MERGED --> Stickies On Atta's Face + 'Able Danger' Stopped From Informing FBI

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MrsSpringsteen

MrsSpringsteen

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Stickies On Atta's Face

Oh well, good to know their rights were protected by the US govt :|

Congressman: 9/11 Hijackers Were Monitored

By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer

Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers were identified by defense intelligence officials more than a year before the attacks, but information about possible al-Qaida connections never was sent to law enforcement, Rep. Curt Weldon said Tuesday.

Weldon, R-Pa. and vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, said the hijackers were identified in 1999 by a classified military intelligence unit known as "Able Danger," which determined they could be members of an al-Qaida cell.

Weldon said that in September 2000 the unit recommended that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists," Weldon said in an interview.

However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because they said Atta and the others were in the country legally.

"In fact, I'll tell you how stupid it was, they put stickies on the faces of Mohammed Atta on the chart that the military intelligence unit had completed and they said you can't talk to Atta because he's here" legally, Weldon said.

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

The congressman, considered something of a maverick on Capitol Hill, initially made his allegations 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.

Al Felzenberg, a spokesman for the 9/11 Commission, confirmed that the panel's investigators had been aware of Able Danger but said they "don't recall any mention of Mohammed Atta" or of cell.

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.

The Justice Department inspector general said in a report released in June that the FBI missed at least five opportunities before the Sept. 11 attacks to piece together vital intelligence information about the terrorists. Inspector General Glenn Fine called it "a significant failure" that hindered the FBI's chances of preventing the attacks.
 
Sounds like huge missteps and a lot of dropping the ball.

Unfortunately many will use this to justify such things as the Patriot Act.
 
I do not want to get into a discussion about profiling. According to the articles I have read, it has nothing to do with PROFILING, but with restrictions that were placed on the military investigating within the US Citizens inside the US. However, the probelem is they were not citizens.

If they withheld information, as the reports I am reading are indicating, the 9/11 comission is null and void in my opinion.

-----------------------------------------------------

[Q]"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."[/Q]

Lee Hamilton


http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,165268,00.html


[Q]"I think this is a big deal," said John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the commission who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration. "The issue is whether there was in fact surveillance before 9/11 of Atta and, if so, why weren't we told about it? Who made the decision not to brief the commission's staff or the commissioners?"

[/Q]

[Q]"If this is true, somebody should be looking into it," said Thomas H. Kean, the commission chairman and a former Republican governor of New Jersey[/Q]

[Q]Spokesmen for the commission members said this week that although the staff was informed by the Pentagon in late 2003 about the existence of a so-called data-mining operation called Able Danger, the panel was never told that it had identified Mr. Atta and the others as threats.[/Q]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/10/politics/10intel.html
 
MrsSpringsteen said:


who died and made you Mark Bellhorn? :D
Click to expand...

Graffanino did!!!!

mwwwaaaahhhhhh:wink:

So when Johnny is a Yankee next year, will you cry>?
 
Dreadsox said:

So when Johnny is a Yankee next year, will you cry>?
Click to expand...

he would never hurt me like that

anyway, back to something that's actually more important than Johnny :wink:

I was actually Googling Bellhorn yesterday and I found that saying, it's my new favorite
 
reply

The past is to learn from and not dwell on.......what has happened is.....the now is the future and that is what is important.

I'm sure there will still be theories and investigations pre 9/11 for time to come.
Signs and omens are that......few know how to interpret it.



:|
 
'Able Danger' Intel Could Rewrite 9/11 History
Thursday, August 11, 2005

Rep. Curt Weldon (search), R-Pa., a champion of integrated intelligence-sharing among U.S. agencies, wrote to the former chairman and vice-chairman of the Sept. 11 commission late Wednesday, telling them that their staff had received two briefings on the military intelligence unit — once in October 2003 and again in July 2004.

Weldon said he was upset by suggestions earlier Wednesday by 9/11 panel members that it had been not been given critical information on Able Danger's capabilities and findings.

"The impetus for this letter is my extreme disappointment in the recent, and false, claim of the 9/11 commission staff that the commission was never given access to any information on Able Danger," Weldon wrote to former Chairman Gov. Thomas Kean (search) and Vice-Chairman Rep. Lee Hamilton (search). "The 9/11 commission staff received not one but two briefings on Able Danger from former team members, yet did not pursue the matter.

"The commission's refusal to investigate Able Danger after being notified of its existence, and its recent efforts to feign ignorance of the project while blaming others for supposedly withholding information on it, brings shame on the commissioners, and is evocative of the worst tendencies in the federal government that the commission worked to expose," Weldon added.

On Wednesday, a source familiar with the Sept. 11 commission — formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (search) — told FOX News that aides who still had security clearances had gone back to the National Archives outside Washington, D.C., to review notes on Atta and any information the U.S. government had on him and his terror cell before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The source acknowledged that the aides were looking for a memo about a briefing given to four staff members by defense intelligence officials during an overseas trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in the fall of 2003.

Staffers apparently did not recall being told of the Able Danger information at that meeting and wanted to double-check their records.

Former commission spokesman Al Felzenberg told The New York Times in Thursday editions that Atta was mentioned to panel investigators during at least one meeting with a military officer. That briefing came in July 2004, less than two weeks before the commission's final report was issued to the public.

Felzenberg said the information about Atta was considered suspect because it didn't jibe with many other findings. For example, the intelligence officer said Atta was in the United States in late 1999, but travel records confirmed that he did not enter the country until late 2000.

"He wasn't brushed off," Felzenberg told The Times about the military officer's briefing. "I'm not aware of anybody being brushed off. The information that he provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing."

But Weldon said that argument was not good enough.

"The 9/11 commission took a very high-profile role in critiquing intelligence agencies that refused to listen to outside information. The commissioners very publicly expressed their disapproval of agencies and departments that would not entertain ideas that did not originate in-house," Weldon wrote in his letter Wednesday night.

"Therefore it is no small irony," Weldon pointed out, "that the commission would in the end prove to be guilty of the very same offense when information of potentially critical importance was brought to its attention."

On Thursday, Weldon told FOX News that the military official, who was under cover when he was in Afghanistan for the October 2003 briefing, is certain he told the staffers about Atta at that time.

The military intelligence officer who attended that meeting with staffers "kept notes of that meeting and will testify under oath that he not only told" the staffers about Able Danger's mission, but about Atta.

Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, told FOX News on Wednesday that if Atta's name had been mentioned in the October 2003 briefing, it would have jumped out at staffers.

He said that the commission did not include the claims by Able Danger in the definitive report of the events leading up to Sept. 11 because it had no "information that the United States government had under surveillance or had any knowledge of Mohamed Atta prior to the attacks.

"It could be a very crucial incident in terms of the lead-up to 9/11. It could reveal flaws in the intelligence sharing or the lack of intelligence that we have not yet focused on," Hamilton said of the military's tracking of Atta and its inability to get domestic intelligence agencies to follow up.

Hamilton told FOX News that the commission team would get to the bottom of the confusion over what the United States knew about Atta and whether it played into the commission's investigation.

"I think the 9/11 commission's obligation at this point is to review our records very, very carefully and make very soon — we hope within the next few days — a complete statement about what happened during our investigation," Hamilton said.

Weldon said that he personally knows five members of the commission and is not attacking the integrity of any of them. He said he discussed the matter with two commissioners who told him they were never briefed about Able Danger.

"I have to ask why. I would hope there was not a deliberate attempt by someone on the 9/11 commission staff to keep this information" from the commissioners, Weldon said, adding "I find no fault right now with the commissioners."

A commission spokesman told FOX News that the panel expected to issue a statement before the end of the week.

Among the most critical facts to be determined, if the information about Atta did exist in 2000, would be who then blocked the intelligence from going to the FBI, which could have tracked down the terror cell.

"Team members believed that the Atta cell in Brooklyn should be subject to closer scrutiny, but somewhere along the food chain of administration bureaucrats and lawyers, a decision was made in late 2000 against passing the information to the FBI," Weldon wrote.

"Fear of tarnishing the commission's legacy cannot be allowed to override the truth. The American people are counting on you not to 'go native' by succumbing to the very temptations your commission was assembled to indict," he added.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/p...&ex=1124942400&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print

August 17, 2005
Officer Says Military Blocked Sharing of Files on Terrorists
By PHILIP SHENON

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - A military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly.

The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the bureau.

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview on Monday night that the small, highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share its information.

But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 attacks were still being planned.

"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," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.

He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations Command of the Defense Department had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.

"It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.

The Defense Department did not dispute the account from Colonel Shaffer, a 42-year-old native of Kansas City, Mo., who is the first military officer associated with the program to acknowledge his role publicly.

At the same time, the department said in a statement that it was "working to gain more clarity on this issue" and that "it's too early to comment on findings related to the program identified as Able Danger." The F.B.I. referred calls about Colonel Shaffer to the Pentagon.

The account from Colonel Shaffer, a reservist who is also working part time for the Pentagon, corroborates much of the information that the Sept. 11 commission has acknowledged it received about Able Danger last July from a Navy captain who was also involved with the program but whose name has not been made public. In a statement issued last week, the leaders of the commission said the panel had concluded that the intelligence program "did not turn out to be historically significant."

The statement said that while the commission did learn about Able Danger in 2003 and immediately requested Pentagon files about it, none of the documents turned over by the Defense Department referred to Mr. Atta or any of the other hijackers.

Colonel Shaffer said that his role in Able Danger was as liaison with the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, and that he was not an intelligence analyst. The interview with Colonel Shaffer on Monday was arranged for The New York Times and Fox News by Representative Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a champion of data-mining programs like Able Danger.

Colonel Shaffer's lawyer, Mark Zaid, said in an interview that he was concerned that Colonel Shaffer was facing retaliation from the Defense Department, first for having talked to the Sept. 11 commission staff in October 2003 and now for talking with news organizations.

Mr. Zaid said that Colonel Shaffer's security clearance was suspended last year because of what the lawyer said were a series of "petty allegations" involving $67 in personal charges on a military cellphone. He said that despite the disciplinary action, Colonel Shaffer had been promoted this year from major.

Colonel Shaffer said he had decided to allow his name to be used in part because of his frustration with the statement issued last week by the commission leaders, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton.

The commission said in its final report last year that American intelligence agencies had not identified Mr. Atta as a terrorist before Sept. 11, 2001, when he flew an American Airlines jet into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York.

A commission spokesman did not return repeated phone calls on Tuesday for comment. A Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor, said in an interview on Tuesday that while he could not judge the credibility of the information from Colonel Shaffer and others, the Pentagon needed to "provide a clear and comprehensive explanation regarding what information it had in its possession regarding Mr. Atta."

"And if these assertions are credible," Mr. Ben-Veniste continued, "the Pentagon would need to explain why it was that the 9/11 commissioners were not provided this information despite requests for all information regarding Able Danger."

Colonel Shaffer said he had provided information about Able Danger and its identification of Mr. Atta in a private meeting in October 2003 with members of the Sept. 11 commission staff when they visited Afghanistan, where he was then serving. Commission members have disputed that, saying that they do not recall hearing Mr. Atta's name during the briefing and that the name did not appear in documents about Able Danger that were later turned over by the Pentagon.

"I would implore the 9/11 commission to support a follow-on investigation to ascertain what the real truth is," Colonel Shaffer said in the interview this week. "I do believe the 9/11 commission should have done that job: figuring out what went wrong with Able Danger."

"This was a good news story because, before 9/11, you had an element of the military - our unit - which was actually out looking for Al Qaeda," he continued. "I can't believe the 9/11 commission would somehow believe that the historical value was not relevant."

Colonel Shaffer said that because he was not an intelligence analyst, he was not involved in the details of the procedures used in Able Danger to glean information from terrorist databases, nor was he aware of which databases had supplied the information that might have led to the name of Mr. Atta or other terrorists so long before the Sept. 11 attacks.

But he said he did know that Able Danger had made use of publicly available information from government immigration agencies, from Internet sites and from paid search engines like LexisNexis.
 
it's all gw's fault, and monica helped too:angry:

im sure we can throw in tipper gore and jesse helms too.:up:

db9
 
:hmm: And all this information got together with out the stasi like information gathering.
 
Um....this is a very important fact in the NY Times story. Shame on Rep. Weldon for trying to make this into some political football to justify the Patriot Act if that's what he's trying to do or shame on the Pentagon if they were told to not release this information to the commission

The statement said that while the commission did learn about Able Danger in 2003 and immediately requested Pentagon files about it, none of the documents turned over by the Defense Department referred to Mr. Atta or any of the other hijackers.
 
'Able Danger' Stopped From Informing FBI

'Able Danger' Stopped From Informing FBI
Aug 17 3:13 PM US/Eastern


By KIMBERLY HEFLING
Associated Press Writer


WASHINGTON


An Army intelligence officer said Wednesday he told staff members from the Sept. 11 commission that a secret military unit had identified two of the three cells involved in the 2001 terrorist strikes more than a year before the attacks.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who said he was associated with the "Able Danger" unit, said that during a 2003 meeting in Afghanistan, he mentioned that the unit had identified Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta along with three other hijackers as terrorist suspects.

Three months later, in January 2004, Shaffer said he was back in the United States and offered to follow up with the commission, but his offer was declined.

"I just walked away shocked that they would kind of change their mind, but I figured someone with equal or better knowledge ... probably came and talked to them, so they must've taken care of it," Shaffer said.

Shaffer said he was told the commission obtained only two briefcase- size loads of documents from at least 15-plus boxes of information on Able Danger.

Lt. Col. Chris Conway, a Pentagon spokesman, said Wednesday an investigation into Able Danger was under way.

The department "has been working to gain more clarity on this issue. Accordingly, we continue to interview a number of individuals associated with Able Danger," Conway said.

Conway said it was too soon to comment on findings related to the program.

Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission's follow-up project, said the commission is awaiting the results of the Pentagon's investigation.

A statement last Friday by former commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said the commission did not obtain enough information on the operation to consider it historically significant.

Shaffer said Able Danger identified Atta and three other Sept. 11 hijackers in 2000, but that military lawyers stopped the unit from sharing the information with the FBI out of concerns about the legality of gathering and sharing information on people in the U.S.

"The lawyers' view was to leave them alone, they had the same basic rights as a U.S. citizen, a U.S. person and therefore the data was kind of left alone," Shaffer said.

Shaffer said he and a Navy officer disagreed with that and tried to set up meetings with the FBI, but each time the idea was rejected by lawyers from the Special Operations command.

"There was a feeling ... if we give this information to the FBI and something goes wrong, we're going to get blamed for whatever goes wrong," Shaffer said.

The statement by Kean and Hamilton said only Atta was mentioned to them as being identified by Able Danger. They were told by a Navy officer about Atta 10 days before the commission released its report in July 2004, but the officer did not have documentation to back it up, the statement said.

The statement also said the Navy officer's dates related to the pre- Sept. 11 whereabouts of Atta did not fit with what they knew.

Shaffer said it did not surprise him the dates would be different.

Able Danger "wasn't about dates and locations. It was about associations and linkages. That's what the focus was," Shaffer said.

Shaffer said Able Danger identified the terrorists using data mining techniques. His relationship to Able Danger was first reported Tuesday night by The New York Times and Fox News Channel.

Shaffer's lawyer, Mark Zaid, said Wednesday that Shaffer does not have documentation related to Able Danger because his security clearance was suspended in March 2004 because of "petty and frivolous" reasons. They include a dispute over mileage reimbursement and a charges for personal calls on a work cell phone, Zaid said.

Shaffer, an Army reservist, has been on paid administrative leave for the past 16 months, Zaid said. He was an active Army major during his involvement with Able Danger, Zaid said.

Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, has said the Sept. 11 commission did not adequately investigate the claim that four of the hijackers had been identified more than a year before the attacks.
 
MrsSpringsteen said:


:( well I gotta do something to get people to read it if it's not about sex or breasts
Click to expand...

Hmmmm....:eyebrow:

I hate one issue people....

There are other body parts that catch my eyes....:ohmy:
 
I guess no one wants to continue discussing :wink:

slate.com :huh:

The "Two Atta" Theory
It might explain the Able Danger scandal.
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Friday, Aug. 19, 2005

"Mohammed Atta and Date Bef 09/11/01": Tom Maguire had a good idea--since Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer claims that the secret Able Danger program had mined public databases to turn up Mohammed Atta's name prior to 9/11, why not look at some public databases, like NEXIS, and see whether Atta turns up? If you send NEXIS the following request

mohammed atta and date bef 09/11/01

it will turn up a 1/28/91 Atlanta Constitution story with the following initiallly astonishing paragraph:

There was a report on "60 Minutes" in which an expert said that Abu Nidal cells were in the United States. Is that true?

Yes, In New York, Dearborn a Michigan city with a large Arab population and Los Angeles. But that doesn't mean they're terrorists. They're support groups, and for the FBI to uncover enough about them and to go through the business of trying to deport them is a long and difficult matter that is not at all easy to accomplish. In 1987, the FBI arrested an Abu Nidal organization member Mohammed Atta in New York on an Israeli warrant charging him with participating in an attack on a bus carrying civilians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 1986. They're around.

It turns out that this is not the same Mohammed Atta who flew a plane into the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's a Mohammed Atta who was (as the story says) an Abu Nidal terrorist extradited to Israel to face charges of fire bombing and machine-gunning a bus.

But the more you think about it, the more Maguire's theory--that the existence of this other Atta explains the Able Danger scandal--makes sense. Specifically, Maguire speculates that the "Atta" fingered by Able Danger was really the first, "Abu Nidal" Atta, and not the second, 9/11 "Al Qaeda" Atta. It was the first Atta's name that was on the list that Lt. Col. Shaffer remembers being shown.

Indeed, Maguires "Two Atta" scenario explains at least three otherwise puzzling aspects of the Able Danger Story:

1) Q. How did the data mining program name an obscure Hamburg grad student so efficiently? A: It didn't. It named a known terrorist--it might even have started with his name. As Maguire argues:

If you were data mining for new terrorists, mightn't you start with him and see who his friends and connections were? As Shaffer explained in an interview with Michael Savage, its all about linkages.

2) Q. What database could possibly have turned up the 9/11 Atta, whose only apparent contact witht he U.S. was applying for a visa? A: It didn't turn up that Atta. It turned up another Atta who had a longer paper trail and was actually arrested.

3) Q: Why was the Defense department so skittish about passing on Atta's name. A. That's understandable if, as Maguire asserts, the first, "Abu Nidal" Atta was a naturalized U.S. citizen. Pentagon spying on U.S. citizens was of questionable legality.

Of course, just because the Atta on the list was the "wrong" Atta doesn't mean that, if the Able Danger info had been shared with the FBI, we wouldn't have accidentally stopped or caught the "right" Atta before 9/11. ...And it still would have been nice if the 9/11 Commission had bothered to clear all this up! ... P.S.: It's also possible, of course, that Able Danger's massive computer program turned up info on both Attas because it assumed, wrongly, that they were the same person
 
You do know that one of the theories is that there were multiple Oswalds....As in Lee Harvey......
 
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