ABLE DANGER BOMBSHELL

Flashback to the summer of 2002.

In its June 3, 2002, issue, Time dramatically presented the story of a brave whistleblower. Coleen Rowley was depicted as the woman that blew the 9/11 case wide open.

Rowley was the liberals' hero.

What courage!

What integrity!

Time wrote of the "inside story of the FBI whistle-blower who accuses her bosses of ignoring warnings of 9/11."

...[F]riends and colleagues of Rowley were impressed but not altogether surprised when she put her career on the line last week to blow the whistle on the terrible failings of her beloved FBI. "She is the kind of person who always does what is right when nobody's watching," says one friend. "That is why she came out." American life seems uniquely capable of producing stories like hers--a loyal public servant who clings to her belief in the system until a betrayal of that faith makes it impossible to stay silent. Rowley, unable to sleep at 3 a.m. one night in early May, drove to the office and wrote the first draft of a memo. She spent a week fine-tuning it, setting it aside for days, anguishing and at times doubting whether she could go through with it. Summoning her courage last Tuesday, she at last fired off the 13-page letter ("from the heart," she writes) to her ultimate boss, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and flew to Washington to hand-deliver copies to two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and meet with committee staffers. The letter accuses the bureau of deliberately obstructing measures that could have helped disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. The FBI responded by marking the letter CLASSIFIED.

...Like no other document to emerge from the current firestorm over the mistakes and missed signals that led to Sept. 11, the Rowley memo casts a searing light into the depths of government ineptitude. In Washington, where the FBI and CIA may be criticized but are allowed to clean up their own messes as they see fit, the memo sent shudders through the establishment for a simple reason: it came from within. If Rowley's account is accurate--and colleagues say she's not one for shading the truth--her letter amounts to a colossal indictment of our chief law-enforcement agency's neglect in the face of the biggest terrorist operation ever mounted on U.S. soil. It raises serious doubts about whether the FBI is capable of protecting the public--and whether it still deserves the public's trust. While saying she does not believe the FBI director engaged in a post-9/11 cover-up, Rowley accuses Mueller and senior aides of having "omitted, downplayed, glossed over and or/mischaracterized" her office's investigation of Moussaoui. After Sept. 11, top FBI officials decided to "circle the wagons," as she puts it, and deny--as Mueller did immediately after the attacks--that the FBI had any knowledge that Islamic terrorists might be planning an attack involving hijacked airplanes. "I have deep concerns," she writes, "that a delicate shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring." Just 2 1/2 years from retirement, Rowley is now fretting about reprisals, friends say. She closes her letter by acknowledging "the frankness with which I have expressed myself" and asking for federal whistle-blower protection.

...No one will ever know what impact, if any, the FBI's following up of these requests might have had," Rowley writes. In a way, she's right--for every American, what might have been will be maddeningly, eternally unknowable. But Rowley has at least forced the FBI and the Administration to confront their failures directly and publicly, rather than sweep them under a self-stitched rug of wartime immunity...Before Rowley came along, the Administration had succeeded in derailing such inquiries by calling them unproductive and suggesting that its critics might be unpatriotic. Last week a patriot came forward to help steer the country back toward the truth.

Why look back at Rowley, that courageous "patriot," and her memo?

It should be obvious.

Will Curt Weldon and the revelations of Able Danger be given the same treatment?

That should also be obvious.

From Time's August 22, 2005, issue:

Just how damning are allegations by Congressman Curt Weldon that a secret Pentagon intelligence operation pegged hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat nearly two years before he led the 9/11 attacks? When Weldon first made the charge in a new book and in a June speech on the House floor, it met with little attention, but perhaps due to the August heat or the approaching fourth anniversary of the attacks, the accusation ignited controversy last week.

The question is whether it has any substance.

...A senior Pentagon official briefed on the program told TIME, “This is much ado about nothing.” a source close to the former 9/11 commission aides who chased down the story last week said they had been led to believe the Pentagon would issue a statement along these lines on Friday. But as of Sunday, this had not occurred. "We have been working with the 9/11 public discourse project to gain more clarity into this issue," said a Pentagon spokeswoman, Air Force Lieut. Col. Ellen Krenke. "Clearly there was information that was developed through this program, but it is unclear what was provided to the 9/11 Commission."

I guess one person's bombshell is another's dud.

One person's patriot is another's Chicken Little.