Reply #4: So once IDed that were arrested *before* the attack? [View All]

[KansDem]

That certainly is a switch since 9/11 when we IDed them and did nothing until after the attacks.

Mohamed Atta and three other alleged ringleaders of the 9/11 hijacking team were under surveillance by an elite US military intelligence program in the summer of 2000, a New York Times story of Aug. 9, 2005 revealed.

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) broke the story to the Times after officers with knowledge of the Able Danger program contacted him. Two officers have since gone on record to say they once had Mohamed Atta in their sights. They claim a recommendation to round up Atta and what they termed his "Brooklyn Cell" (!) was rejected in the fall of 2000 by commanders at MacDill Air Force Base, supposedly on the advice of Defense Department lawyers. As of Sept. 2, the Pentagon says three additional people with knowledge of Able Danger have corroborated the story.

This dossier by Nicholas Levis rounds up Able Danger news reports to date, as well as analyses by various authors. The views expressed herein are the writers' own and do not necessarily reflect those of 911Truth.org.

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20050830191215604


A key section of the congressional report tells the puzzling story of a pair of Saudi hijackers who settled in San Diego almost two years before the attacks. Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were two of the terrorists aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. In the report’s judgment, their story represents “perhaps the intelligence community’s best chance to unravel the September 11 plot.”

The tale begins in late 1999, when counterterrorism agents working round-the-clock in preparation for the Millennium celebrations got wind that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, who had been connected to the 1998 East Africa bombings, were planning a trip to Malaysia. According to a CIA officer who testified to the committee, “a kind of tuning fork buzzed” when he and his colleagues heard the news. The CIA arranged for Malaysian intelligence to monitor the pair once they landed in Kuala Lumpur on January 5, 2000. Their behavior, CIA Director George Tenet testified, “was consistent with clandestine activity.”

In Kuala Lumpur, the two men attended a high-level al-Qaeda meeting at the home of Yazid Sufaat, a Malaysian chemist with ties to the bin Laden network. Photographs of the gathering were taken secretly by Malaysian intelligence and transmitted back to CIA headquarters. By that time, the CIA had obtained a copy of al-Mihdhar’s Saudi passport, giving the agency his full name, passport number, birth date and other details. The passport showed that al-Mihdhar had a visa, issued at the U.S. consulate in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, giving him the right to enter the United States at any time until the visa expired in April 2000.

Yet no action was taken to warn U.S. customs officials. According to Tenet, “We had at that point the level of detail needed to watchlist —that is, to nominate him to State Department for refusal of entry into the US or to deny him another visa. Our officers remained focused on the surveillance operation and did not do so.”

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http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0904-03.htm