danger story. Please be very polite — some of these folks really are good people and just need to be educated. I’ve known a couple of them for years and think highly of them. Don’t be rude or vague or use pre-canned e-mails, but point them to good sources of information, like the Free Republic Able Danger collection or the Captain’s Quarters blog. Politeness and persistence can pay off in wonderful ways.

Todd J. Gillman — Texas congressional delegation and politics

G. Robert Hillman — national politics, the White House

David Jackson — national politics, the White House

Carl P. Leubsdorf — Bureau Chief

Richard Whittle — military affairs

Wayne Slater — President George W. Bush, state politics, money in politics

Pete Slover — investigations

The question is not so much anymore whether the story will get out. It will. The question is whether the mainstream media will join us in the search for truth or fight us.

The Weekly Standard has an excellent column by Stephen F. Hayes this week on how the 9/11 Commission left anything out of the report that might tie the disaster to Iraq. The big question is why did the 9/11 Commission operate with such an agenda? They apparently decided what the results of the investigation would be before they conducted the investigation and deliberately ignored any evidence that didn’t fit their conclusion.

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.

When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his “pocket litter,” in the parlance of the investigators, included contact information for Musab Yasin and another 1993 plotter, a Kuwaiti native named Ibrahim Suleiman.

These facts alone, linking the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, would seem to cry out for additional scrutiny, no?

The Yasin brothers and Shakir have more in common. They are all Iraqis. And two of them—Abdul Rahman Yasin and Shakir—went free, despite their participation in attacks on the World Trade Center, at least partly because of efforts made on their behalf by the regime of Saddam Hussein.
…

Readers of The Weekly Standard may be familiar with the stories of Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab Yasin, and Ahmed Hikmat Shakir. Readers of the 9/11 Commission’s final report are not. Those three individuals are nowhere mentioned in the 428 pages that comprise the body of the 9/11 Commission report. Their names do not appear among the 172 listed in Appendix B of the report, a table of individuals who are mentioned in the text. Two brief footnotes mention Shakir.

Why? Why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention Abdul Rahman Yasin, who admitted his role in the first World Trade Center attack, which killed 6 people, injured more than 1,000, and blew a hole seven stories deep in the North Tower? It’s an odd omission, especially since the commission named no fewer than five of his accomplices.

Why would the 9/11 Commission neglect Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, a man who was photographed assisting a 9/11 hijacker and attended perhaps the most important 9/11 planning meeting?

And why would the 9/11 Commission fail to mention the overlap between the two successful plots to attack the World Trade Center?

The answer is simple: The Iraqi link didn’t fit the commission’s narrative.

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Consider the three new facts in this brief summary. One, Shakir himself told interrogators that an Iraqi embassy employee got him the job that allowed him to help the hijacker(s). Two, that Iraqi embassy employee was Ra’ad al Mudaris. Three, another source identified al Mudaris as former Iraqi Intelligence.

All of this information was known to the U.S. intelligence community months before the 9/11 Commission completed its investigation. And yet none of it appeared in the final report.

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BY THE END OF LAST WEEK, the demands for more information on Able Danger had reached fever pitch. The Pentagon claimed to have launched an aggressive investigation into the project. 9/11 Commission co-chairman Thomas Kean was demanding more information on Able Danger from the National Security Council. And Senator Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, fired off a hard-hitting letter to FBI director Robert Mueller demanding answers to a series of questions about the Pentagon unit and its interactions with the FBI.

Answers about Able Danger would be nice, but it is surely long past time for answers on Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, Abdul Rahman Yasin, and Musab Yasin. The 9/11 Commission itself and other relevant bodies should reexamine Shakir’s role in the 9/11 plot and his connections to the 1993 World Trade Center plotters. The Bush administration should move quickly to declassify all of the intelligence the U.S. government possesses on Shakir and the Yasin brothers. The Senate and House intelligence committee should demand answers on the three Iraqis from the CIA, the DIA, and the FBI.