After the DoD issued their report in which they rejected the notion that the unit named Able Danger  could of stopped 9/11 this report today should not come as any surprise:

The Senate Intelligence Committee has rejected as untrue one of the most disturbing claims about the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes — a congressman’s contention that a team of military analysts identified Mohamed Atta or other hijackers before the attacks — according to a summary of the panel’s investigation obtained by The Times.

The conclusion contradicts assertions by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and a few military officers that U.S. national security officials ignored startling intelligence available in early 2001 that might have helped to prevent the attacks.

[...]"Able Danger did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker at any time prior to Sept. 11, 2001," the committee determined, according to an eight-page letter sent last week to panel members by the top Republican and Democrat on the committee.

[...]The panel said it found "no evidence" to support claims by military officers connected to Able Danger that Defense Department lawyers prevented the team’s analysts from sharing their findings with FBI counter-terrorism officials before the attacks.

Nor was the alleged chart or any information developed by Able Danger improperly destroyed at the direction of Pentagon lawyers, the panel concluded — a charge that had stoked claims of a cover-up.

Question to the Senate Intelligence Committee….why then was Atta on one of the charts produced by Able Danger?

"One of these individuals depicted on the chart arguably looked like Mohammed Atta," the committee concluded. "In addition, the chart contained names of Al Qaeda associates that sound like Atta, as well as numerous variations of the common Arab name Mohammed."

The committee also suggested that officials’ memories may have been clouded by the flurry of charts and photographs of Atta that surfaced after the attacks. The panel noted that a defense contractor that produced the chart at the center of the controversy subsequently created a follow-up chart, after the attacks, that did include Atta.

Yeah.  Simple case of mistaken identity right?  Too many Mohammed’s to go around.

Read the rest of this entry »

A little background refresher.

So here’s the latest update:

[*snipped, trimmed, & slimfasted*] when Berger was confronted by Archives officials about the missing documents, he lied by saying he did not take them, the report said.

 Brachfeld’s report included an investigator’s notes, taken during an interview with Berger. The notes dramatically described Berger’s removal of documents during an Oct. 2, 2003, visit to the Archives.

Berger took a break to go outside without an escort while it was dark. He had taken four documents in his pockets.

 "He headed toward a construction area. … Mr. Berger looked up and down the street, up into the windows of the Archives and the DOJ (Department of Justice), and did not see anyone," the interview notes said.

He then slid the documents under a construction trailer, according to the inspector general. Berger acknowledged that he later retrieved the documents from the construction area and returned with them to his office.

"He was aware of the risk he was taking," the inspector general’s notes said. Berger then returned to the Archives building without fearing the documents would slip out of his pockets or that staff would notice that his pockets were bulging.

The notes said Berger had not been aware that Archives staff had been tracking the documents he was provided because of earlier suspicions from previous visits that he was removing materials. Also, the employees had made copies of some documents.

 In October 2003, the report said, an Archives official called Berger to discuss missing documents from his visit two days earlier. The investigator’s notes said, "Mr. Berger panicked because he realized he was caught."

The notes said that Berger had "destroyed, cut into small pieces, three of the four documents. These were put in the trash."

What was Sandy Berger’s motive in stealing and destroying these documents?   What was so important in them, that he felt the need to commit such a crime?  I feel like he’s gotten away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist;  by stealing and shredding classified records from the National Archives, he’s basically rewritten history.  And without so much as an explanation given.

Mike Kasper at Able Danger Blog updates us about the new book from Peter Lance that finally delves feet first into the 9/11 conspiracy. This time there is no backroom dealing to leave stuff out or gloss over the facts as the 9/11 Commission did:

Able Danger is mentioned throughout the book, but some other chapters which focus on it include Chapter 31, “Operation Able Danger”, Chapter 32, “Obliterating the Dots”, and Chapter 33, “Able Danger Part Two”. Over the past nine months, I was beginning to doubt if anyone would ever give the Able Danger story the treatment it deserves. Peter Lance has gone above and beyond my expectations in “Triple Cross” and anyone who is interested in getting to the bottom of the Able Danger story should read it.

Among other things, he points out flaws in the IG Report on Able Danger:

It’s also clear that, in attempting to impeach Capt. Phillpott, the IG relied heavily on the word of Dietrich Snell, the 9/11 Commission senior counsel, who found Phillpott’s account of the Able Danger findings “not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the [Commission] report or further investigation.” That was Snell’s conclusion following a July 12, 2004, meeting with Phillpott ten days before the Commission’s “final report” was to go to press:

“We considered Mr. Snell’s negative assessment of Capt. Phillpott’s claims particularly persuasive given Mr. Snell’s knowledge and background in antiterrorist efforts involving al Qaeda. Mr. Snell considered Capt. Phillpott’s recollection with respect to Able Danger identification of Mohammed Atta inaccurate because it was ‘one hundred per cent inconsistent with everything we knew about Mohammed Atta and his collegues at the time.’ Mr. Snell went on to describe his knowledge of Mohammed Atta’s overseas travel and associations before 9/11 noting the “utter absense of any information suggesting any kind of a tie between Atta and anyone located in this country during the first half of the year 2000,” when Able Danger had allegedly identified him.”

But in this book we’ve demonstrated that there was massive evidence on the high visibility of 9/11 hijackers al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, who were living openly in San Diego as early as January 2000. We showed how Atta himself entered the United States on June 3 and rented a room in Brooklyn near the Al Farooq Mosque, using his own name. Just how difficult would it have been for the Able Danger analysts to track his movements via airline reservations and immigration sources, since, according to the IG’s report, the Able Danger data harvest was “collecting data from 10,000 websites each day”?

In an interview following release of the report, one operative close to the data-mining operation told me that “we also accessed INS databases in the data harvest, so picking up Atta who had to get airline tickers and a visa prior to his arrival in early June was no big deal.”

Mike also has the press release announcing the book:

In TRIPLE CROSS, five-time Emmy-award winning investigative reporter Peter Lance reveals how U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald and the FBI’s elite bin Laden squad failed to stop Ali Mohamed, al-Qaeda’s master spy, in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks. Recruited as an FBI informant as early as 1992, Mohamed — an intimate of Osama bin Laden — was allowed to remain free for years, planning and executing multiple acts of terror, including the 1998 African embassy bombings that killed 224 and injured 4000 — while Fitzgerald and key FBI agents did little to stop him.

Mohamed had been on the FBI’s radar since 1989, when the FBI’s Special Operations Group photographed a cell of his trainees firing AK-47s at a Long Island shooting range. Yet despite their prior knowledge of this New York cell, the Bureau ended its investigation, paving the way for multiple acts of terror in the years that followed.

Of the Islamic radicals trained by Ali Mohamed and photographed by the FBI: one went on to kill Rabbi Meier Kahane in 1990, three were convicted in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and another American Muslim was convicted by Patrick Fitzgerald in 1995 in a plot to blow up the bridge and tunnels into Manhattan. Mohamed himself was opened as a Bureau informant on the West Coast in 1992-a year before the WTC bombing. Worse, he continued to snooker Fitzgerald and other FBI and Justice Department officials for years as he learned the FBI’s playbook on al-Qaeda.

After a five-year investigation into FBI negligence on the road to 9/11, Lance reveals:

How Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who was directing the FBI’s elite bin Laden squad (I-49), allowed Ali Mohamed to remain an active al-Qaeda agent despite the fact that the FBI knew he had sworn allegiance to bin Laden as early as 1993. Mohamed moved the Saudi billionaire from Afghanistan to Sudan, trained his personal bodyguard, set up al-Qaeda terror camps in Khartoum, and trained the terrorists responsible for the 1993 WTC bombing and Day of Terror plots.

How Fitzgerald and other top officials buried a treasure trove of al-Qaeda-related evidence in 1996 — including proof of a liquid-based airliner bomb plot that was a precursor to the August 2006 plot revealed by U.K. authorities. The evidence included proof of an active al-Qaeda cell operating in NYC five years before
9/11.

How Mohamed twice smuggled al-Qaeda’s second-in-command, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, into the U.S. in the 1990s to raise half a million dollars for the Jihad — and left his post at Fort Bragg, against orders, to hunt down Soviet Spetsnaz commandos in Afghanistan in the midst of America’s covert war.

How Mohamed stole TOP SECRET memos and other classified intelligence from Fort Bragg and passed it onto the al-Qaeda leadership, including memos to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the positions of all Special Forces units worldwide. Copies of that intelligence, with Mohamed’s notes in Arabic, are part of more than 30 pages of declassified or formerly SECRET documents included as appendices to the book.

How, after meeting Mohamed face-to-face in 1997, Fitzgerald called him “the most dangerous man I have ever met” and vowed, “We cannot let this man out on the street.” Yet for another ten months he allowed Mohamed to remain free, while the al-Qaeda spy continued to support the African embassy bombing plot he had set in motion in 1993-after being freed from custody on the word of his FBI control agent.

How Mohamed had told Fitzgerald that he had “hundreds” of al-Qaeda sleepers ready to go “operational” at any time — and yet to this day the FBI has failed to detect them. Mohamed, who wasn’t even arrested until a month after the 1998 embassy bombings, remained in U.S. custody for three full years before 9/11. But even after cutting a deal that allowed him to escape the death penalty and enter witness protection, Fitzgerald failed to extract the 9/11 planes-as-missiles plot from Mohamed.

How as early as 1991 the FBI was aware of a New Jersey mail box store directly linked to al-Qaeda, but failed to monitor the location. Fitzgerald himself had named the store owner as an unindicted coconspirator in the 1995 Day of Terror case. Six years later, in July 2001 , the FBI blew an extraordinary chance to interdict the 9/11 plot when two of the 9/11 hijackers got their fake IDS at the very same store. “All the FBI had to do was monitor that location, the way they sat on John Gotti’s Ravenite Social Club,” says Lance, “and they would have been in the middle of the 9/11 plot.”

Just when I thought Able Danger was going to be filed away and forgotten comes a book that will once again show how close we came to stopping Atta.

I’ve already pre-ordered my copy of the book, don’t miss out.

First we had the Senate report on Iraq/Al-Qaeda links so full of holes you could drive a truck through them, now comes this DoD report. Many of us suspected the DoD would whitewash the Able Danger information.

We were not disappointed:

A Pentagon report rejects the idea that intelligence gathered by a secret military unit could have been used to stop the Sept. 11 hijackings.

The Pentagon inspector general’s office said Thursday that a review of records from the unit, known as Able Danger, found no evidence it had identified ringleader Mohamed Atta or any other terrorist who participated in the 2001 attacks.

[...]Weldon questioned the “motives and the content” of the report and rejected its conclusions. “Acting in a sickening bureaucratic manner, the DOD IG cherry-picked testimony from witnesses in an effort to minimize the historical importance of the Able Danger effort,” Weldon said in a statement.

“The report trashes the reputations of military officers who had the courage to step forward and put their necks on the line to describe important work they were doing to track al-Qaida prior to 9/11,” Weldon said. He said the investigation did little to answer the questions it was supposed to examine.

The report acknowledged that one Able Danger member alleged he was prohibited from providing a chart to the FBI in 2000 by a senior Special Operations commander. But, the report said, “the senior official did not recall the incident and we are persuaded that the chart would have been of minimal value to the FBI.”

The Pentagon had said some employees recall seeing an intelligence chart identifying Atta as a terrorist before the attacks. The report said those accounts “varied significantly” and witnesses were inconsistent at times in their statements.

You can view the report here.

No one can really say they would be surprised by this new report. The DoD has been covering their backside since this whole scandal started. It isn’t even surprising that they release this so close to election day, not that it was done on purpose…./sarcasm.

As you can imagine, Weldon is a bit miffed:

U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, today released the following statement about the Department of Defense Inspector General (DOD IG) report on “Alleged Misconduct by Senior DoD Officials Concerning the Able Danger Program and Lieutenant Colonel Anthony A. Shaffer, U.S. Army Reserve.”

“The purpose of the DOD IG investigation was to shed light on the pressures and harassment placed on LTC Shaffer and other Able Danger team members. It was also supposed to investigate why Able Danger was glossed over by the Pentagon and why there was such a fight to get information out of the Department of Defense about Able Danger, its findings and the reasoning behind destroying crucial data about linkages and relationship of al-Qaeda prior to 9/11. The IG’s report did little to answer these questions.

“The DOD IG failed to brief LTC Shaffer’s lawyer before releasing the report. The contents and overall tone and scope of the report were leaked to the media before Congress was even briefed of its findings. The DOD IG failed to explain in their briefing to me and my staff how such information got out to the media. They said they would investigate, but I have very little confidence that anything will come of that. Also, the timeliness of this report, just weeks before Congressional elections, also raises serious questions about the IG’s motivations.

“Acting in a sickening bureaucratic manner, the DOD IG cherry picked testimony from witnesses in an effort to minimize the historical importance of the Able Danger effort. The IG narrowly focused their investigation on the witnesses recollections of the 9/11 hijackers and a chart. The report trashes the reputations of military officers who had the courage to step forward and put their necks on the line to describe important work they were doing to track al-Qaeda prior to 9/11.

“To further substantiate the Able Danger effort, within the last three months of the DOD IG investigation, another person who recently retired from the military has come forward and corroborated the work of the Able Danger program. Additionally, another official within DOD has conducted data runs of stored pre-9/11 data that has yielded information about the Brooklyn cell.

“They do not explain why LTC Shaffer and other Able Danger principles were harassed by their superiors. Specifically, the report did not address why the Defense Intelligence Agency trumped up phony charges against LTC Shaffer in an effort to revoke his clearance. When the DOD IG briefed me, they could not account for why they failed to interview key witnesses connected to this harassment, except for claiming that these witnesses ‘did not come to us’ – evidence that this was not a proactive investigation.

“The FBI agent that was tasked with setting up meetings between Able Danger and FBI officials – meetings that were block by DOD lawyers – was not interviewed in this report, yet it concluded that ‘Able Danger members were not prohibited from sharing intelligence information with law enforcement authorities.’

“I am appalled that the DOD IG would expect the American people to actually consider this a full and thorough investigation. I question their motives and the content of this report, and I reject the conclusions they have drawn.

While reading the report you cannot help but notice how much credibility they put on commanding officers while reduing the credibility of lower level officers. They basically call Shaffer a liar and cast his whole testimony in a bad light by suggesting he stole a GPS unit. They spend quite a bit of time on this incident, one in which it could easily have been a mix-up, either Shaffer forgot it was in his deployment bag (this one has happened to me personally while I was in the Marines) or some other kind of mix-up. But the time they spend on this incident smells to me. They cast all his testimony and memories away because of it.

How convenient.

This is a whitewash from top to bottom. Please check my other Able Danger posts, and there are many of them, for much of the evidence that this group did indeed identify Atta prior to 9/11….but no one listened to them.

UPDATE

TopDog notices some more wordplay in this report.

From page six of the IG report:

GEN Shelton testified that he had no specific recollection of term “Able Danger” or the Able Danger program, but did recall that while Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he was concerned about al Qaeda and the need to develop a holistic view of al Qaeda. GEN Shelton stated,

the genesis of starting to try to collect on a worldwide basis against terrorists, came about as a result of me looking at all the information that was coming into the Chairman’s office, and seeing that we would get — we were just being inundated with information, and it wasn’t really intelligence, but little snippets.

From James Rosen at McClatchy News Service, December 7, 2005:

While Shelton said he never heard the program referred to as “Able Danger” until news reports on it first emerged in the summer, the retired general said he authorized a computer data-mining effort to target bin Laden and his associates.

“I dealt with a million damn acronyms and different kinds of code names for operations,” Shelton said. “Able Danger was not one that jumped out at me when it first surfaced” in news reports.

But under his direction, Shelton said, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, now Army chief of staff, set up a team of five to seven intelligence officers after Shelton was promoted to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1997 and Schoomaker succeeded him as Special Operations commander.

The program began at Special Operations headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, Shelton said, but it was expanded later and moved to Fort Belvoir, Va., outside Washington. Schoomaker briefed Shelton on the program’s progress in late 1997 when Shelton made a return visit to his old command post in Florida.

In Washington, sometime between 1999 and 2001, Shelton received a more extensive briefing from Defense Intelligence Agency officers involved in the program.

So a year ago he states he didn’t remember the AD name but does recall the program. In this report they state he now had no recollection of even the program.

No whitewash here.

Excellent article yesterday at AIM about Mary McCarthy, the reporter who used the information Mary gave her to tell the world our secrets, and Curt Weldon:

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz has said that it is “absolutely relevant information” that fired CIA officer Mary O. McCarthy was a major financial contributor to Democratic Party causes. He made the statement because of criticism of a Post profile of McCarthy, which curiously omitted that information.

[...]If politics motivated McCarthy, could politics have motivated Dana Priest? Priest is the Post reporter who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning story on “secret CIA prisons” in Europe but refuses to say whether McCarthy was one of her sources. The Priest story, based completely on anonymous sources, has not been confirmed.

We do know that Priest authored a vicious attack on Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), a major critic of the intelligence community who supported CIA director Porter Goss’s effort to reform the agency and fire leakers to the press.

As we noted in our August-B, 2005 AIM Report, Priest authored the attack on Weldon without contacting the congressman and the paper refused to print a letter to the editor from Weldon rebutting the Priest article.

Weldon has called on his congressional opponent, Joe Sestak, to return campaign contributions from McCarthy, the fired CIA officer ($350); Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, who pleaded guilty to illegally taking and destroying classified documents ($1,000); and Clinton CIA Director John Deutch, who admitted mishandling classified documents ($500). Berger also hosted a fundraiser for Sestak in the offices of Harold Ickes, a close associate of Hillary Clinton and billionaire George Soros.

Sestak, who is also backed by John Kerry, replies he won’t give the money back to his “friends.” Weldon counters that accepting money from “criminals and convicted felons” raises character and security issues.

Other contributions to Sestak came from Hill PAC, Hillary Clinton’s political action committee; Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright; Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick; and Clinton chief of staff John Podesta.

One thing is certain: don’t look for any investigative stories from the Post into the intervention of the intelligence community into the media and politics.

While the media have played a nefarious role, officials of the Bush and Clinton administrations are scrambling to silence those, led by Weldon, who are asking tough questions about the performance of the intelligence community. Weldon, for example, wonders how it could happen that lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta was not arrested even though he had been identified as a dangerous terrorist by the Able Danger military intelligence unit well before the terrorist attacks. He and at least three other members of an al-Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, NY were known as dangerous terrorists more than a year before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field.

With notable exceptions (see below), powerful media outlets are ignoring or ridiculing those who are trying to expose the scandal of what at best can be categorized as incredible incompetence. At the moment, their target is Congressman Weldon, Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and the Homeland Security Committee.

Weldon and 248 of his colleagues in both parties are demanding a no-holds-barred investigation. There was one congressional hearing in February–followed by minimal news coverage–with other Capitol Hill investigations possibly in the offing. Congressman Todd Tiahrt, a member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, said he could not comment when AIM asked if that panel planned hearings on Able Danger. Most of the Intel committee’s hearings are behind closed doors.

[...]At the February 15 House hearing, the Pennsylvania congressman announced that Able Danger records had been found showing hundreds of references to Mohammed Atta prior to the 9/11 attacks. Mondics and Goldstein either were unaware of or ignored the fact that Weldon was working to get the documents declassified. The Inquirer reporters write as if they had been on another planet when all this happened.

In fact most of the media in this country acts as if they are from another planet when it comes to the Able Danger story. One interesting note is the next paragraph which tells us there is an upcoming book by Peter Lance that investigates the disgraceful job done by the 9/11 Commission, all to cover up their favorite boss…President Clinton:

Weldon notes that the top 9/11 staffer who steered away from his investigators the information offered by Shaffer and Philpott was Dietrich Snell–identified on the commission’s website as its chief counsel. The congressman tells AIM that an upcoming “blockbuster” book by ABC investigative reporter Peter Lance identifies Snell as “the key link in getting the 9/11 commission to ignore certain information that would have embarrassed the Justice Department during the Clinton administration in the early 1990s.”

Snell was closely allied with 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick. She was a top official in the Justice Department in the Clinton/Reno regime. In that position she took the lead in preventing intelligence-sharing among different agencies over and above what were already restrictive requirements in the law. The commission rejected outraged demands that she walk over to the other side of the witness table and answer (rather than ask) some tough questions under oath.

Congressman Weldon asks “How can they (the 9/11 commission) justify hiring 70 people and spending $15 million and not interview one analyst or any of the people who were doing the work of Able Danger? How could they do that? Unless [they] deliberately did not want to pursue the story?”

The commission staff told the congressman they “looked at it [Able Danger]” and “we decided not to go down that route.” He suspects a bipartisan cover-up to avoid “embarrassment to both sides.”

All this comes on the heels of the recent revelation that up to 10,000 additional pages of Able Danger documents still exist. Even though the DoD has said over and over that they were ALL destroyed: (via Able Danger Blog)

Scott Malone of NavySeals.com and Christopher Law of PublicEdCenter.org have been following the Able Danger story from the beginning. Back in November, Chris submitted a FOIA request for all documents and emails that could be located related to Able Danger. He was routed from the Pentagon to SOCOM, back to the Pentagon, asked to resubmit his request, then told he had submitted duplicate requests. Last week, his request was finally denied. DOD refused to turn over a single document, but admitted there were at least 9,500 pages of data responsive to his request! Considering that DOD has maintained all along they have not been able to find much material on Able Danger, and has been slow to respond to requests for documents on Able Danger from both the Congress and the 9/11 Commission, this is quite a surprise.

This news is actually quite stunning if you have followed this scandal. How in the world was 10,000 documents misplaced?

A quick update on the Able Danger story. Mike at Able Danger Blog had a email exchange with Peter Lance, who is a five time Emmy winning reporter, about the recent hearings:

Mike,

I had heard about the exchange at the hearing but not in such detail. Do you have a transcript of the public session? If so, please forward it.

My dealings with Jacob L. “Jay” Boesen came as I was pursuing the story of FDNY Fire Marshal Ronnie Bucca in 2002 and early 2003.

Boesen knew and worked with Ronnie at DIAC (the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center at Bolling AFB in D.C.) when Bucca was tasked there by his Army Reserve unit.

I had hours and hours of discussions with Boesen over many months.

He personally sent me the hard copy of his link chart (below).

It shows a DIRECT link (as of August 10, 1999) between al Qaeda (bin Laden) and the Brooklyn/New York cell of blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (OAR) and Ramzi Yousef. I published it in both 1000 YEARS FOR REVENGE and COVER UP, I felt that it was so significant.

As you know my central thesis is that Yousef, the original WTC bomber was the primary architect of the 9/11 plot and that both attacks on the WTC were directly funded and tightly controlled by al Qaeda.

You don’t NEED Atta’s picture to prove the al Qaeda/Sheikh Omar/Yousef link if you have that chart, prepared by Boesen just four months before the Able Danger data mining operation is said to have commenced.

As you know, according to Curt Weldon, Boesen went on to do many, if not most of the Able Danger link charts.

Further, I have a booklet on al Qaeda that he co-wrote with Dr. Preisser in 2002. It’s a little known monograph that he autographed for me.

I tried for weeks to reach Boesen after Cong. Weldon broke the Able Danger story in August. On the eve of the Specter Hearing in Sept. Boesen’s son told me that his father couldn’t talk to me because his “company” forbade him too, since I was a member of “the press.”

Boesen’s position is that the alleged Atta picture was really that of another Egyptian (Mohammed Atef) –

But even if that’s true, it in no way invalidates the strength of the al Qaeda/OAR/Yousef ties uncovered by the A.D. unit at Fort Belvoir and its successor in Garland, Texas.

My new book TRIPLE CROSS will document even more links between both attacks on the WTC (1993 and 9/11)

My findings, once and for all, will decimate the falacious allegation by the 9/11 Commission (per Dietrich Snell) that the origin of the “planes as missiles” plot was Afghanistan in 1996 and that KSM was merely a freelancer at the time; not affilidated with al Qaeda.

In contrast, I’ve proven that was the plot began in Manila in 1994 with Ramzi Yousef as its principal architect.

Yousef,a criminal genius whom other al Qaeda operatives referred to as “The Great One,” designed the “planes operation.” His uncle KSM merely carried it out after Ramzi’s capture on February 7th, 1995 in Islamabad –

At that takedown, KSM was in a downstairs room at the Su Casa Guesthouse, a bin Laden NGO-controlled rest stop for jihadis.

But, as I’ve documented in both books, he hung around long enough after the Yousef seizure to comment on it. He even disclosed his own name to a stringer for TIME and the L.A. Times.

Nonetheless, KSM was missed by FBI agent Bradley Garrett who got to the guest house late. He escaped and went on to carry out his nephew’s deadly plan on Sept. 11th 2001.

That incredible “miss” was the first of two opportunities the FBI had to capture KSM prior to 1996. In both cases they blew it.

I’ll have more on the second incident in TRIPLE CROSS.

My sense now is that re: the Able Danger scandal, the fix is in.

Efforts have been made to discredit Curt Weldon on multiple fronts and silence other key witnesses. The House Hearing you refer to was a disgrace and clearly intended by DOD to placate critics in the House.

It’s up to reporters like you and your readers to keep this issue alive and I applaud your work.

You have my permission to use this “post” in its entirety.

Best,

Peter Lance

As proof of the “fix being in” just check out this recent article in the MSM:

At times, he acts less like a congressman and more like a shadow secretary of state or head of the CIA.

Among Weldon’s notable forays into the world of spies is the Able Danger speech he made on the House floor last year.

In that speech, Weldon asserted that a secret intelligence program called Able Danger had fingered three of the 9/11 hijackers before the deed, but that the government failed to act on the information - thus losing a chance to prevent the attacks.

As my colleagues Chris Mondics and Steve Goldstein reported in these pages last week, no credible evidence has been found to verify Weldon’s Able Danger theory.

What a crock. There are MULTIPLE witnesses, and not just some scatterbrained witnesses but credible professional’s who have spent their whole life serving this country.

You notice how much we hear about Able Danger nowadays? That’s right, the fix is in.

Just an update. You can find the complete transcript of the Able Danger here. A searchable .PDF file is here.

Lot’s of information in the hearings, and many many excerpts to be blogged about. Take one for example:

WELDON: Dr. Cambone, are you aware that on a flight to Mexico earlier this calendar year, Butch Willard from your staff was speaking rather publicly to a person sitting next to him, who happened to be a retired intelligence officer who knows Colonel Shaffer, who will come forward with a signed affidavit that your office was trying to kill this whole story, and that Colonel Shaffer’s story had no credibility?

Are you aware that that was a statement by Butch Willard? And we have a signed affidavit coming from the woman who was sitting there.

Check out the other Able Danger Bloggers for much more:

• Able Danger Blog
• The Strata-Sphere
• Rory O’Conner
• TopDog08
• QT Monster
• Dread Pundit Bluto
• Captain’s Quarters
• Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill
• Decision ‘08

Patrick Radden Keefe writes in this Sunday’s NYT’s about some of the technology that went into Able Danger and how useful it can be. Of course the fact this is in the New York Times you had to know they would include the usual hyperbole about the NSA wiretaps:

Recent debates about the National Security Agency’s warrantless-eavesdropping program have produced two very different pictures of the operation. Whereas administration officials describe a carefully aimed “terrorist surveillance program,” press reports depict a pervasive electronic net ensnaring thousands of innocent people and few actual terrorists.

Yeah, the program targeted 30+ some odd people….thousands my ass. You see how they attempt to wrap the wiretap program with the program’s the NSA have done for quite some time, put in place by Bush’s predecessor.

During the last decade, mathematicians, physicists and sociologists have advanced the scientific study of networks, identifying surprising commonalities among the ways airlines route their flights, people interact at cocktail parties and crickets synchronize their chirps. In the increasingly popular language of network theory, individuals are “nodes,” and relationships and interactions form the “links” binding them together; by mapping those connections, network scientists try to expose patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. Researchers are applying newly devised algorithms to vast databases ? one academic team recently examined the e-mail traffic of 43,000 people at a large university and mapped their social ties. Given the difficulty of identifying elusive terror cells, it was only a matter of time before this new science was discovered by America’s spies.

In its simplest form, network theory is about connecting the dots. Stanley Milgram’s finding that any two Americans are connected by a mere six intermediaries ? or “degrees of separation” ? is one of the animating ideas behind the science of networks; the Notre Dame physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi studied one obvious network ? the Internet ? and found that any two unrelated Web pages are separated by only 19 links. After Sept. 11, Valdis Krebs, a Cleveland consultant who produces social network “maps” for corporate and nonprofit clients, decided to map the hijackers. He started with two of the plotters, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, and, using press accounts, produced a chart of the interconnections ? shared addresses, telephone numbers, even frequent-flier numbers ? within the group. All of the 19 hijackers were tied to one another by just a few links, and a disproportionate number of links converged on the leader, Mohamed Atta. Shortly after posting his map online, Krebs was invited to Washington to brief intelligence contractors.

Announced in 2002, Adm. John Poindexter’s controversial Total Information Awareness program was an early effort to mine large volumes of data for hidden connections. But even before 9/11, an Army project called Able Danger sought to map Al Qaeda by “identifying linkages and patterns in large volumes of data,” and may have succeeded in identifying Atta as a suspect. As if to underline the project’s social-network principles, Able Danger analysts called it “the Kevin Bacon game.”

Given that the N.S.A. intercepts some 650 million communications worldwide every day, it’s not surprising that its analysts focus on a question well suited to network theory: whom should we listen to in the first place? Russell Tice, a former N.S.A. employee who worked on highly classified Special Access Programs, says that analysts start with a suspect and “spider-web” outward, looking at everyone he contacts, and everyone those people contact, until the list includes thousands of names. Officials familiar with the program have said that before individuals are actually wiretapped, computers sort through flows of metadata ? information about who is contacting whom by phone or e-mail. An unclassified National Science Foundation report says that one tool analysts use to sort through all that data is link analysis.

The use of such network-based analysis may explain the administration’s decision, shortly after 9/11, to circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court grants warrants on a case-by-case basis, authorizing comprehensive surveillance of specific individuals. The N.S.A. program, which enjoys backdoor access to America’s major communications switches, appears to do just the opposite: the surveillance is typically much less intrusive than what a FISA warrant would permit, but it involves vast numbers of people.

[...]

Overall an interesting article about some of the nuts and bolts that go into the program, if you can wade through the obvious bias. Hopefully the next edition of Able Danger doesn’t get shut down because a few lawyers get a little nervous.

A new article today by Keith Phucas detailing the difficulty Lt. Col Shaffer and James Smith are having defending themselves against the retribution coming their way from the DoD:

Lawyers representing Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and James D. Smith complain they cannot adequately defend their clients without access to classified information pertinent to the case. The lawyers for the “Able Danger” plaintiffs filed a civil lawsuit against the Defense Department and three Pentagon attorneys last month.

Shaffer, a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) employee on administrative leave, has alleged that DIA revoked his security clearance and harassed him after he revealed details of “Able Danger,” a former Army data mining effort that claims it identified four future Sept. 11 hijackers in 2000. The reservist was awarded a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan.

Smith, a former data analyst for defense contractor Orion Scientific Systems, worked on the program that linked hundreds of individuals in the United States and abroad to al-Qaida. He claims the controversy surrounding “Able Danger” has cost him defense work.

The law firm, Krieger & Zaid, filed a suit on behalf of Shaffer and Smith on Feb. 27 claiming the “actions” or “inactions” of DIA lawyers George Peirce and Robert Berry Jr., and Army lawyer Tom Taylor, harmed Shaffer and Smith.

He then details a little bit about the Able Danger program:

According to Feb. 15 testimony before a joint House subcommittee, Smith and Erik Kleinsmith, another data analysts who worked on “Able Danger,” a small team compiled terabyte-size data sets.

A significant amount of information was culled from Internet Web sites run by Islamic extremists, according to Smith, who helped create many charts linking suspicious individuals. Shaffer and Smith testified in February that one chart contained a photograph of Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in January or February 2000.

The secret program was shut down in 2000 owing to concerns over civil liberties concerns, according to the Pentagon. Defense guidelines prohibit retaining information on U.S. persons for more than 90 days unless it is determined the data would be used for foreign intelligence purposes.

According to the Army’s AR 381-10 intelligence-gathering guidelines, “U.S. persons” are defined as American citizens or foreign nationals in the country legally, including on temporary visas.

The 9/11 Commission staff executive, Philip Zelikow, received information from Shaffer in October 2003 about the data mining program, and from another “Able Danger” principal, Capt. Scott Phillpott, in July 2004, however, the information was not included in the commission’s final report published later that month.

And then he writes about how the brass ordered the destruction of material gathered from unclassified, open-source data when there was no need to destroy it:

In prior interviews with The Times Herald, Shaffer said information obtained from the Internet is public information, and therefore, should not be subject to government restrictions.

“I fundamentally disagree with the (Pentagon) policy,” he said. “If it’s on the Internet, there should be no expectation of privacy.”

During the clamp-down on “Able Danger” in 2000, Shaffer vigorously protested the data retention restrictions with Pentagon attorneys.

“I didn’t agree with them then, and I don’t agree with them now,” he said.

Prior to the September hearing, the Department of Defense refused to give Shaffer permission to testify publicly, claiming “Able Danger” was classified, according to the lawsuit. The DIA revoked Shaffer’s clearance just days before the hearing to retaliate against him, the suit alleges.

An August 2005 request to examine classified information concerning “Able Danger” was denied by Pentagon attorneys Pierce and Berry, according to the legal complaint. Another similar request for “relevant classified information” was denied Feb. 2, 2006.

By refusing to allow Shaffer’s attorney to see classified data, he was without legal counsel during the closed portion of the Feb. 15 congressional hearing, putting him potentially in legal jeopardy, the suit said.

Congressman Curt Weldon indicated to us during that earlier conference call that we could all help move the members of the International Relations subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations to hold hearings in which Louie Freeh would testify. Contact the below members here:

• Dana Rohrabacher, CA - (202) 225-2415
• Edward R. Royce, CA - (202) 225-4111
• William D. Delahunt, MA - (202) 225-3111
• Jeff Flake, AZ - (202) 225-2635
• Howard L. Berman, CA - (202) 225-4695
• Mark Green, WI - (202) 225-5665
• Betty McCollum, MN - (202) 225-6631
• Mike Pence, IN - (202) 225-3021
• Adam B. Schiff, CA - (202) 225-4176
• Joe Wilson, SC - (202) 225-2452

And ask that a hearing be scheduled so that the mistakes made in the past can be corrected. It’s best to call them if you live near or in their districts.

Much more of the audio from our conference call with Congressman Weldon has been released.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Attending this conference call with Congressman Weldon were:

• AJ Strata from The Strata-Sphere
• Dana from Common Sense Political Thought
• Curt from Flopping Aces
• Mike of Able Danger Blog
• Vi from QT Monster
• Rory from Rory O?Connor
• Pierre from Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill
• Bluto from The Dread Pundit Bluto.

Lots of information packed into this call.

Rory O’Conner also has a the scoop on the Atta picture. It appears that during the DoD Inspector General investigation they uncovered the name of the person who obtained the Atta photograph:

Sources close to the ongoing Department of Defense investigation into the controversial Able Danger data mining intelligence program, which purportedly identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers a year before the worst terror attacks in US history, say the mystery person who actually obtained a much-disputed photograph of Atta for the Able Danger team has now been identified.

Ever since the Pentagon-ordered destruction in 2000 of 2.5 terabytes of data unearthed by Able Danger ? allegedly including a chart featuring Atta?s photograph that revealed terrorist links and patterns when clicked on ? skeptics have long raised doubt about the very existence of the chart and the photograph in question.

It has now been confirmed that a female contract employee of defense contractor Orion Scientific, which provided personnel and proprietary software to the original Able Danger operation, has been identified as a result of investigation by the Pentagon?s own Inspector General.

Identification of the mystery woman lends more credence to claims by Able Danger members, such as team leader Captain Mark Phillpott, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer, and Orion analyst J.D. Smith, among others, that the Able Danger program did in fact identify four 9/11 hijackers well before the attacks.

You will recall that many people poo-poo’d the fact that the photo even existed. Gonna be a bit harder to remain skeptical now that the DoD’s own investigation has uncovered the employee who obtained the picture.

Other’s Blogging:

• Able Danger Blog

Just an FYI, the first 20 minutes of our conference call with Congressman Weldon can be downloaded here. More will be forthcoming.

Much was discussed and even a few nuggets of new information was let out such as the fact that he met with both John Lehman and Tim Roamer from the 9/11 Commission in June 2005, just as he was coming forward with the story. Both of them told the Congressman that they were never briefed about Able Danger from their staffs.

It is apparent as time goes on and more facts are uncovered that the decision to ignore this operation was made at the staff level.

Also Keith Phucas has written an excellent article today that details even more new information:

Just as “Able Danger” was uncovering startling links to al-Qaida in the United States and abroad in 2000, the data mining effort was suddenly ordered to cease operating that April.

For three months, a 24-member project team had culled data from thousands of Internet sites and compiled hundreds of names and locations linked to suspected terrorists. According to testimony from data analysts who worked on the program, Pentagon lawyers threw up red flags after learning that the data mining team was downloading information from Internet Web sites run by Islamic groups.

Their Internet access was sharply curtailed after attorneys raised concerns about the group’s practice of collecting personal information on “U.S. persons,” said Erik Kleinsmith, who as the Army’s chief of intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Center (LIWA), in Ft. Belvoir, Va., supervised the computer analysis.

As a result, the “Able Danger” effort was effectively shut down for six months. For Kleinsmith, those months would be the longest of his professional life.

“The most frustrating thing me for me was I needed to ask for permission in writing to use the Internet,” he said in an interview Friday.

Though the “Able Danger” team never claimed it located any of the Sept. 11 terrorists in the U.S., the group would learn after the attacks that its cutting-edge techniques had identified key al-Qaida members and their U.S. affiliates - including future hijackers Mohamed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, who were associated with a “Brooklyn Cell,” according to Congressman Curt Weldon.

[...]Lawyers overseeing the data mining questioned the legality of downloading and retaining Web sites information and Internet protocol, or “IP,” addresses connected with “U.S. persons,” defined not only as American citizens but also foreigners in the country legally. At that time, this would have applied to anyone in the country on a current U.S. visa - including suspected terrorists.

The Army’s guide for intelligence gathering, AR 381-10, says analysts must make a determination within 90 days about whether they can legally retain data collected on U.S. persons. If not, information must be purged from computer systems. The large amounts of data the project swept up, however, made the 90-day requirement nearly impossible to meet.

There was lively debate at LIWA about an exception in the Army guide that legally allowed “collection” of publicly available information. If so, why couldn’t data be kept indefinitely?

[...]“The more important point is that our team was tracking hundreds of names and creating dozens of charts for (Special Operations Command),” he testified. “And while most of these charts contained information and intelligence that needed further analytical vetting, we were still able to identify a significant worldwide (al-Qaida) footprint with a surprisingly large presence within the United States.”

From April until September 2000, his team tried to restart work, but found it next to impossible. All the analysts could do was watch-troubling hints of terrorist activities online.

“We were getting restriction after restriction,” he said. “We were watching the next threat, but we couldn’t take the battlefield.”

In the summer of 1999, the first test data mining project at LIWA searched for links to high technology transfers to China. The effort was a smashing success as the information dragnet pulled in a mother lode of names, places and hardware descriptions. But once that information made its way to Capitol Hill in November 1999, government officials got nervous, according to Center for Cooperative Research (cooperativeresearch.org).

Next, federal marshals showed up at LIWA with subpoenas issued from Congressman Dan Burton’s office, Kleinsmith said. Government officials wanted copies of the data mining results.

According to the Center for Cooperative Research, the data included former Secretary of Defense William Perry and then Stanford University provost, Condoleezza Rice, among others. Other reports identified then Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen and former Democratic National Committee chairman, Steve Grossman.

“I spent the weekend making 30,000 pages of copies,” Kleinsmith said. He said his group stored two copies in a safe and sent six boxes of material to the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel and a congressional liaison office.

With the data mining capability declared a success, LIWA closed out the test project.

In December 1999, Kleinsmith got a visit from Special Operations Command (SOCOM) officers interested in the program. By February 2000, the effort was in full swing.

Some traditional intelligence officials, however, seemed either skeptical or jealous of LIWA’s capability. At one conference, “Able Danger” analysts identified four major al-Qaida hubs - the Middle East, East Africa, Balkans and the Far East - in about 90 minutes.

“Because we weren’t an intelligence organization, we got a lot of bad press,” he said. “Folks thought we were running fast and loose with the data.”

By April, the “Able Danger” team was told to end its support of SOCOM. During the month’s long work stoppage, SOCOM’s patience ran out, and the military command transferred the work to a Raytheon facility in Garland, Texas, and continued the effort.

One of the million-dollar questions in Washington is who ordered the shut down.

“Nobody will admit sending down the order to do it,” he said. “It came from somewhere up in the Pentagon.”

Many speculated that Richard Shiffrin, the Pentagon’s deputy general counsel at the time, was to blame for the decision. Shaffer’s testimony claims Army lawyer Tom Taylor cut off Army support for the project.

Critics speculate that politics played a role in the death of “Able Danger” because of fallout from the China study. Others, including Shaffer, blame it on shortsighted Pentagon bureaucrats.

In the end, it didn’t much matter. An obedient Army officer, Kleinsmith grudgingly followed his orders and destroyed enough “Able Danger” data to fill a portion of the Library of Congress.

While he had deep misgivings about getting rid all of the group’s impressive work, an army of shadowy figures that emerged equally haunted him from the mountains of data.

“There was stuff that disturbed us, and we were losing sleep,” he said.

Amazing. The staff at LIWA had to ask permission to use the internet. Not like any of that is public knowledge. WTF we’re these lawyers thinking?

Other’s Blogging:

• Able Danger Blog
• QT Monster’s Place

I participated in a conference call with Congressman Curt Weldon this afternoon along with the following bloggers:

Mike Kasper from Able Danger Blog
AJ Strata from The Strata-Sphere
Vadkins from QT Monster’s Place
Pierre from The Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill
Rory O’Connor from Media Is A Plural
Bluto from Dread Pundit Bluto
Dan Pico from Common Sense Political Thought

Many thanks to Mike from Able Danger Blog for ramrodding this call, and of course thanks to the Congressman for spending close to 2 hours with us. Lots was said, and we should have audio up in the next day or so but I will run down a few interesting tidbits. First, he needs any help any can get in keeping this story on the front burner. Contact your local representatives, your Senator, and your Congressman. Contact the press and let them know you feel this is an important story. Anything and everything helps. As you heard in the hearings, Mr. Weldon has a retired intelligence officer who has signed a sworn affadavit alleging that Cambone’s staff told her they are going to kill this story. This is what they are counting on. This is too important to let fade away.

In fact towards the end of the call Mr. Weldon told us that the DIA held a agency wide conference where the main topic was not security of this country, not improving the intelligence gathering of the agency, it was killing the Able Danger story.

AJ Strata:

I live and work in DC and that has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever heard. If people wanted this story to go away they would fix all the problems - none of which are involve classified material or details. All the problems surrounding Able Danger are related to people misusing their positions to hide personally embarrassing information. In the Clinton years it was apparently studies regarding technology leaks to Chine. In the Bush administration it appears to be bad decisions, turf wars and protecting empires. But in all cases, national security is second to the DC CYA.

We got into every aspect of this case, which you will hear in the audio, from the China aspect to the destruction of unclassified data. So stayed tuned.

Meanwhile, I have finished transcribing 53.5 minutes of the hearings. You can read it here, or download the .PDF here.

Apparently Ed Morrissey has an inside source that has told him some interesting information about the recent Able Danger hearings:

An inside source on the Able Danger controversy — one that has provided CQ with reliable background information in the past — gives some interesting background information about the recent hearings on the data-mining program that the 9/11 Commission did its best to ignore. The source writes:

The Able Danger hearing was noteworthy for things that did not happen. One interesting item that everyone seems to have missed is that Steve Cambone did not swear in for his testimony to the subcommittee. (In fact, he refused to swear in, but this was not made an issue by the subcommittee.) Thus, no matter how blatantly erroneous his testimony was, he can’t be charged with perjury as he did not testify under oath.

Also, Zelikow was excoriated in his testimony during the closed session by the Representatives present. He was called a liar to his face.

How interesting. Ed updates his post with the fact that his source mistook Hadley for Cambone but either way it’s quite interesting that he did not want to be sworn in.

On another note, I will be participating in a conference call with Curt Weldon and some other bloggers tomorrow. If anyone has a question for the Congressman let me know. Also, I have transcribed 50 minutes of the hearings here. .PDF file here. More to follow.

I was honored to get an invite from Mike at the Able Danger Blog to participate in a conference call with Mark Zaid, attorney for a few of the Able Danger witnesses. Unfortunately I had to pull a 15 hour day and just got home….argh!

Anyways, AJ Strata has an excellent update about the status of the Able Danger situation from Mark Zaid:

Tuesday?s hearing was the culmination of delayed hearings with Mark covering Tony?s side on whistle blowing, etc. The DIA did try to stop Tony from testifying in uniform. Wednesday?s House hearings were on Able Danger with open and closed sessions. There are some chances for more house hearings, and the DoD Inspector General?s report will be out sometime in May

[...]Mark was not in the classified hearings, and apparently neither were any Congressman. Three people stayed for the closed hearing testimony: McKinney, Saxon and Weldon.

Well isn’t that special. Not one Congressman stayed for the classified portion.

Rory O?Connor asked about Zelikow (9-11 Commission) denying his meeting with Shaffer. Apparently Zelikow?s denial was a miscommunication or confusion by someone else - he has never denied meeting Shaffer.

[...]Pierre asked Mark why there was resistance in Congress and the media. Mark responded no one knows, no one can figure it out, but embarrassment - at least at DIA - is one factor (me: but that w0uld not explain, necessarily, the data purges and cancelled meetings in 2000). Bill Huntington is a name that keeps appearing as someone to watch in DIA.

From The Jawa Report:

Mr. Zaid was quite forthcoming, but unfortunately, more questions were raised than answered, and I got the impression that the hearings are a pro forma exercise that will probably shed little light on the Able Danger program. He described the conduct of the hearings as “very disconcerting” and said that the Representatives involved displayed “very superficial knowledge” of the Able Danger saga.

[...]The biggest question I have is this: why isn’t the mainstream media all over this story? It stinks to high heaven of coverup. NBC can provide nightly coverage of the Katrina aftermath for five months, but a story that has profound implications for national security doesn’t rate thirty seconds?

Captain’s Quarters:

As Zaid points out, the lack of press almost certainly results from the committee members themselves; the only thing that Republicans and Democrats have in common these days is a desire to push Able Danger out of sight. The FBI also appears to have gotten the same disease as the two parties. The FBI, which once acknowledged that several attempts occurred to have meetings between its agents and the Able Danger team now denies that any such contacts occurred.

Decison ‘08:

Zaid said the feeling was that the hearing was a farce that appeared to be intended to placate Weldon. Zaid also said he was puzzled by the behavior of the FBI, who were formerly cooperative about acknowledging and following up on meetings that were attempted with several principals and seem to have gone through a sudden chill.
A Blog For All also has an update.

Overall, judging from the bloggers who participated, it seems that Able Danger is in danger of becoming a has been story. A majority of Congress doesn’t know enough, or even want to know enough about this program and could care less about it. It’s shocking the lack of interest this is getting, and disappointing.

For those who are checking the transcript I am doing on the Able Danger hearings, I have the next few days off and would like to get at least one hour of the hearings done by then. I will then make a searchable .PDF file available for future reference. I am hoping to have the whole 3 some hours done by the end of March. It’s a painstaking process and I have a day job. Patience grasshopper.