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Aug. 16, 2005 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:35
August 16, 2005, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Just tell me the number.
I'll tell you who it was.
I wasn't watching it last quarter.
Was it number two?
Snurdley's asking me who the quarterback was in the fourth quarter for the Steelers Eagles game last.
I wouldn't watch the fourth quarter.
Anyway, greetings and welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the Rush Limbaugh program.
The Ditto Cam is up and running, and it'll be running unless it breaks.
And it never has, but you have to allow for all possibilities.
It'll be up and running for the whole program.
Great to have you with us.
We got a great program lined up for you here.
The telephone number, if you want to be on the program, 800-282-2882.
The email address is rush at EIBnet.com.
I told you yesterday this Cindy Sheehan train was coming off the tracks, is derailing, and it lobby is starting today.
Now Cindy Sheehan's complaining about the media.
It just makes you want to cry.
It just makes, and laugh at the same time.
Now she's complaining that her vigil here has become a media circus.
She's just, you know, it's like I've been saying, she's just the latest incarnation of the Jersey girls.
She's just the latest incarnation of any number of these people the media pluck from obscurity and try to make the face of anti-Bush opposition out there.
Now we know her husband has filed for divorce.
Things are not good out there regardless.
But it's a continuing shame because this woman, and you know what's going to happen, I'll tell you, if the media ever does disband, and I don't think, well, they're not going to go away simply because she asks them to, but eventually this train's going to come off the tracks and it's going to be over with.
And, you know, she's able to substitute all this celebrity for her grief.
But when this stuff ends, you know, that's when she's going to need the real help, folks.
And she's going to need whatever counseling is available out there if she can find it because this is a mask for all of the actual grief or whatever that she is.
She is suffering.
And to see these people continue to exploit her with their hopes and dreams plastered all over their sleeves, get Bush, get Bush, get Bush.
You just know that it's going to backfire on them.
It also appears to be that, and this is now, you have to have a caveat attached to this, but it appears out there, ladies and gentlemen, that the Democrats have decided they can't stop John Roberts.
The preliminary counts now show him at 70 votes.
He's filibuster-proof.
And there are stories, the Washington Post, I think it's Dana Milbank has the story today that, yeah, they've come to grips with reality.
They can't stop the guy.
So they're going to use the hearings.
They're going to be tough.
They're going to ask tough questions, but they're going to use the hearings on John Roberts to lay out their agenda for the American people and to explain their values as a party.
This, of course, barring some unforeseen, shocking detail that is revealed about this man between now and then.
If this holds up, and as I say, it's a large caveat, but if it holds up, I told you not long ago that this nomination would be the thing that would finally wake these people up and make them realize they lost the election, that this illusion that they won or that they came so close or that they've always run this town and they're never going to give up that power.
The realization that they lost was going to settle in as a result of this nomination.
And it may well be that that's what's happening here.
There are some people on the Democrat side.
You can now hear, if you read the right places, you have to read between the lines.
You have to be a highly trained political scientist like I am, along with broadcast specialists to be able to read between the lines here.
But what you can see, some Democrats are starting to win.
Yeah, you got to win elections to be able to put people on the court.
Yeah, we, you know, it's what happens when you lose elections, and we better start getting ourselves in a position to win elections again rather than just oppose everything going on.
It's not a whole lot of Democrats, and it's none of the kooks that are saying it.
It is some of these old stalwart Democrats that you know are out there that are just, you know, this is true.
They have to be shocked and stunned at how their party is now being represented by these kooks, but they don't have the guts to speak up.
That's why you got to read between lines.
And I will share all this with you in detail as the program unfolds today.
But how about this?
I couldn't let the opening monologue go.
Oh, and speaking of monologues, so much response, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for it, to yesterday's second hour monologue on who it is that actually makes this country work.
We had a liberal call from San Diego yesterday.
Guy's name was John, and he was trying to advance the argument that the war is unjust and ignoble because the sons and daughters of the rich and the political class, Bush's daughters, are not in Iraq.
Blah, blah, blah, blah.
And after, we took a commercial break shortly after his call, and I came back with a monologue after that.
And it's received a tremendous amount of response.
And again, I thank you for it.
And I've decided we're going to put the transcript and the Ditto Cam video of that monologue on the free side at rushlimbaugh.com and leave it up all week.
I'm just going to tell you what people have said to me.
See, Rush, it was great on the radio.
I mean, it had me glued to the seat of my car.
I couldn't get out of the car and go into work or go into lunch or whatever, or go to my house till you finished it.
When I went home and I watched it on the Ditto Cam, I was, Rush, it has to be seen.
So I haven't looked at it.
I never, I don't even listen to my program.
Why should I listen to it?
I know what I did every day.
And I don't watch the Dittocam because I see myself on the monitor here now.
I'm always looking forward, my friends.
I never go back and relive a previous program.
But since there has been so much response and many people suggesting that, hey, you ought to make this video available to everybody so they can see it, decided to do that.
We're working on getting the video ready now.
The site has not been adjusted so that what I'm talking about is on the free side yet, but it won't be long.
And when it is, I will let you know.
And as I was saying, I can't let the opening monologue go by here without this.
The headline is really all you need to know.
Clinton, colon, I would have attacked bin Laden.
Bill Clinton here in, I guess, New York magazine got the first post-stroke interview with the former president.
And he was out in Chicago today at the memorial service for John Johnson, the publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines.
He was escorting Mrs. Johnson to her seat in the church.
And you just see, I want my legacy, folks.
I'm still working on my legacy in everything he says and does.
Former President Clinton now says that he would have taken out Osama bin Laden before the 9-11 attacks if only the FBI and CIA have been able to prove the al-Qaeda mastermind was behind the attack on the USS Cole.
I desperately wish I had been president when the FBI and the CIA finally confirmed officially bin Laden was responsible for that attack.
I mean, that we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early.
I mean, I don't know if it prevented 9-11, but it certainly would have complicated it.
Despite his failure to launch such an attack, Clinton said that he saw the danger posed by bin Laden much more clearly than the Bush administration has.
Come on, folks.
I can't keep a straight face.
I'm sorry.
I always thought that Bin Laden was a bigger threat than the Bush administration did, Clinton said to New York Magazine.
Well, now this is just so much BS.
Where do you start with it?
He did launch attacks.
He did.
He sent a missile into an empty building in Baghdad on a Saturday night, killed a janitor.
He sent missiles to an ibuprofen factory in the Sudan.
He sent missiles to an empty terrorist camp in Afghanistan.
He did all this.
But if I didn't know it was Bin Laden, I was taking Bin Laden a lot more seriously than Bush administration ever did.
I was because I knew.
How did you know?
Well, I mean, I really didn't know because we had this wall out there.
You know, I couldn't find out if we didn't have this wall.
But, you know, I can't say that publicly.
Everybody would know I'm responsible for that wall.
That's exactly right, sir.
Oh, folks, it's, I mean, just the sheer immaturity and childishness.
I was taking bin Laden seriously than Bush was.
If this would have happened on my watch, we wouldn't be doing where we're doing now.
We would have been over with it.
It had been done with.
If I was there, because I was taking bin Laden far more.
So you weren't taking terrorism seriously at all in your administration, Mr. President.
You were shuffling it aside, moving it aside.
It was a big issue and you dealt with small issues.
You were so worried about your legacy.
You didn't want anything going wrong.
One of the reasons that the Pentagon, supposing his able danger story, one of the reasons the Pentagon did not pass the information along is that nobody wanted to hear it in the Clinton administration.
Nobody wanted to hear, particularly after the Waco invasion, nobody wanted to hear that there was a terrorist cell, al-Qaeda terrorist cell on American soil because that would have required somebody to do something about it.
And why did the wall exist?
Where did that wall come from, Mr. President?
It came from your assistant attorney general, Jamie Ghorelik, who ran the place while Janet Reno was out there buffaloing people through her press conferences and stealing Elian Gonzalez and sending him back to a communist hellhole.
I mean, if Clinton would have launched an attack on Mrs. Gorelik, 9-11 may not have happened.
If he killed Bin Laden when he had the opportunity, 9-11 would not have happened.
If Bill would have not treated terrorists the same as cat burglars, 9-11 probably wouldn't have happened.
I mean, if bin Laden was such a huge threat to Bill Clinton, why didn't he mention him in his farewell address to the nation?
Clinton mentions the word terrorism, but the speech is worth reading to put in context just how big a deal Clinton thought the issue of terrorism was.
And you can get the speech at AmericanRhetoric.com, speeches slash Clinton farewell.
According to Clinton, if you look at his farewell speech, the world was perfect as he left office.
He had no clue what the hell was about to happen.
And it wasn't the FBI or the CIA's fault.
They knew what was going on.
If only Clinton let them talk to each other about it, then we might have had some idea.
How often did Clinton meet with his CIA director?
He met with him twice.
He met personally with George Tennett twice, folks, when Tennett was named the CIA director.
It went seven years.
Clinton met personally with him in the office twice.
There was no way Clinton was going to find.
He didn't want to know what was going on with these places.
This is just, it's comical.
Quick timeout.
We'll be back.
We will continue in mere moments.
Stay with us.
Yeah, it's real simple here, folks.
If only the executive branch, those offices, the executive branch that Clinton had direct control over, had done their jobs, Bill would have been able to kill Bin Laden.
If only Gorelik had not built the wall, if only he had killed Bin Laden when he was asked to, if only, Bill Clinton's one of these, if only, it's like the dog ate my homework.
Well, you know, if I'd have found out that, if I'd have known this, and if I didn't have that wall and if I'd have killed bin Laden.
I've taken bin Laden a lot more serious than Bush is, but I had all those ifs in the way, and I couldn't get there.
Wish I had a second chance.
Speaking of all this, Washington Times today, Pentagon lawyers, fearing a public relations blowback, blocked the military intelligence unit, this is Abel Danger, from sharing information with the FBI that four suspected al-Qaeda terrorists were in the country prior to the September 11th attacks after determining they were here legally.
This, according to a former Defense Department intelligence officer, members of Abel Danger were shut out of the September 11th Commission investigation and final report.
The official said, despite briefing Commission staff members on two occasions about the Mohamed Atta-led terrorist cell and telling them of a lockdown of information between the Defense Department and the FBI, the intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Pentagon lawyers were afraid of a blowback similar to the public's response to the FBI-led assault on the Waco Branch Davidian compound and decided to withhold the information from the FBI.
The official said the decision was made at the Army's Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, which concluded that ATTA, the ringleader of the September 11th team and the others, were in the country legally and thus had the same legal protections as U.S. citizens.
Something goes wrong.
The Special Operations Command at Tampa felt it could get blamed.
Something went wrong.
But Pentagon officials have said that they've uncovered no specific intelligence data from the Abel Danger unit concerning an ATA-led terrorist cell other than a few intelligence analyses that mention his name.
And the Commission Chairman Thomas Kaine and Vice Chairman Lee Hamilton disputed the source of the information.
They keep changing their stories, too.
Kane and Hamilton said in a joint statement, the military source of the accusation could not describe what information had led to this supposed ATA identification, and that no other information placed three other September 11th hijackers with Atta in a purported terror cell.
Now, the intelligence official said that he was interviewed in October of 2003 by members of the September 11th Commission of staff, including the executive director Philip Zelikow, and sought to arrange a follow-up meeting that the staff had requested when he returned from Afghanistan in January 2004, but he was rebuffed.
They took good notes.
They scribbled the entire time I talked.
Two staffers took four to five pages of notes each.
Other members from Special Ops Command also were in attendance, he said, adding that he was shocked in January 2004 when the staff members told him we don't need to talk to you.
Kurt Weldon said he wants to know who made the decision and why it was never mentioned in the final document.
It would have changed the completion on the final 9-11 report.
I tell you what's going to happen here, folks.
The good old Washington CYA is going to get into full gear here.
Remember what these commissions are all about, where these blue ribbon panels are all about.
And I hate saying this, but I've seen too many of them to know.
The Washington political class, even though they may be diametrically opposed to each other ideologically on occasion, some are Democrats, some are Republicans, liberals, and conservatives.
The political class will circle the wagons to protect itself, i.e. the Clinton impeachment and the Senate Republicans' decision not to take the whole thing seriously.
Base closures.
You bring in these guys that used to be elected officials, but now they're retired.
Bring them back, give them big expense accounts at nice hotels, give them the limelight for whatever period of time.
Let them make up their minds which bases get closed, insulating any elected official from blowback, if you will, from controversy.
Because when a base gets closed in a member's district and the people raise hell, I didn't do it.
Pentagon did it.
Blue Ribbon Committee did it.
Here comes the 9-11 Commission, and it's the same thing.
Even though there were plenty of partisans in that commission, the primary objective of that commission, I think, on the left was to protect Bill Clinton and Jamie Gorelik.
And on the other side, the primary effort was to protect Bush.
The primary effort was not to find out what happened.
The primary effort was not to find out who knew what happened and dig into it.
If the primary effort of the commission was to find out what happened, the wall would have been something that was a focal point of the 9-11 Commission.
As it was, it gets a couple mentions.
The architect of the wall is one of the commissioners, Jamie Gorelic.
She's there so that she can run interference for herself and her presence and the way the political class operates, her presence.
Well, we can't go after a valued member of this commission.
How dare you level such an accusation?
These are some of the finest people in this country.
We are some of the finest people in Washington.
Why?
We've been in Washington all of our lives.
We've devoted our lives to public service.
How dare you suggest that we are out here trying to cover up for one of our prestigious members?
Blah, So the whole point here, circle the wagons and make sure that at the end of the day, the political class, regardless of ideology or party, doesn't take a big hit.
They'll have their ideological battles on other issues.
When it comes to something like this, a big terrorist attack that apparently enough data was known about in advance to at least get some advance warning and maybe do something about it.
We're not going to focus on that.
Makes political class look bad, no matter who was in charge, where and when.
Makes political class look bad.
So basically what you have here is you have a commission that came up with all of these suggestions.
We need to do this, we need to do that, we need to do that.
And the media treated them with such gusto because there was enough anti-Bush sentiment and there were enough anti-Bush moments during the campaign year of 2004 that the commission was pumped up and made to feel really big, sort of like Cindy Sheehan's being made to feel now.
And so they issued all of their suggestions and demands.
And then when the other members of political class didn't act on them soon enough, the commission said, well, what are you going to do about what we said to do?
Because the fastest way to provide the old CYA is to implement what they said.
Because if Congress implements what these other guys in the political class say to do, why then everybody's on the same page?
We're working together to save America.
That's what we're trying to do here.
Bamo.
And then this stuff leaks out.
And oh, and now we've got to circle the wagons here.
And we've got to do something because a member of the political class is making these charges.
That would be Kurt Weldon.
And members of the political class don't turn on one another and live to tell about it very long in a political sense.
So we'll see what happens with this, folks.
Sit tight.
We'll be right back.
Thank you.
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.
Great to be with you on the EIB Network.
I'm Rush Limbaugh, America's anchorman to Knoxville, Tennessee.
Hello, Sean.
Nice to have you on the program.
Hey, Rush.
Pleasure to be with you today.
Thank you, sir.
I'm your biggest airborne fan listening in the flight levels from the cockgo to my CRJ.
Hey, hey, thanks very much.
I appreciate that.
Yeah, you bet.
The reason I'm calling in is I tried all day yesterday.
I was so fired up about this after watching Fox News Sunday.
Charles Croudhammer said some comments about the Abel Danger revelation that just absolutely mystify me.
I cannot understand how a guy who's so pro-conservative can come out and dismiss the Abel Danger claim as, what did he say, a conspiracy theory that went beyond the pale.
I think I have the quote right.
And I was hoping you could explain why a guy who we would count on to back us on this, and to at least give it some kind of an inspection, a guy like this would come out and immediately dismiss it.
You have come to the right place, Sean.
I'm glad you called.
Interestingly, you bring this up.
I got an email this morning from a friend of mine, Jim Garrity.
Jim Garrity writes the Corner blog at National Review Online.
And his, I'm sorry, the Carry Spot.
His blog is called The Carry Spot.
It was so popular during the Carry campaign that they kept it alive as a blog.
Now they call it TKS at nationalreview.com.
But here's what he says.
The title of this email is Darn You, Congressman Weldon.
He says, I just heard from a guy I trust that the Pentagon will be releasing information regarding Abel Danger in the not-too-distant future.
The short version, Don't Expect Any Bombshells.
Thank you, Congressman Weldon, for getting just enough of this story right, the existence of Abel Danger and its mission to get folks like me and a lot of others to take you seriously.
Those others weren't just bloggers, by the way.
I'm talking about the New York Times, the AP, and others.
And thanks a heap for getting more than enough wrong that we look like idiots for trusting you.
You know, like that rather key element that Abel Danger had picked out four of the 9-11 hijackers and recommended they be picked up by the FBI.
I could see how you could mix up that pesky little detail.
So apparently, Garrity here has a source that says that's not true from the Pentagon, that Abel Danger had not picked out four of the 9-11 hijackers and recommended that they be picked up by the FBI.
He also writes, thank you for making all of those stunning allegations without any supporting evidence.
Thank you for not having any documents, memos, or anything beyond allegations from an anonymous former defense intelligence guy who's unwilling to come forward and speak on the record.
Thanks for using us to goose your book sales this month.
Thank you for making the 9-11 Commission, a group that seemed to have done a sloppy, incomplete job, look absolutely on the ball and well-organized and coherent in comparison.
In retrospect, should the Commission have mentioned Able Danger?
Sure.
They were a small part of U.S. counterterrorism efforts before 9-11.
If they never found anything that tied into the attacks, then the Commission is right.
They weren't all that significant in the big picture.
They wanted a paragraph or two, or warranted a paragraph or two.
If Weldon generates some actual evidence, or if any of the 11 guys in Abel Danger come forward and make a persuasive case that, yeah, we did spot four hijackers in 2000, then I'll backtrack on all this.
But right now, I doubt that we will ever hear from any of them.
The only silver lining to this mess, I can gloat to Mary Mapes about how to burn a source that leads you astray.
So that's Jim Garrity from National Review Online.
And there is a, I've been noticing on some of the, are you still with me, Sean?
I sure am.
Yeah.
I didn't want to interrupt you.
You seem like you're on a roll.
I've been, I just want to make sure you hadn't hung up.
Oh, no.
Never would.
Well, I've been reading conservative blogs on this.
One of the things I've noticed on conservative blogs, this is Rush Here Out to Make Big Friends in the movement.
I have noticed on these conservative blogs, and not just in this story, but I think there's so many pseudo-intellectuals out there on these blogs.
Some of them are very good and some of them are really nice guys.
But some of them have just got caught up in the blog chatter and they're trying to be the smartest people in the room.
And I've also noticed this about some, and not just bloggers.
I shouldn't just limit it to them, but some of the people in the conservative movement Are doing their best to avoid being considered part of what they think is the kook fringe of the right wing.
And I gather from reading Garrity's note here to me today that that's one of the things that bothers him.
He's afraid that we jumped at a conspiracy theory on the word of a congressman that can't be backed up, that it can't be proven, and it all looked like idiots.
So now I think this might have been what Krauthammer was doing, trying to run to the middle here to make sure you don't get tarred much as the Cindy Sheehan's getting tarred or some of the left-wing kooks are getting tarred.
Well, Rush, maybe Krauthammer could have at least said, let's investigate this.
Let's perhaps reopen the 9-11 Commission.
Because that was my position.
I called my senator, Lamar Alexander, yesterday, and I was emphatic with the aide I spoke with.
I said they must either reconvene a new 9-11 Commission or reopen it because the American people are never going to know the truth unless we have a lot of people.
Wait, just I can understand your passion on this, but let me again share with you and tell you rather than read it to you what Mr. Garrity said to me in his email.
And it's posted at National Review at the Carrie Spot blog.
It's posted there.
Anybody can go read it.
I am a featured member of the undisclosed recipients list that Mr. Garrity sends his dispatches to before they get posted right at the same time.
He's saying that no evidence from the Pentagon that's going to be presented soon backs up anything that Kurt Weldon says other than there was an Able Danger, but that they didn't have details on four hijackers.
They didn't have details that they were plotting 9-11, none of this.
And Garrity is basically saying until we hear something different, actually get some proof and documentation from Congressman Weldon that the commission was right to treat Able Danger the way they did with a couple of references.
Congressman Weldon said that, or was it, yeah, on Sean Hannity, I believe that some of the Able Danger people were willing to go on the record.
Yeah, I've heard him say that, and I hope that's true, and I hope they do.
I hope they do.
Because I'll tell you something else, and this is not just specifically tied to...
Let me give you a little story here and help put some of my comments in context.
The 50th anniversary of National Review magazine is coming up in October.
They're having a big bash on October 7th.
And the New York Times is doing a story on the 50th year of National Review and Mr. Buckley as the quote-unquote patron saint of conservatives.
And they asked me if I would consent and submit to being tied down in a room with a little light bulb for an interview.
And I said, no, but I'll talk to you on the phone.
So I did the interview last week.
And one of the questions, well, what's changed in the conservative movement, say, in the last 30 years, Buckley started it, and how does it exist today?
And I gave him one story as an example.
When I came to New York in 1988, National Review was pretty much it.
I mean, as far as conservative publications, there was no conservative media other than when my show started.
The bloggers hadn't kicked up yet.
There was no Fox News or any of that.
It was basically just National Review.
I mean, Buckley and whatever adjuncts there.
American Spectator was there too, Bob Tyrrell and his bunch, and they were doing some good work.
But it wasn't a diverse group of people at all.
It was very small.
And after I'd been on the air only a year and a half, and Buckley's one of my idols, after I'd been on the air only a year and a half, I get a phone call and I'm invited to the editor's meeting.
They have editors' meetings or did when Buckley was the editor.
He's retired since, but at editor's meetings every other week.
And at this point in time of the year, it was summertime.
I think they did them in his home in New York.
And I was invited to one of these.
And they wanted to get to know me.
They wanted to find out who I was.
They were appreciative that a new conservative had arrived on the scene.
And basically, the purpose of the dinner was to welcome me to it all.
And I said, that would never happen today.
There is no William Buckley to welcome new arrivals into the conservative movement.
I said, if you told the Times, if you look at the conservative movement now, it's a bunch of competitors.
The conservative movement has changed drastically.
It's grown.
I mean, this is not a complaint.
I'm just illustrating.
It's gotten big.
And there's so many people in it that they all think they're the leaders.
They all think they run it.
They all think they're the smartest of the movement or whatever.
And so there's competition in the movement now.
And there isn't a singular source that will welcome any new conservative arrival in and anoint them, if you will, and say welcome to the team and have them join the team.
There is no team now.
And I think if you understand, despite what you people might think, there is no conservative team.
There's conservative competition.
There are conservative beliefs and there are conservative principles and those are hard and fast and they are true.
But there's also mass competition.
You've got half the conservative movement lives and dies to be invited on cable television shows that nobody watches.
Half of them live and die just to be on TV.
Half of them live and die to have their names published there or mentioned there or whatever.
It's sort of comical to watch because I've been through it myself many, many, many moons ago.
But what it all adds up to is that that's why you're going to have now factions, as you've noticed, in the conservative movement, because there are elements of the conservative movement that, frankly, embarrass other elements.
And I will tell you for a fact that many of the intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, hate talk radio.
They despise the conservatives of talk radio.
They don't like them.
They think they give conservatives a bad name.
And they do.
They think this because of what the mainstream press writes about talk radio.
These are people that want to be accepted by the mainstream press.
They want to be quoted by the mainstream press, and yet they're conservatives.
And there's also a branch of the conservative movement which does not want to be tied at all to any element of the conservative movement that can't get over Bill Clinton.
So I think that when this Abel Danger thing came up, Sean, and when what Weldon was saying made the focus the Clinton administration, there are a lot of conservative, oh, I'm not going there.
We have not been able to nail Clinton, and I'm not going to look like all I got's Bill Clinton on my mind.
I'm going forward.
I don't care about Bill Clinton.
He's past history.
It doesn't make any difference to me.
And I don't want to be lumped in with those neophyte conservatives who can't get over Bill Clinton.
I think that's why you get some separation and distance on this story.
It's just part and parcel of growth.
It's just that there's now competition in this movement in all kinds of ways.
There's competition for power, competition for influence, competition for dominance, competition for identification, recognition, praise, and all that.
Whereas back in Bill Buckley's day, there wasn't time for that.
It was grow the movement and anybody that showed up on the scene that was conservative, welcome them in and don't make them competitors and don't turn them into enemies or whatever.
But now you've got factions of the conservative movement just like you've got factions of the liberal movement.
And I think that's why when you get a story like this, these various factions anchor their positions.
And in many cases, some of these positions are anchored so as not to get disfavor from the mainstream press.
I hate to say it, but there's a Washington, D.C. culture, and it exists.
And it affects, to one degree or another, virtually everybody who lives there.
Liberal, conservative, atheist, Catholic, Jewish, doesn't matter.
It affects them all.
So that's the best thing I can do to tell you about this.
I can just tell you that there is in the conservative movement, so to speak, there's a body of thought that says this story is fraught with danger.
It's leading us down a path that's going to make us look like kooks.
It doesn't really say what it purports to say.
The Pentagon's going to have an announcement someday soon, and they're going to release some information, and it's not going to back up what Congress and Weldon said, blah, So people protecting their reputations.
I mean, that's the best I can answer it for you.
Got to go, quick timeout.
We'll be back after this.
Stay with us.
Now, let me tell you what I think about this Able Danger business after trying to explain to Sean why some conservatives are backtracking on their original enthusiasm.
If you go back, you go back to this Washington Times story.
There's something fascinating here.
And it just kind of glides by you if you're just reading it to read a story.
It's this paragraph.
But Pentagon officials have said that they have uncovered no specific intelligence data from the Abel Danger unit concerning an ATA-led terrorist cell other than a few intelligence analyses that mention his name.
Well, that's one of those sentences that doesn't flow.
It doesn't work.
The sentence to be read correctly would be this.
Pentagon officials have said they've uncovered no specific intelligence data from the Abel Danger unit concerning an ATA-led terrorist cell.
But when you add to that, other than a few intelligence analyses that mention his name, well, that means you have uncovered something about OTA.
Too many people that are changing their stories too often here.
At first, the 9-11 Commission, oh, never even talked to us, we never even heard about Abel Danger.
Oh, yes, they had heard about Abel Danger.
And then there was only one reference, and then there was a second reference to Abel Danger.
And we learned they took a lot of notes, and they decided to leave it out because they were conflicted about the data and the times that Otta was supposedly here.
I mean, everybody, when this story first hit, when the first barrage of details hit, the people on this commission started, they got very defensive.
I mean, they started running for the tall grass themselves.
Now, if there was nothing to it, that would have been the time to say, yeah, we heard about this.
Yeah, we talked about it.
Yeah, but it wasn't anything.
There wasn't enough to go on.
But they act, uh-oh, and they stand and a commissioner's, the chairman went out there and a co-chairman went out there and started to mend some fences and so forth.
I don't think we're near the end of the story.
I have no clue what it is, but I can tell you that there's too many blowbacks, if you will, here, too many fallbacks, too many run backs, too many retreats on both sides.
But yet New York, the Washington Times today, apparently, this is a new source that they have found.
This is not one of Weldon's as I read this.
And this Pentagon source is a lawyer.
Well, he's not.
He's a Defense Department intelligence official.
And he's saying that it was the lawyers in the Pentagon who, well, of course, that makes sense.
That makes sense to me because it was the lawyers who and essentially the Justice Department created all these walls that prevented the exchange of information.
And there's no denying the wall existed.
And there's no denying that this Abel Danger unit knew of Atta in the country.
And there's no denying they couldn't tell anybody.
Now, what other facts emerge from that will be very interesting.
But I just, I don't think we've heard the last of the story.
There are too many people acting like they could be harmed by the release of this information to make me think there's nothing to it.
I mean, if something comes out and you've looked at it and you've examined it and you rejected it, then you're not going to act frightened when somebody brings it up after your report's over.
And that's what's happened here.
So patience, my friends.
Patience.
Back in just a second.
Stay with us.
A newspaper in Florida, the Herald Tribune, I'm not sure where this is from.
Sarasota, maybe, but regardless.
The story published today, the headline, former flight scruple owner says U.S. intelligence failure ruined his life.
The flight screw owner is Rudy Deckers.
He was angered the government may have known about Adda, but never shared it with the FBI or other agencies who could have stopped the terrorists.
We're civilians here.
We're supposed to be protected.
And apparently we're not.
Deckers claims the fallout from unwittingly training the terrorists cost him his business, his reputation, and his marriage.
He had to close his flight training school six months after the attacks.
Everywhere I come, they say, are you that guy that trained the terrorists?
So just one example of the fallout from somebody knowing about Ada and not passing it on.
Quick time out.
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