ABLE DANGER ARCHIVE

Original http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2005/08/09/national/w154220D27.DTL

San Francisco Chronicle, August 09, 2005

By KIMBERLY HEFLING -- Associated Press -- Tuesday, August 9, 2005

(08-09) 17:43 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) -- The Sept. 11 commission will investigate a claim that U.S. defense intelligence officials identified ringleader Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers as a likely part of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the hijackings but didn't forward the information to law enforcement.

Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa. and vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, said Tuesday the men were identified in 1999 by a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger." If true, that's an earlier link to al-Qaida than any previously disclosed intelligence about Atta. Sept. 11 commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton said Tuesday that Weldon's information, which the congressman said came from multiple intelligence sources, warrants a review. He said he hoped the panel could issue a statement on its findings by the end of the week.

"The 9/11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

The Sept. 11 commission's final report, issued last year, recounted numerous government mistakes that allowed the hijackers to succeed. Among them was a failure to share intelligence within and among agencies.

According to Weldon, Able Danger identified Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi as members of a cell the unit code-named "Brooklyn" because of some loose connections to New York City.

Weldon said that in September 2000 Able Danger recommended that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists." However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because they said Atta and the others were in the country legally so information on them could not be shared with law enforcement.

Weldon did not provide details on how the intelligence officials identified the future hijackers and determined they might be part of a cell.

Defense Department documents shown to an Associated Press reporter Tuesday said the Able Danger team was set up in 1999 to identify potential al-Qaida operatives for U.S. Special Operations Command. At some point, information provided to the team by the Army's Information Dominance Center pointed to a possible al-Qaida cell in Brooklyn, the documents said.

However, because of concerns about pursuing information on "U.S. persons" — a legal term that includes U.S. citizens as well as foreigners admitted to the country for permanent residence — Special Operations Command did not provide the Army information to the FBI. It is unclear whether the Army provided the information to anyone else.

The command instead turned its focus to overseas threats.

The documents provided no information on whether the team identified anyone connected to the Sept. 11 attack.

If the team did identify Atta and the others, it's unclear why the information wasn't forwarded. The prohibition against sharing intelligence on "U.S. persons" should not have applied since they were in the country on visas — they did not have permanent resident status.

Weldon, considered something of a maverick on Capitol Hill, initially made his allegations about Atta and the others in a floor speech in June that garnered little attention. His talk came at the end of a legislative day during a period described under House rules as "special orders" — a time slot for lawmakers to get up and speak on issues of their choosing.

The issue resurfaced Monday in a story by the bimonthly Government Security News, which covers national security matters.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said he was unaware of the intelligence until the latest reports surfaced.

But Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the 9/11 Commission looked into the matter during its investigation into government missteps leading to the attacks and chose not to include it in the final report.

Hamilton said 9/11 Commission staff members learned of Able Danger during a meeting with military personnel in October 2003 in Afghanistan, but the staff members do not recall learning of a connection between Able Danger and any of the four terrorists Weldon mentioned.

Associated Press reporter John J. Lumpkin contributed to this report.

Copyright 2005 The San Francisco Chronicle.

Original http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/10/Worldandnation/Reports__911_clue_hid.shtml

St. Petersburg Times

A lawmaker says a Special Operations Command unit identified terrorist Mohammed Atta before the attacks.

By PAUL DE LA GARZA, Times Staff Writer

Published August 10, 2005 

TAMPA - Congress and the Sept. 11 Commission have launched multiple investigations into reports that the Special Operations Command in Tampa held back information that could have foiled the 9/11 plot, officials said Tuesday.

The fast-paced developments were in response to information provided by Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., vice chairman of the Armed Services Committee and the Homeland Security Committee. Weldon said a secret military unit known as "Able Danger" discovered a year before the attacks that ringleader Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers were in the United States. Weldon said the unit - created at SOCom under a classified directive in 1999 to take out al-Qaida targets - identified Atta and the others as likely members of the organization.

In fall 2000, the unit recommended SOCom share the information with the FBI, Weldon said in an interview Tuesday. But lawyers at either the Pentagon or SOCom determined the men were in the country legally, Weldon said. He said he based his information on intelligence sources.

When members of Able Danger made their presentation at command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Weldon said, the legal team "put stickies on the faces of Mohammed Atta on the chart," to reinforce that he was off-limits.

"They said, "You can't talk to Atta because he's here on a green card,"' Weldon said.

Had SOCom shared the information with the FBI, Weldon said, 9/11 might not have happened.

"The outcome would have been seriously affected."

In a statement Tuesday, SOCom said Able Danger developed information about al-Qaida "as part of an effort to deter transnational terrorist organizations."

"We do not have any information about whether Able Danger identified Atta or other 9/11 hijackers, or about a recommendation to provide information to the FBI," SOCom said.

SOCom is responsible for the nation's secret commando units, and has played a central role in the war on terror since 9/11.

A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 Commission said that members of its staff were told about the program but that the briefers did not mention Atta's name. The commission report produced last year did not mention Able Danger's findings.

On Tuesday, commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton said that Weldon's information, which the congressman said came from multiple intelligence sources, warrants a review.

He said he hoped the panel could issue a statement on its findings by the end of the week.

"The 9/11 Commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "Had we learned of it obviously it would have been a major focus of our investigation."

At least two congressional committees have begun looking into the episode.

Rep. C.W. Bill Young, chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, said he, too, had asked the Pentagon for information about the Able Danger program.

The Indian Shores Republican said that in hindsight, it was easy to say that one thing or another could have disrupted the hijackers.

"There should have been better sharing of information," he said.

Young said that passage of the Patriot Act and appointment of John Negroponte as intelligence czar, which gives one person access to all information generated by the intelligence community, would help resolve future problems.

"The tools weren't as good then as they are today," Young said.

Sounding agitated by what he perceived as a missed opportunity, Weldon made a distinction between the military lawyers and Special Operations Forces, whom he praised. Gen. Pete Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, was SOCom commander at the time.

The small military unit developed the information using mostly open sources, not classified channels, Weldon said.

Weldon revealed the Able Danger findings in a little-noticed speech on the floor of the House in June. On Monday, Government Security News, a biweekly publication that covers homeland security, published a cover story on the subject, generating another article in the New York Times.

Until now, Atta had not been identified publicly as a threat to the United States before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

According to Weldon, the military unit identified a terrorist cell in Brooklyn, N.Y., in September 2000.

The individuals identified as members of the cell were Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhamzi.

In late 1999 or 2000, the CIA had identified Almihdhar and Alhamzi as terrorist members who might be involved in a terrorist operation.

The duo arrived in Los Angeles in early 2000, but the FBI was not warned about them until spring 2001. No efforts were made to track them until a month before the terrorist attacks.

In the article published by Government Security News, a former defense intelligence official who worked with Able Danger said he alerted SOCom about the unit's findings. The publication said it interviewed the source in Weldon's office.

"The documents included a photo of Mohammed Atta supplied by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and described Atta's relationship with Osama bin Laden," the article said.

"The officer was very disappointed when lawyers working for Special Ops decided that anyone holding a green card had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen.

"Thus, the information Able Danger had amassed about the only terrorist cell they had located inside the United States could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded."

Former Sen. Bob Graham, one-time chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he was not familiar with the Able Danger program.

However, the Florida Democrat said he was not surprised by Weldon's account.

"If it's true," Graham said, "it would be yet another example of a missed opportunity to learn about the plot and to blow it up before 9/11."

Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.

Copyright 2005 The St. Petersburg Times.

Original http://www.timesherald.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=15032471&BRD=1672&PAG=461

(Pennsylvania) Times Herald

By: KEITH PHUCAS, Times Herald Staff

08/13/2005

NORRISTOWN - Ten days before publication of the 9/11 Commission report, commission staff discounted information from a military officer linking Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta to a terror cell believed to be operating in New York City more than a year before the terrorist attacks.

According to a statement released Friday by The 9/11 Public Discourse Project, the two commission staff members who interviewed the officer in July 2004 concluded his story about a Defense Department intelligence counterterrorism program, called Able Danger, that worked to identify and target al-Qaida and other terrorists, was not credible. As a result, the information was not included in the commission's final report published July 22, 2004.

The 9/11 Public Discourse Project, formerly known as the 9/11 Commission, issued the statement late Friday to respond to charges made by Congressman Curt Weldon, R-7th Dist., this week that the commission failed to follow up after being tipped off three times about the defense operation.

The Times Herald broke the Able Danger story in its June 19 edition. The story eluded the national media until early last week.

A small group of Defense Intelligence Agency employees ran the Able Danger operation from fall 1999 to February 2001 - just seven months before the terrorist attacks - when the operation was unceremoniously axed, according to a former defense intelligence official familiar with the program. The former official asked not to be identified.

In their efforts to locate terrorists, the operation's technology analysts used data mining and fusion techniques to search terabyte-sized data sets from open source material - such as travel manifests, bank transactions, hotel records, credit applications - and compared this material with classified information.

By charting the movements and transactions of suspected terrorists, the operation linked Atta to al-Qaida. Between fall 1999 and early 2000, the intelligence team concluded that Atta, and two others, were likely part of a terrorist cell in Brooklyn.

At that point, Able Danger wanted the FBI, assisted by Special Operations Command, to track the group. But to the team's surprise, SOCOM's legal counsel shot down the idea.

"I tried to broker meetings between Special Operations and the FBI, but SOCOM's lawyers squashed it," the former defense officials said.

According to the former official, the Special Operations attorneys told the team it couldn't perform surveillance on the suspected terrorist. The foreign nationals had green cards, and thus, had the same protections as American citizens from such scrutiny.

Special Operations had advised the FBI during the ill-fated seige of the Branch Davidian compound, in Waco, Texas, in 1993, that resulted in more than 80 deaths after Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raided the compound, Weldon and the official said.

Following the fiery debacle, all the federal participants in the siege, including SOCOM, were harshly criticized. Fear of suffering the fallout if Able Danger backfired, they said, explains the military's reluctance to help the FBI.

"We felt that they were terrorists, and we should have done something about it," the former intelligence officials said. "I believe we could have prevented 9/11."

Wednesday, after becoming exasperated with former 9/11 Commission staff who claimed it didn't know anything about Able Danger, Weldon fired off a harsh letter to former commission members demanding to know why the information had not been considered.

In Weldon's letter, he said his chief of staff actually handed a package on the defense program to one of the commissioners in a Capitol Hill congressional office building April 13, 2004. Also, the congressman criticized the staff for not returning calls from a defense intelligence official with information on the operation.

Scrambling to answer Weldon's claims, commission staff combed through its archives this week for information related to Able Danger.

In its Friday statement, The 9/11 Public Discourse Project said the commission was first told about Able Danger while commission members were visiting Afghanistan on Oct. 21, 2003. While there, Philip Zelikow, then executive director of the commission, and two senior staffers met with three intelligence officials working for the Defense Department. One official mentioned Able Danger and said it was shut down. According to documents the commission received from the Pentagon, Able Danger began in 1999.

In November 2003, commission staff requested Defense Department material about the operation and received documents in February 2004 that included diagrams of terrorist networks, according to the 9/11 project letter.

The commission, however, said it first heard Atta mentioned in discussions about Able Danger on July 12, 2004, during an interview with a Navy officer. The officer told senior commission staff member Deiter Snell and another staffer that he recalled briefly seeing Atta's name and photo in a chart belonging to a Defense Department employee, and said the material was dated "February through April 2000."

According to the commission, Atta first arrived in the United States on June 3, 2001, about three months before the airline he flew crashed into the World Trade Center.

The Navy officer, who said the chart showed Atta to be a member of a terrorist cell in Brooklyn, complained that the identities of other cell members had been removed from the document because Pentagon lawyers were concerned about the propriety of the military's role with the FBI in a domestic intelligence operation.

Eventually commission staffers found the military officer's description and explanation of Able Danger to be wanting and concluded the information was "not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the (9/11) report or further investigation."

Weldon is demanding to know why the Defense Department did not pass information about Able Danger on to the FBI in 2000 and why the commission's staff failed to pursue the matter. He has vowed to push for a full accounting of the controversy, according to a written response issued from his office Friday evening.

Since 1999 Weldon has called for fusing the government's intelligence agencies collection system so they could share information and more effectively thwart terrorist plots. Six years ago, he proposed the creation of a National Operations and Analysis Hub (NOAH) for this effort.

In 2004, President Bush established the National Counterterrorism Center to integrate all intelligence the U.S. possesses on terrorism and counterterrorism.

In a new book, "Countdown to Terror: The top-secret information that could prevent the next terrorist attack on America ... and how the CIA has ignored it," Weldon is critical of the CIA for failing to share intelligence information with other agencies and discrediting information he has offered the CIA.

The congressman said he first became aware of the tremendous intelligence collaboration possibilities after visiting the Army's Land Information Warfare Assistance Center, in Fort Belvoir, Va., where massive amounts of data was mined and fused to profile emerging threats.

Calls to communications director Al Felzenberg at the 9/11 Public Discourse Project by The Times Herald were not returned on Friday. A spokesman for John Lehman, a former 9/11 Commission member, said Lehman did not wish to comment on the matter.

Copyright © 2005 The Times Herald.

Original http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,1551268,00.html

The Guardian (UK)

Julian Borger in Washington

Thursday August 18, 2005 

A US army intelligence officer went public yesterday with claims that a secret military unit had identified Mohammed Atta and three other al-Qaida members as a potential threat a year before they carried out the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer said the secret intelligence unit, codenamed Able Danger, had been prevented from passing on its information to the FBI by Pentagon lawyers concerned that the military should not be involved in surveillance of suspects inside the US.

The claim has focused new light on the Pentagon's part in intelligence failings before the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and called into question last year's official report on the debacle.

Col Shaffer, a reservist now working part-time at the Pentagon, said he was risking his career by giving on-the-record interviews to the New York Times and television networks, but he said he had been frustrated by the dismissal of his account by the official inquiry into the September 11 attacks. He said information he provided to the investigative staff "never got to the commissioners".

The commission's final report last year did not mention Able Danger, despite being briefed on its work by Col Shaffer in October 2003 and by an unnamed navy captain in 2004. The two top commissioners, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, defended that decision last week, arguing its role "did not turn out to be historically significant".

The commissioners issued a statement last week saying the claim that Mohammed Atta and other plotters had been identified before 2001 was not supported by official documents the commission had requested.

They said Atta had not been mentioned in the 2003 briefing on Able Danger in Afghanistan, and the allegation made by the naval officer in 2004, that Atta was attached to an al-Qaida cell in Brooklyn, was incompatible with official records of his movements.

Col Shaffer countered that the commission was never given all the relevant documentation by the Pentagon.

"I'm told confidently by the person who moved the material over, that the 9/11 commission received two briefcase-sized containers of documents. I can tell you for a fact that would not be one-twentieth of the information that Able Danger consisted of during the time we spent investigating," the intelligence officer told Fox News.

The Able Danger unit was created in 1999 under the Special Operations Command to carry out computer analysis of huge amounts of data on possible terrorist suspects.

Col Shaffer, who served as a liaison officer between Able Danger and the Defence Intelligence Agency, said that by mid-2000 the unit came up with a chart linking Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian lead hijacker, and three others, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Marwan al-Shehhi, complete with photographs of the plotters. "I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Col Shaffer told the New York Times.

Copyright 2005 The Guardian.

Original http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0534,mondo1,67096,6.html

Village Voice

by James Ridgeway with Natalie Wittlin

August 23rd, 2005 11:49 AM

Whether or not U.S. military intelligence was prevented by Pentagon superiors from alerting the FBI to the presence of Mohammed Atta in 1998, there is little doubt the U.S. was well aware of the infamous hijacker by then. The Republican right wing is raising the Atta issue at a time when Bush is sinking in the polls, people are fed up with Iraq, and there are continuing questions about the administration's handling of 9-11 and the war on terror. One way to take some of the heat off is to shift the blame to Bill Clinton.

In his book Countdown to Terror, Republican Congressman Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, lays the blame for our lousy intelligence on Clinton: "Given the intelligence community's poor track record and the political corruption of the intelligence process during the Clinton administration, the intelligence community's failure to detect and stop the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington seems inevitable. "

By 1998, Atta was living in a Hamburg apartment (later found to be an Al Qaeda cell) and under surveillance by German intelligence. The Germans were passing along what they knew to the CIA. There are suggestions that Atta may have been known to U.S. intelligence as far back as 1993 and, according to the German press, the CIA itself had other people in the apartment under surveillance. This raises the question of whether this cell might not have been taken out well before 9-11.

In 2004, the German prosecutor who was in charge of the investigation was scheduled to testify about this Hamburg cell to the 9-11 Commission. But his testimony was unexpectedly canceled. The documents from the investigation are reported to be missing.

Last week, Mounir al-Motassadek, one of Atta's associates, was convicted of belonging to a terrorist organization in a German court and sentenced to seven years in prison. He had been acquitted in another court on charges related to whether he knew anything about the 9-11 attacks. The Germans had him under surveillance and had been tapping his phones since August 1998. He was an associate of Atta's in the Hamburg apartment. He witnessed Atta's will and had power of attorney over the hijackers' bank accounts, shifting money to them while they took flying lessons in the U.S. He trained with them in Afghanistan.

What Weldon and Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer are claiming is that the Army Intelligence and Special Operations Command in 1998-1999 launched a secret program, Able Danger, to map out the international Al Qaeda network. One Defense official has said the project was approved by General Henry H. Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Shelton said recently that he does not remember the project but that "we had lots of initiatives to find out where Al Qaeda was."

By September 2000, so the story goes-and much of it depends on Shaffer's shaky memory-Able Danger had discovered Atta and other hijackers working out of a "Brooklyn cell." They wanted to tell the FBI about their findings in hopes the Bureau would take out the cell. But military lawyers blocked them from doing so on grounds it would reveal the existence of illegal military intelligence operations within the U.S., and that would cause controversy for Clinton-and perhaps damage Al Gore's campaign against George W. Bush.

In July 2004, a naval officer testified to the 9-11 Commission that he saw an Able Danger document in 2000 that linked Atta to the Al Qaeda cell. Commission chair Thomas Kean and vice-chair Lee Hamilton later said that one piece of testimony had not been "sufficiently reliable" to merit further investigation.

This month Weldon asked the commission how come it had not pursued Able Danger, and Hamilton replied, "The 9-11 Commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9-11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell. Had we learned of it, obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation." Later both said Able Danger "did not turn out to be historically significant."

Even if the Pentagon's supposed discovery of Atta before 9-11 succeeds in shifting some of the political blame from Bush to Clinton, it also raises new questions about the role of the Pentagon and especially that of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 9-11 and the war on terror. And this comes at a time when the military is clamoring for a greater role in intelligence gathering.

At 9:53 on the morning of 9-11, the National Security Agency intercepted a call from an Osama bin Laden operative in Afghanistan to a person in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, as noted in the 9-11 Timeline compiled by Paul Thompson at cooperativeresearch.org. The caller said he had "heard good news" and another target was still to be hit (apparently by the plane that was brought down in the Pennsylvania countryside). This was the first firm indication the government had that bin Laden was behind the attack. Two hours later, at 12:05, CIA director George Tenet told Rumsfeld about the NSA intercept.

As reported by CBS News, based on leaked notes from a National Military Command Center teleconference, the Secretary of Defense was surprisingly reluctant to make much of the call: "Rumsfeld felt it was 'vague,' that it 'might not mean something,' and that there was 'no good basis for hanging hat.' In other words, the evidence was not clear-cut enough to justify military action against Bin Laden. But later that afternoon, the CIA reported the passenger manifests for the hijacked airliners showed three of the hijackers were suspected Al Qaeda operatives."

According to the notes, Rumsfeld learned that "one guy is associate of bomber"-the Al Qaeda suicide bomber who attacked the U.S. warship in Yemen in 2000.

At 2:40, the notes report, Rumsfeld was beginning to take aim at the target close to his heart: He wants the "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama Bin Laden]. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." This was the first indication that Rumsfeld was disregarding specific intelligence clearly linking the attack to Al Qaeda and instead had begun to fantasize about getting Saddam Hussein.

Hours later, White House terrorism adviser Richard Clarke went to the White House for meetings that Clarke believed would concern U.S. vulnerabilities, possible future attacks, and what might be done to prevent them. As he writes in one of the most famous passages from his book, Clarke "instead walked into a series of discussions about Iraq."

"At first," Clarke writes, "I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting Al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq. My friends in the Pentagon had been telling me that the word was we would be invading Iraq sometime in 2002."

Rumsfeld's breezy dismissal of Al Qaeda's involvement in the attacks in the face of specific intelligence is hard to fathom. And if there is buried somewhere in the Pentagon a military intelligence operation-its existence approved at the highest levels-that knew all about Atta and Al Qaeda, then Rumsfeld's behavior is indefensible.

The 9-11 Commission was established to get to the bottom of the attacks that day. However, it often skipped over key issues:

*Bush and Cheney were interviewed together, in secret, with no record of the meeting.

*Florida senator Bob Graham's joint congressional inquiry had unearthed the outlines of what may have been a Saudi spy operation linked to Al Qaeda and operating in the U.S. But the commission dismissed Saudi involvement and cleared the royal family.

*The commission never seriously inquired into the activities of Pakistan, whose secret intelligence agency had created the Taliban and subsequently backed Al Qaeda.

*The commission had no time for FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, who came up with one tale after another of fishy operations in the FBI translations section, including the mind-boggling information that FBI interpreters were being sent to Guantánamo to translate languages they could not speak.

*The congressional joint inquiry discovered that an FBI informant on the West Coast, unbeknownst to the Bureau, rented an apartment to two hijackers. When Graham tried to interview the landlord, the FBI refused. Later a top FBI official told Graham that the White House had blocked the informant's testimony. The commission dismissed all this.

*The commission skipped over the scandalous mess at the FAA, suppressing a staff study saying that the agency had ignored numerous warnings issued in the months before the attack. After the election, the commission released parts of this study, leaving some of it classified.

*The commission never seriously inquired into intelligence failures at the Hamburg cell where Atta lived off and on and which was a key center for planning the attacks.

Every day it looks as if the government's main probe of 9-11 has turned into a political fix.

Additional reporting: Halley Bondy

Copyright 2005 The Village Voice.

Original http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050901/pl_nm/security_attacks_pentagon_dc

Reuters, September 1, 2005
Three more assert Pentagon knew of 9/11 ringleader

By Will Dunham 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three more people associated with a secret U.S. military intelligence team have asserted that the program identified September 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta as an Al Qaeda suspect inside the United States more than a year before the 2001 attacks, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

The Pentagon said a three-week review had turned up no documents to back up the assertion, but did not rule out that such documents relating to the classified operation had been destroyed.

Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott and Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer last month came forward with statements that a secret intelligence program code-named "Able Danger" had identified Atta, the lead hijacker in the attacks that killed 3,000 people, in early 2000. Pennsylvania Republican Rep. Curt Weldon (news, bio, voting record), vice chairman of the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, also went public with the allegations.

Pat Downs, a senior policy analyst in the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, told reporters that as part of the review, the Pentagon interviewed 80 people.

Downs said that three more people, as well as Phillpott and Shaffer, recalled the existence of an intelligence chart identifying Atta by name. Four of the five recalled a photo of Atta accompanying the chart, Downs said.

Pentagon officials declined to identify the three by name, but said they were an analyst with the military's Special Operations Command, an analyst with the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center and a contractor who supported the center.

Downs said all five were considered "credible people."

But officials said an exhaustive search of tens of thousands of documents and electronic files related to Able Danger failed to find the chart or other documents corroborating the identification of Atta. Phillpott has said Atta was identified by Able Danger by January or February of 2000.

"We have not discovered that chart," Downs said.

Asked whether it ever existed, she said, "We don't know. We don't have it at the moment." Downs said it was possible that the chart and any other document that might have referred to Atta were destroyed by the military.

"Able Danger," now disbanded, was a small, classified military operation engaged in data-mining analysis of information including media reports and public records through the use of powerful computer systems.

"There are strict regulations about collection, dissemination and destruction procedures for this type of information. And we know that did happen in the case of Able Danger documentation," Downs said.

But Navy Cmdr. Christopher Chope of the Special Operations Command said that "we have negative indications" that destruction of such a chart was advised by military lawyers.

When Shaffer, currently on paid leave as an employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, went public, he said analysts involved in Able Danger were blocked by military lawyers when they sought to provide the team's findings to the FBI in 2000 in an effort to find Al Qaeda suspects.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said the review turned up no evidence that the Pentagon prevented the disclosure of Atta's name to other agencies of the U.S. government.

Shaffer also has said Able Danger identified some of Atta's fellow hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, as part of an al Qaeda cell inside the United States.

Copyright © 2005 Reuters.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005 - 08:59 AM

For Immediate Release

August 10, 2005

As a group of 9/11 widows who fought for the creation of the 9/11 Independent Commission, we are horrified to learn of further possible evidence (as detailed by the New York Times article, "4 in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00") that the 9/11 Commission failed to fully investigate all of the facts and circumstances surrounding the 9/11 attacks.

By legislative mandate, Public Law 107-306, November 27, 2002, the 9/11 Independent Commission was charged with providing a full accounting of the 9/11 attacks to the American people. As has been indicated repeatedly since the release of the Commission's Final Report and via the NY Times article published yesterday, the 9/11 Commission failed to provide said full accounting. As a result, each Commissioner and Staff Member should be held accountable. Nearly four years since the attacks of 9/11, we are tired of our nation's leaders (elected and appointed officials from both political parties) not being held accountable for their actions or inactions – particularly when it comes to fighting the "ongoing war against terrorism." We believe that the time has come for the American people to demand the necessary accountability from all of our leaders. The 9/11 Commissioners and Staff who had a legal obligation to investigate and report upon all of the facts relevent to the 9/11 attacks should, therefore, be the very first individuals to be held accountable and responsible for their collective failure to meet their legislative mandate.

Because the 9/11 Commission’s Report is incomplete, nearly four years after the 9/11 attacks, the American people clearly suffer from a false sense of security. How can we know that we are truly safer from terrorists if the 9/11 Commission has chosen to hide certain facts? Particularly when those withheld facts detail specific actions made by intelligence community officials at the following agencies: the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and the National Security Council. These are the very same agencies and individuals that are charged with keeping us safe from the terrorists today. Yet, a close inspection of the failures made by these individuals reveals that these same individuals had ample opportunity to unravel the 9/11 plot prior to the 9/11 attacks and failed to do so. In fact, a fair reading of these occurrences could lead one to believe that some of these individual actions or inactions actually contributed to the "catastrophic success" of the 9/11 attacks.

The revelation of this information demands answers that are forthcoming, clear, and concise. The 9/11 attacks could have and should have been prevented. To date, not one individual has been held accountable for this nation's failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. Thus, the 9/11 Commission Report is incomplete and illusory.

As 9/11 widows who fought tirelessly for the creation of the 9/11 Commission, we are wholly disappointed to learn that the Commission's Final Report is a hollow failure. We spent innumerable hours of our time away from our families to ensure that the 9/11 Commission had the tools and resources necessary to provide a complete and thorough accounting of the 9/11 attacks to the American people. We truly wanted to learn lessons from the 9/11 attacks so that we could all live in a safer environment. We find this latest revelation of the Commission's failure to adequately and aggressively pursue the complete truth surrounding 9/11 absolutely shameful.

September 11th Advocates

Kristen Breitweiser

Patty Casazza

Monica Gabrielle

Mindy Kleinberg

Lorie Van Auken

PRESS RELEASE

August 12, 2005

Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, former Chair and Vice Chair of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (9/11 Commission),in response to media inquiries about the Commission's investigation of the ABLE DANGER program, today released the following statement:

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.

While still in Afghanistan, Dr. Zelikow called back to the Commission headquarters in Washington and requested that staff immediately draft a document request seeking information from DOD on ABLE DANGER. The staff had also heard about ABLE DANGER in another context, related to broader military planning involving possible operations against al Qaeda before 9/11.

In November 2003, shortly after the staff delegation had returned to the United States, two document requests related to ABLE DANGER were finalized and sent to DOD. One, sent on November 6, asked, among other things, for any planning order or analogous documents about military operations related to al Qaeda and Afghanistan issued from the beginning of 1998 to September 20, 2001, and any reports, memoranda, or briefings by or for either the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Commanding General of the U.S. Special Operations Command in connection with such planning, specifically including material related to ABLE DANGER. The other, sent on November 25, treated ABLE DANGER as a possible intelligence program and asked for all documents and files associated with "DIA's program 'ABLE DANGER'" from the beginning of 1998 through September 20, 2001.

In February 2004, DOD provided documents responding to these requests. Some were turned over to the Commission and remain in Commission files. Others were available for staff review in a DOD reading room. Commission staff reviewed the documents. Four former staff members have again, this week, reviewed those documents turned over to the Commission, which are held in the Commission's archived files. Staff who reviewed the documents held in the DOD reading room made notes summarizing each of them. Those notes are also in the Commission archives and have also been reviewed this week.

The records discuss a set of plans, beginning in 1999, for ABLE DANGER, which involved expanding knowledge about the al Qaeda network. Some documents include diagrams of terrorist networks. None of the documents turned over to the Commission mention Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers. Nor do any of the staff notes on documents reviewed in the DOD reading room indicate that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers were mentioned in any of those documents.

A senior staff member also made verbal inquiries to the HPSCI and CIA staff for any information regarding the ABLE DANGER operation. Neither organization produced any documents about the operation, or displayed any knowledge of it.

In 2004, Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) and his staff contacted the Commission to call the Commission's attention to the Congressman's critique of the U.S. intelligence community. No mention was made in these conversations of a claim that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers had been identified by DOD employees before 9/11.

In early July 2004, the Commission's point of contact at DOD called the Commission's attention to the existence of a U.S. Navy officer employed at DOD who was seeking to be interviewed by Commission staff in connection with a data mining project on which he had worked. The DOD point of contact indicated that the prospective witness was claiming that the project had linked Atta to an al Qaeda cell located in New York in the 1999-2000 time frame. Shortly after receiving this information, the Commission staff's front office assigned two staff members with knowledge of the 9/11 plot and the ABLE DANGER operation to interview the witness at one of the Commission's Washington, D.C. offices.

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 officer then described the remainder of his work on link analysis efforts, until he was eventually transferred to other work. The officer complained about how these methods were being used by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and mentioned other concerns about U.S. officials and foreign governments.

At the time of the officer's interview, the Commission knew that, according to travel and immigration records, Atta first obtained a U.S. visa on May 18, 2000, and first arrived in the United States (at Newark) on June 3, 2000. Atta joined up with Marwan al-Shehhi. They spent little time in the New York area, traveling later in June to Oklahoma and then to Florida, where they were enrolled in flight school by early July.

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.

We have seen press accounts alleging that a DOD link analysis had tied Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi (who had arrived in the U.S. shortly before Atta on May 29) to two other future hijackers, Hazmi al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, in 1999-2000. No such claim was made to the Commission by any witness. Moreover, all evidence that was available to the Commission indicates that Hazmi and Mihdhar were never on the East coast until 2001 and that these two pairs of future hijackers had no direct contact with each other until June 2001.

The Commission did not mention ABLE DANGER in its report. The name and character of this classified operation had not, at that time, been publicly disclosed. The operation itself did not turn out to be historically significant, set against the larger context of U.S. policy and intelligence efforts that involved Bin Ladin and al Qaeda. The Report's description of military planning against al Qaeda prior to 9/11 encompassed this and other military plans. The information we received about this program also contributed to the Commission's depiction of intelligence efforts against al Qaeda before 9/11.

 Original http://www.911citizenswatch.org 

Second Familes' Release:
We would like to thank Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer 

For Immediate Release -- August 17, 2005 

We would like to thank Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer for coming forward with invaluable information that could ultimately be used to help make our nation safer.

The mandate of the 9/11 Commission was to unearth these facts so as to provide the necessary fixes that would prevent, thwart or mitigate the results of another attack. We strongly disagree with Thomas Kean's and Lee Hamilton's latest conclusion that Able Danger "did not turn out to be historically significant, set against the larger context of U.S. policy and intelligence efforts that involved (Osama) bin Laden and al Qaeda." Clearly, knowledge of the hijackers whereabouts, one year prior to 9/11, would be of extreme relevance to the 9/11 story and would have bearings on recommendations put forth by the 9/11 Commission. It is, therefore, becoming increasingly apparent that the Commission failed in their obligation to the American Public and to those who lost their lives on 9/11.

Today, with no real fact finding body in place, it will only be when individuals have the courage to speak out about these truths that we can actually hope to make progress in this post 9/11 era.

It is our fervent wish that any other individuals who have information find the strength and courage, as exhibited by Lt. Colonel Shaffer, to come forward and that in doing so they suffer no consequences but instead are properly rewarded for their patriotism.

September 11th Advocates

Kristen Breitweiser

Patty Casazza

Monica Gabrielle

Mindy Kleinberg

Lorie Van Auken

Original http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/8/10/145513/501

Thursday, August 11, 2005 - 12:00 PM

Wed Aug 10th, 2005 -- Copyright 2005, Mark G. Levey

Tommy Franks, retired U.S. Army four star General, and long-time Texas friend of President George W. Bush, was in command of two of the worst ever counter-terrorism failures of U.S. military intelligence.

Under Frank's command, Army intelligence released Mohamed Atta along with the main 9/11 hijackers from surveillance in 2000. Then, in early 2002, Usama bin Laden slipped past U.S. forces under Franks and escaped into Pakistan. Beginning in July 2000, General Tommy Franks was commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), headquartered at McDill AF Base near Tampa, Florida. During that three-year tour of duty, he was in charge of US special forces in the Mid-East, and commanded the failed operation there in January 2002 to capture Usama bin Laden (UBL) at Tora Bora, Afghanistan.

Franks was also in command of a secret Army intelligence operation, codename Able Danger, that surveilled al-Qaeda cells known to be inside the United States prior to the 9/11 attack.

According to a front-page New York Times article by Douglas Jehl published yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/politics/09intel.html :

"More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States . . .

"In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command" Gen. Franks had overall command of SOC and its Able Danger unit, that was reportedly involved in tracking al-Qaeda cells by gathering and analyzing electronic communications and other data from multiple sources.

Jehl reports, that a "former intelligence official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political support and the possible financing for future data-mining operations by speaking publicly. He said the team had been established by the Special Operations Command in 1999, under a classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about Al Qaeda networks around the world."

That information was assembled into a giant chart that linked Mohammed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi with another al-Qaeda cell headed by Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who had been identified by the CIA. The four were collectively termed the "Brooklyn Cell", apparently in reference to the initial detection of Atta and al-Shehhi there in late 1999.

Ultimately, according to a US military intelligence officer sourced in the Times article, that officer "said that he delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and said that it had been based on information from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service."

This is particularly notable because CIA officials have testified under oath to Congress and the 9/11 Commission that the agency did not pass on information it had about the arrival in the US on January 15 2000 of al-Hazmi and al-Midhar. The then commander of the CIA Counter-Terrorism Center (CTC), Cofer Black, testified that his unit had simply overlooked the entry of the Flight 77 hijackers. In fact, the head of CIA counter-terrorism ordered an FBI liaison officer to withhold a cable notifying the Bureau's counterterrorism unit in New York of that entry by known terrorists, after they returned from a CIA-monitored al-Qaeda planning summit in Kuala Lumpur where both the 9/11 attack and the bombing of the USS Cole were discussed. See, Perjury by CIA Counterterrorism Center Director - the Blocked Memo, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/6/10/105125/910 ; also, see: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-te ...

Nonetheless, the presence of all four principal 9/11 hijackers inside the US had become known to Army intelligence by the summer of 2000, when Gen. Franks took command.

Franks and Black have been at the opposite ends of this still unravelling tale of counter-terrorism failure and bureaucratic finger-pointing. The CIA's Cofer Black was the initial source for media reports in 2002 that Franks had been responsible for bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora that hastened Gen. Franks replacement as CENTCOM commander. For that exposure of Franks, Defense Secretary Runsfeld convinced George Tenet to fire Black. See, Richard Sale, Embarrassed Rumsfeld fired CIA official, UPI, 07/28/04, http://www.washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040728-03...

While the DoD and CIA had long been been aware of their presence, for reasons that have not been satisfactorily explained, the FBI was not notified that any of the al-Qaeda cells had entered the U.S. until the summer of 2001, at which time critical information continued to be withheld from Bureau investigators who were attempting to obtain warrants to investigate suspected terrorists.

The former Army intelligence officer is quoted by Jehl as stating, "We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them."

After the CIA CTC and the DoD Able Danger unit commanders failed to notify the FBI of the terrorist cells presence inside the U.S., these four al-Qaeda operatives went on to successfully commandeer passenger jets that crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 9/11, killing some 3,000 people, an outrage that led to the Bush Administration's war on terrorism and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

For their part in this fiasco, in 2004 Tommy Franks along with George Tenet received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush.

Copyright 2005, Mark G. Levey. Used here for information purposes under fair-use provisions, please see Fair-Use Notice, below.

Thursday, August 11, 2005 - 10:23 PM

By Joseph Kay and Barry Grey -- 11 August 2005

The revelation that a military intelligence unit had identified four September 11 hijackers as Al Qaeda operatives working in the US a year before the 9/11 attacks has sparked a flurry of disclaimers and denials from official sources, while most media outlets have ignored the story altogether.

The fact that the government had long been tracking some of the hijackers, including the putative leader, Mohammad Atta, was revealed in a front page article in the New York Times on Tuesday. Citing Republican Congressman Curt Weldon and an unidentified former military intelligence officer, the article reported that a Pentagon unit known as Able Danger had by the middle of 2000 identified Atta and three of the other September 11 hijackers as members of an Al Qaeda cell operating in the US. The former intelligence officer said that Able Danger was prevented by the military's Special Operations Command from passing on the information to the FBI.

The former intelligence officer also said that he was in a group that briefed members of the staff of the 9/11 commission on this information in October of 2003. The 9/11 commission made no mention of Able Danger in its final report, nor did it reveal that any government agency had identified Atta as an Al Qaeda operative prior to the hijack bombings of the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

Weldon has said he talked to top-level administration officials about Able Danger, including then-Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, as early as September or October 2001.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, government officials and members of the September 11 commission scrambled to discount the significance of the revelations, while the media refrained from publicizing the story. The New York Times on Wednesday followed up its front-page report of the previous day with an article placed inconspicuously at the bottom of page 13.

The Washington Post published on an inside page a five-paragraph Associated Press dispatch which explained nothing about the significance of the revelations. The Wall Street Journal did not even take note of the Times exposé, nor did most other American newspapers.

The story received scant treatment on the evening television news on Tuesday, and no coverage on Wednesday.

What accounts for this silence? A US congressman and a former intelligence official have alleged that at least a section of the American military knew the identity and whereabouts of several of the September 11 hijackers over a year before the attacks, and that they were prevented from acting on this knowledge.

The congressman says he told administration officials within a month of the attacks about the work of Able Danger, and the former intelligence officer says the staff of the official investigatory commission into 9/11 was likewise informed. And yet news of these facts has surfaced only this week, nearly four years after the attacks on New York and Washington.

If the claims concerning Able Danger are true, they point to a massive cover-up within the government, a cover-up that can have no innocent explanation. They deliver a further and devastating blow to the official history of an event that has had a profound effect on American foreign and domestic policy. Yet the media is all but silent.

As is often the case, the coverage in the media is inversely proportional to the gravity of the news.

What has been said or reported in response to the Able Danger revelations consists largely of evasions and obfuscations. It seems that in the scramble to cover up their past omissions and lies, Bush administration officials and 9/11 commission members have failed to get their story straight. They are tripping over themselves with contradictory statements and inane disclaimers.

At a press briefing on Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declared he had no knowledge of Able Danger. "I have no idea," he said. "I've never heard of it until this morning. I understand our folks are trying to look into it."

Weldon claims that the Able Danger team was set up in 1999 under the direction of the then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Henry Shelton. Yet Shelton said on Tuesday that he did not recall authorizing the creation of the unit.

Hadley, who is now Bush's national security adviser, has not made any public comments about the revelations.

A spokesman for the Pentagon took a different tact, implying that any investigation into the matter would help terrorist organizations. "There were a number of intelligence operations prior to the attacks of 9/11," said Lt. Col. Christopher Conway. "It would be irresponsible for us to provide details in a way in which those who wish to do us harm would find beneficial."

The chairman and co-chairman of the 9/11 commission, while not denying that the October 2003 meeting with Able Danger took place, assert that the commission staff do not recall being given the name of Mohammad Atta. According to the New York Times article on Wednesday, Thomas Kean, the commission's chairman and a former Republican governor from New Jersey, said 9/11 commission staff members were "confident" Atta's name was not mentioned in the briefing or subsequent documents from the Pentagon.

Lee Hamilton, co-chairman of the commission and a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, made a similar statement. According to the Associated Press: "Hamilton said 9/11 commission staff members learned of Able Danger during a meeting with military personnel in October 2003 in Afghanistan, but that the staff members do not recall learning of a connection between Able Danger and any of the four terrorists Weldon mentioned."

Hamilton is quoted by the Associated Press as saying, "The 9/11 commission did not learn of any US government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell. Had we learned of it, obviously it would've been a major focus of our investigation."

Even if one were to take the statements of these commissioners at face value, they do not explain the failure of the commission to even mention the work of Able Danger. Nowhere in its massive report on the September 11 attacks, nowhere in the volumes of documents and transcripts that it published, did the commission consider it relevant to mention the existence of a Pentagon group gathering information on Al Qaeda members operating on US soil. How is this to be explained?

In fact, it is inconceivable that no information was given to the commission concerning precisely who it was that Able Danger was tracking. What else would those associated with Able Danger who briefed the 9/11 commission staff in October 2003 have talked about?

The commission was tasked with investigating the September 11 attacks, and unless a conscious decision was made to cover up the information reported by the military intelligence officials, it would undoubtedly have pursued in great detail any report given by them. Yet Kean and Hamilton would have us believe that no one on the commission thought it necessary to investigate exactly what the military intelligence group had uncovered.

The statements by the commission members are directly contradicted by the military intelligence official who has been speaking to the press. According to a Reuters report, "The former military intelligence official insists he personally told Sept. 11 commission staff members about Atta in Afghanistan, and offered to supply them with documents upon his return to the Untied States, only to be rebuffed."

The intelligence official has specifically mentioned the panel's staff director Philip Zelikow as someone he personally spoke to about Atta. Prior to being chosen as head of the 9/11 commission staff, Zelikow was a close associate of then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. He has since been promoted to become a senior advisor to Secretary of State Rice.

Zelikow has refused thus far to comment on the revelations.

The statements by Dean and Hamilton have the appearance of a preemptive alibi for Zelikow, suggesting that the information he was given did not include details relevant to the commission's investigation.

There can be no innocent explanation for the failure of the 9/11 commission to note in any way the activities of the Able Danger group and its identification of an Al Qaeda cell led by Atta and including three other future hijack-bombers. Why was this information concealed?

Because it points imperiously to the existence of a conspiracy within one or another intelligence or security agency, not to mention the Bush White House, to shield the future hijackers and allow some form of terrorist attack on US soil to occur. All of the efforts of the 9/11 commission—as well as the entire official media and both the Democratic and Republican parties—have been concentrated on excluding even the possibility that something more sinister than bureaucratic

incompetence or institutional roadblocks were responsible for an intelligence failure of staggering dimensions.

But the evidence pointing to some form of government complicity continues to mount, despite official whitewashes, cover-ups, half-truths and lies.

One thing is certain: without the tragedy of 9/11, the government could not possibly have shifted public opinion to tolerate invasions in the oil-rich regions of Central Asia and the Persian Gulf and an open-ended policy of militarism codified in the doctrine of preventive war. Nor could it have carried out the massive attack on democratic rights that has been justified by appeals to national security and the "war on terrorism."

For the Bush administration and the American ruling elite, 9/11 served, and continues to serve, an indispensable political function in facilitating the pursuit of imperialist policy abroad and social reaction at home.

Copyright (c) 2005 World Socialist Web Site -- www.wsws.org

Original http://www.intel-dump.com/archives/archive_2005_08_07-2005_08_13.shtml#1123659720

Legal Aspects of Data Mining and Able Danger

Jon Holdaway, Wednesday August 10, 2005 at 3:42am EST

[Note: This was written in response to an argument that there was a legal basis for suspending Able Danger surveillance of Atta.-ED.]

1. Information Sharing and US Persons.

Phil,

The critical part of your first quote block below is:

This is just flat-out wrong. First, the "law" cited is Executive Order 12333, which defines the Intelligence Community and its authority to conduct operations. The most important provision of EO 12333 is its rules for when the IC can collect information on "US Persons." This is a specific definition and applies to a) US citizens, b) Permanent Resident Aliens (green-card holders), c) un-incorporated organizations composed by a majority of a) or b), or d) US corporations not owned by a foreign government.

The general rule for EO 12333 is basically, "thou shalt not collect information (that is, spy on) US Persons, except . . ." The "except" portion is critical. There are 13 exceptions under which an intelligence agency can collect information on US Persons. These include for personnel security investigations, for administrative purposes, when the subject gives consent to collect. The two most important categories are for Foreign Intelligence purposes (that is, collecting information on US Persons who are agents of a foreign power) and for Counterintelligence purposes. The Counterintelligence exception also includes collection for counternarcotics and international counterterrorism purposes. It also allows for collection of not just individuals reasonably believed to be engaged in international terrorism activities, but also collection of information on people associated with individuals reasonably believed to engaged in international terrorism activities (for the purpose of determining the relationship â?? if no significant relationship, then the info is destroyed).

All of this falls under the rubric of "intelligence oversight", which is a well-ingrained program within the military intelligence community ensuring that collection (especially HUMINT) activities did not retain information on US Persons without authority.

So when someone says that the military couldn't share information because of rules against collection of US Person information, that is not an accurate statement. Even if Mohammed Atta was a Permanent Resident Alien, the Intelligence Community was free to spy on him, collect the information, database it, and use it in intelligence reporting community-wide. The excuse doesn't make sense logically, either: How could have Able Danger conducted intelligence collection, using Army intelligence resources at LIWA have built the briefing to begin with? Once the information has been properly collected, it can be shared (theoretically). The reason the information was not forwarded probably had more to do with the infamous "wall" created by Justice Department's misreading of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, fixed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Appeals and the Patriot Act.

2. Datamining.

When one talks of datamining, they need to be clear on what exactly they mean. All datamining is is a set of tools used to dip into databases which can sort through the data and provide the answer to the query. Think of Westlaw or Lexis/Nexis on speed. The controversy in TIA was created over the types of databases they were going to search. DARPA was talking about applying the analytical toolkits to civilian business databases such as credit cards, hotel bookings, rental cars, etc. Even then, there were rules in place (using EO 12333 as the foundation) to ensure that the databases were not being queried without a legitimate purpose.

However, TIA was killed in a spate of misinformation. Before its death, these toolkits were already being used and improved by the Information Dominance Center at Fort Belvoir, VA. The significant difference between TIA's goals and the IDC's actual practice is that IDC is only analyzing databases of Intel Community information already collected.

Here's how IDC (at this discussion level) works: if Army intelligence has a reasonable belief that I am either engaging in or supporting international terrorist activities (or had a relationship with those engaged in the same) based on information that I had attended a mosque with a known terrorist and/or had made pro-terrorist statements, the first thing Army intel is going to do is to "tip" its own databases and see what has already been collected on me. Low and behold, they find a report written about a Gitmo detainee, explaining the pocket litter when he was captured. In his pocket litter was my business card. Now analysts can build linkages and determine relationships between me and others in the database to see if there may be other linkages out there that look innocuous at first, but when compared with other pieces of information show patterns and indications of terrorist activity. And the best thing is that the database check is multi-INT, tapping into SIGINT, HUMINT, and other sources of information. What happens with this information? Do the links mean anything? Maybe, maybe not. It's usually not enough to create "actionable intelligence". But what it does is become used to determine whether further investigation is required or whether the linkages are just coincidental. It is also used to build the bigger intel picture of the hydra that is international jihadist terrorism.

If I could actually explain how the datamining toolkits work, you would be amazed at their speed and accuracy in pointing out links and indicators (think Minority Report without the precogs). Of course, with great power comes great responsibility, but after the TIA debacle, the owners of IDC have ensured that its operations receive the highest levels of oversight and scrutiny. In the IDC operations I was involved in, each US Person database query had to have legal counsel approval.

The defense contractors involved in developing the datamining software are interested in taking it civilian, so you may see variations of the technology on the market soon. For instance, it would very helpful in complex litigation, such as tobacco or asbestos litigation, where discovery leads to thousands of documents and reports.

There's a longer discussion about whether information already databased by the intel community is already "collected" for purposes of intelligence oversight and therefore can be queried using analytical toolkits without worrying about collection exceptions. This will be for another day.

Copyright 2005 Jon Holdaway.

Go to Next Page