Pentagon: Able Danger couldn't stop 9/11

[Tab]

WASHINGTON - 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.

The report was ordered following the assertion last year that the unit had identified four of the 19 hijackers in 2000. That claim was made by a former intelligence officer who worked on Able Danger, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and by Rep. Curt Weldon (news, bio, voting record), vice chairman of the House Armed Services and
Homeland Security committees.

Weldon, R-Pa., has said the unit used data-mining to link Atta and three other hijackers to al-Qaida more than a year before the attacks.

The 71-page report, blacked out in parts, also rejected Weldon's claim that the unit wanted information given to the
FBI but that Pentagon lawyers would not allow it.

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.

Last year, the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks dispensed with the issue by calling it "not historically significant.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060921/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/sept11_hijackers

[leveymg]

1. I guess everyone was just seeing things in that unit. Optical illusion.

Ball lightning. Swamp gas. The Planet Venus.

Geeze.:eyes:

[The_Casual_Observer]

2. Those two rw hack politicians that were peddling this thing in order

to make Clinton look bad should be back charged for all the money that was wasted doing this investigation.

[leveymg]

3. If you read the report. pp 47-48, you'll see that AD didn't end. It was

rolled into other programs. The only thing that was terminated were the people who had put the nodes together, and started making a fuss about sharing it with other agencies. Their positions were eliminated along with a bunch of worthless internet site searches.

The valuable parts of the program -- the results of searches of the DoDs own classified databases -- where one would find real intelligence on al-Qaeda cells inside the US -- got shipped over to Raytheon and other units within SOCOM and DIA.

The IG report says that AD didn't specifically identify Mohamed Atta. What it doesn't state, however, is what AD learned about the Flt. 77 hijackers, whose identities were well known by CIA and NSA, who would have been in DoD intel database. The IG report just seems to ignore them, and they are conspicuous by omission. At page 43, nonetheless, the report does acknowledge that in January 2000 the AD matrix contained 53 terrorists known to be at large, but dismisses this as insignificant because their identities were already known, and some had already been arrested by 9/11. Known by whom? Which were arrested and what happened to the others? Hint, hint.

Not a lie, exactly, but note exactly the whole truth, either.

[paulthompson]

5. Where'd you see the full report already?

?

[leveymg]

6. It's posted at the DoD IG site

Hi, Paul -

Had to do some poking around, but, it's a PDF link off the Pressroom page here: http://www.dodig.osd.mil/pressroom.htm

I would consider amending the DA section of the timeline. The impression given there is that AD was an open source data-mining program. According to the IG report and DoD statements, it actually combined classified DoD files with analysis of open-sources. There are some serious implications to that -- NSA was tracking al-Midhar and al-Hazmi as they travelled to Kuala Lumpur -- that should have been in the DoD database, and from there they went on to Bangkok and LA, where they went through INS inspection on 1/15/00. Other reports tell us the INS database was also available to AD. Recall, we learned from the FBI IG report that CIA CTC learned of their admission on 1/15/00 (but ordered the FBI liason to withhold a notification cable to FBI HQ and the National Secuity unit in NY)

When CENTCOM wrapped up the project, they threw out almost all of the open-source data as useless clutter -- no surprise -- but, the report confirms that 3 team members do claim to have identified Atta as part of the "Brooklyn Cell", although others don't recall it that way (again, no surprise), and that there were several aborted attempts documented by team members to meet with the FBI, again others, particularly the commanding officers, don't recall it that way. The useful data and technology was then transferred to other DoD programs and to Raytheon, the private contractor that took over from Orion.

Bottom line: there doesn't seem to be much really new here, but I just did a quick skim yesterday. Let me know if you find anything interesting.

Cheers.

- Mark

[fshrink]

4. What would have stopped it is

some intelligent handling of the negotiations with the Taliban between 2000 and 2001. The assholes who did that, Cheney first because the Idiot is incapable of negotiating anything, are directly responsible. The discussion about so-called "intelligence" amounts to discussing if it would be possible to know which bee is going to sting once you kicked the nest. Who fucking cares!

[goodboy]

7. they didn't want to stop it...so I guess in kind of a warped way, they're

telling the truth.

[sendero]

8. "Inconsistent statements"..

... were a good enough reason to go to war with Iraq (Chalabi), but they weren't enough to keep an eye on a suspected terrorist.

See how that works?

[Demeter]

9. Because It Couldn't Stop Bush and Cheney and Rummy

The problem is within, folks, and until the body politic (and its mind) are sound, it's not going to matter what's going on outside.

[LeftHander]

10. Go investigate yourself....

I mean come on...if there were purposeful failures leading up to 911 to enable LIHOP...then the Pentagon is not the investigative body to trust.