TOPDOG08.COM: Snell worked for Zelikow, not Gorelick

TOPDOG08.COM: Snell worked for Zelikow, not Gorelick

As much as you've got to love Curt Weldon for having the guts to say he will resign if the Able Danger cover up continues, you've also got to admit that at times Congressman Weldon can get his facts wrong.

A great furor has arisen in the blogosphere over this Weldon comment:

"The person who debriefed Scott Philpot was, in fact, the lead staffer for Jamie Gorelick," Weldon told the Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes." "His name was Dieter Snell."

Weldon contended: "It was Dieter Snell who did not brief the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commissioners were never briefed on Able Danger."

He also said pretty much the same thing to Lou Dobbs on CNN:

That 9/11 Commission staffer made a decision not to brief the commissioners. That 9/11 Commission staffer was working for Jamie Gorelick, who was a member of the Commission, who wrote the famous memo that said they could not tranfer information between the military and the FBI.

First of all, the Gorelick memo - which you can read - dealt with FBI counterterrorism efforts and the need to separate countterterrorism from criminal prosecution, to avoid getting a mistrial. It did not have anything to do with the separation of FBI counterterrorism from CIA countterterrorism, DIA countterterrorism, or anything else. William Dugan established this at the Judiciary Committee hearing.

Now, on to the real substance of the argument.

Did Snell debrief Phillpott? Yes. Was he working for Jamie Gorelick? No. Not any more than he was working for Slade Gordon or any other member of the Commission, as opposed to the Commission staff. He was working for Philip Zelikow, the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission staff who hired him as Senior Counsel.

Who is Philip Zelikow? Zelikow is now the lead Counsel for Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. Zelikow also wrote a document called the National Security Strategy for Rice back in 2002. Not exactly a Clinton administration hold over:

Zelikow, who's mostly stayed out of the spotlight, is a strange fit for the role of administration scourge. Intellectually, he's squarely in the neoconservative camp. He was part of the Bush foreign policy transition team, and the president later named him to his presidential advisory board on intelligence. Zelikow is reportedly close to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, with whom he co-wrote a book about German reunification in 1995. In 2002, according to James Mann's Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet, Rice tapped Zelikow to rewrite the National Security Strategy of the United States, which emphasized preemption. He also fought for the administration's corner in his academic writing. After working on the National Security Strategy, Zelikow wrote a 6,000-word article in the neoconservative journal The National Interest praising his own document for its "explicit adaptation to the new conditions of international life."

Not only did Zelikow hire Snell, he put him in charge of writing the section of the 9/11 Commission report that dealt with the 9/11 plot. As Ernest R. May told The New Republic:

With agreement from the commissioners and his colleagues in the front office, Zelikow divided the staff into teams, more or less coinciding with topics in the outline. MacEachin headed one studying Al Qaeda. In time, this team split in two, with Dietrich Snell captaining a group that worked specifically on the 9/11 plot and the movements of the hijackers. Though a lawyer through and through, Snell had prosecuted terrorists in New York, was fascinated by the terrible story, and proved to be both a natural-born historian and a gifted writer. Hurley led the team that focused on U.S. counterterrorism activity prior to September 11.

MacEachin's, Snell's, and Hurley's teams found offices in the premises that Hamilton had obtained from the CIA. So did a team that concentrated on the intelligence community, as well as parts of a team that dealt with terrorist finance. This Special Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF, pronounced "skiff"), essentially one large safe, housed also the front office and the commission's sensitive files. It had the commission's principal conference room. Other staff in Washington and New York worked on topics such as emergency response on September 11, which required less access to highly classified material, but the SCIF was where the commission met and where all drafts for the final report ended up.

Zelikow asked all the teams to start preparing timelines and monographs for their subjects. For some, this was the first hint that they might not be writing a conventional government report--that they would be writing history. MacEachin set the example, turning out a rolling chronology into which he fitted every new scrap of information. Nearly all members of the staff accommodated to this way of sorting evidence--and this way of thinking about it. In the late spring of 2003, when the outline was finally unveiled before all the commissioners, it appeared to have won acceptance among the staff. The commission endorsed it almost without debate.

It is also worth noting that while Zelikow had been told about Able Danger in October 2003, he subsequently ignored Tony Shaffer, when Shaffer attempted to contact him to discuss it in more detail.

Snell on the other hand, did not meet with Phillpott until days before the 9/11 Report was supposed to go to press. As the Commission describes in their press release from August 12, 2005:

On July 12, 2004, as the drafting and editing process for the Report was coming to an end (the Report was released on July 22, and editing continued to occur through July 17), a senior staff member, Dieter Snell, accompanied by another staff member, met with the officer at one of the Commission’s Washington, D.C. offices. A representative of the DOD also attended the interview.

According to the memorandum for the record on this meeting, prepared the next day by Mr. Snell, the officer said that ABLE DANGER included work on “link analysis,” mapping links among various people involved in terrorist networks. According to this record, the officer recalled seeing the name and photo of Mohamed Atta on an “analyst notebook chart” assembled by another officer (who he said had retired and was now working as a DOD contractor).

The officer being interviewed said he saw this material only briefly, that the relevant material dated from February through April 2000, and that it showed Mohamed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn. The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document (“redacted”) because DOD lawyers were concerned about the propriety of DOD intelligence efforts that might be focused inside the United States. The officer referred to these as “posse comitatus” restrictions. Believing the law was being wrongly interpreted, he said he had complained about these restrictions up his chain of command in the U.S. Special Operations Command, to no avail....

The interviewee had no documentary evidence and said he had only seen the document briefly some years earlier. He could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification. Nor could the interviewee recall, when questioned, any details about how he thought a link to Atta could have been made by this DOD program in 2000 or any time before 9/11. The Department of Defense documents had mentioned nothing about Atta, nor had anyone come forward between September 2001 and July 2004 with any similar information. Weighing this with the information about Atta’s actual activities, the negligible information available about Atta to other U.S. government agencies and the German government before 9/11, and the interviewer’s assessment of the interviewee’s knowledge and credibility, the Commission staff concluded that the officer’s account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation.

Notice that it does not say Snell made the decision, it only says that "the Commission staff" did. That leads me to believe that Snell showed Zelikow his momorandum which specifically named Atta, and it was Zelikow, not Snell, who deemed it "not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation".

Now compare the records Snell kept, explicitly mentioning Atta, with the records that Zelikow kept when he met Shaffer in Afghanistan:

On October 21, 2003, Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, two senior Commission staff members, and a representative of the executive branch, met at Bagram Base, Afghanistan, with three individuals doing intelligence work for the Department of Defense. One of the men, in recounting information about al Qaeda’s activities in Afghanistan before 9/11, referred to a DOD program known as ABLE DANGER. He said this program was now closed, but urged Commission staff to get the files on this program and review them, as he thought the Commission would find information about al Qaeda and Bin Ladin that had been developed before the 9/11 attack. He also complained that Congress, particularly the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), had effectively ended a human intelligence network he considered valuable.

As with their other meetings, Commission staff promptly prepared a memorandum for the record. That memorandum, prepared at the time, does not record any mention of Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers, or any suggestion that their identities were known to anyone at DOD before 9/11. Nor do any of the three Commission staffers who participated in the interview, or the executive branch lawyer, recall hearing any such allegation.

Was Snell on this trip? If not, who else was? The plot thickens.