Able Danger

[Arrow]

WASHINGTON (AP) - An Army intelligence officer says his unit was blocked in 2000 and 2001 from giving the FBI information about a U.S.-based terrorist cell that included Mohamed Atta, the future leader of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer said the small intelligence unit, called ``Able Danger,'' had identified Atta and three of the other future Sept. 11 hijackers as al-Qaida members by mid-2000. He said military lawyers stopped the unit from sharing the information with the FBI.

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks left the Able Danger claims out of its official report.

In an interview with Fox News Channel and The New York Times, Shaffer said the panel was not given all the information his team had gathered.

``I'm told confidently by the person who did move the material over that the 9/11 commission received two briefcase-size containers of documents,'' Shaffer said in the interview, part of which was aired by Fox News Tuesday night. ``I can tell you for a fact that would not be ... one-20th of the information that Able Danger consisted of during the time we spent.''

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.

Former commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said last week that the military official who made the claim had no documentation to back it up.

Shaffer rejected that remark. ``Leaving a project targeting al-Qaida as a global threat a year before we were attacked by al-Qaida is equivalent to having an investigation of Pearl Harbor and somehow leaving out the Japanese,'' he said.

[Arrow]

Jack Kelly: Able Danger -- now they tell us

The 9/11 commission report, once much lauded, now has an awfully big hole

Sunday, August 14, 2005

The report of the 9/11 commission, once a best seller and hailed by the news media as the definitive word on the subject, must now be moved to the fiction shelves.

The commission concluded, you'll recall, that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon couldn't have been prevented, and that if there was negligence, it was as much the fault of the Bush administration (for moving slowly on the recommendations of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke) as of the Clinton administration.

Able Danger has changed all of that.

Able Danger was a military intelligence unit set up by Special Operations Command in 1999. A year before the 9/11 attacks, Able Danger identified hijack leader Mohamed Atta and the other members of his cell. But Clinton administration officials stopped them -- three times -- from sharing this information with the FBI.

The problem was the order Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick made forbidding intelligence operatives from sharing information with criminal investigators. (Gorelick later served as a 9/11 commission member.)

"They were stopped because the lawyers at that time in 2000 told them Mohamed Atta had a green card" -- he didn't -- "and they could not go after someone with a green card," said Rep. Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican who brought the existence of Able Danger to light.

The military spooks knew only that Atta and his confederates had links to al-Qaida. They hadn't unearthed their mission. But if the FBI had kept tabs on them (a big if, given the nature of the FBI at the time), 9/11 almost certainly could have been prevented.

What may be a bigger scandal is that the staff of the 9/11 commission knew of Able Danger and what it had found, but made no mention of it in its report. This is as if the commission which investigated the attack on Pearl Harbor had written its final report without mentioning the Japanese.

Weldon unveiled Able Danger in a speech on the House floor June 27, but his remarks didn't attract attention until The New York Times reported on them Tuesday.

When the story broke, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, a Democrat from Indiana, co-chairman of the 9/11 commission, at first denied the commission had ever been informed of what Able Danger had found, and took a swipe at Weldon's credibility:

"The Sept. 11th commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of the surveillance of Mohamed Atta or his cell," Hamilton said. "Had we learned of it obviously it would have been a major focus of our investigation."

Hamilton changed his tune after The New York Times reported Thursday, and The Associated Press confirmed, that commission staff had been briefed on Able Danger in October 2003 and again in July 2004.

It was in October 2003 that Clinton National Security Adviser Sandy Berger stole classified documents from the National Archives and destroyed some. Berger allegedly was studying documents in the archives to help prepare Clinton officials to testify before the 9/11 commission. Was he removing references to Able Danger? Someone should ask him before he is sentenced next month.

After having first denied that staff had been briefed on Able Danger, commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said no reference was made to it in the final report because "it was not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts before the attacks," the AP reported.

The only dispute over Atta's whereabouts is whether he was in Prague on April 9, 2001, to meet with Samir al Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer. Czech intelligence insists he was. Able Danger, apparently, had information supporting the Czechs.

The CIA, and the 9/11 commission, say Atta wasn't in Prague April 9, 2001, because his cell phone was used in Florida that day. But there is no evidence of who used the phone. Atta could have lent it to a confederate. (It wouldn't have worked in Europe anyway.)

But acknowledging that possibility would leave open the likelihood that Saddam's regime was involved in, or at least had foreknowledge of, the 9/11 attacks. And that would have been as uncomfortable for Democrats as the revelation that 9/11 could have been prevented if it hadn't been for the Clinton administration's wall of separation.

The 9/11 commission wrote history as it wanted it to be, not as it was. The real history of what happened that terrible September day has yet to be written.

Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio

[Seascamp]

No doubt the 9/11 Commission members are going to cry havoc and unleash the dogs of war on this deal. This has the potential of blowing the wheels right off the 9/11 commission findings and the procedure itself. One level down is the so-called ?Wall? memo that prohibited communication among agencies.

Then one of the 9/11 Commission inquisitors/interrogators was Jamie Gorelick who as a Justice Department Assistant Attorney General, penned and presumably enforced the Wall memo. I recall she made a TV pitch at the time claiming that Bush and Co. had misinterpreted the meaning and intent of the memo; oh my, and therefore had been negligent in coordinating agency data points. This was off-line from the main inquisition so it would seem one of the inquisitors was stacking the deck in her own favor whilst out of court, hmm, hmm, hmm. Such fun, eh. Now I'm really curious as to what Sandy Berger was stuffing in his socks and jockey shorts,

She wasn?t under oath at the time, just planting seeds I reckon, but maybe like the fabled Jack in ?Jack and the bean stock?. Ooops, up-up and away, perhaps.

Scamp

[Arrow]

Fun is what I'm havng hereScamp...

Playing Alice in Wonderland following the madhatters of media trying to sort out the pepper from the flysh*t.

This from the NY Times on line...

August 17, 2005

State Dept. Says It Warned About bin Laden in 1996

By Eric Lichtblau New York Times

WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - State Department analysts warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Osama bin Laden's move to Afghanistan would give him an even more dangerous haven as he sought to expand radical Islam "well beyond the Middle East," but the government chose not to deter the move, newly declassified documents show.

In what would prove a prescient warning, the State Department intelligence analysts said in a top-secret assessment on Mr. bin Laden that summer that "his prolonged stay in Afghanistan - where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate - could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum," in Sudan.

The declassified documents, obtained by the conservative legal advocacy group Judicial Watch as part of a Freedom of Information Act request and provided to The New York Times, shed light on a murky and controversial chapter in Mr. bin Laden's history: his relocation from Sudan to Afghanistan as the Clinton administration was striving to understand the threat he posed and explore ways of confronting him.

Before 1996, Mr. bin Laden was regarded more as a financier of terrorism than a mastermind. But the State Department assessment, which came a year before he publicly urged Muslims to attack the United States, indicated that officials suspected he was taking a more active role, including in the bombings in June 1996 that killed 19 members American soldiers at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Two years after the State Department's warning, with Mr. bin Laden firmly entrenched in Afghanistan and overseeing terrorist training and financing operations, Al Qaeda struck two American embassies in East Africa, leading to failed military attempts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill him in Afghanistan. Three years later, on Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an operation overseen from the base in Afghanistan.

Critics of the Clinton administration have accused it of ignoring the threat posed by Mr. bin Laden in the mid-1990's while he was still in Sudan, and they point to claims by some Sudanese officials that they offered to turn him over to the Americans before ultimately expelling him in 1996 under international pressure. But Clinton administration diplomats have adamantly denied that they received such an offer, and the Sept. 11 commission concluded in one of its staff reports that it had "not found any reliable evidence to support the Sudanese claim."

The newly declassified documents do not directly address the question of whether Sudan ever offered to turn over Mr. bin Laden. But the documents go well beyond previous news and historical accounts in detailing the Clinton administration's active monitoring of Mr. bin Laden's movements and the realization that his move to Afghanistan could make him an even greater national security threat.

Several former senior officials in the Clinton administration did not return phone calls this week seeking comment on the newly declassified documents.

Adam Ereli, a spokesman for the State Department, said the documents should be viewed in the context of what was happening globally in 1996, rather than in the hindsight of events after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In 1996, Mr. Ereli said, "the question was getting him out of Sudan."

"The priority was to deny him safe haven, period, and to disrupt his activities any way you could," he continued. "There was a lot we didn't know, and the priority was to keep him on the run, keep him on guard, and try to maximize the opportunities to nail him."

Before the East Africa bombings in 1998, however, Mr. bin Laden "wasn't recognized then as the threat he is now," Mr. Ereli said. "Yes, he was a bad guy, he was a threat, but he was one of many, and by no means of the prominence that he later came to be."

The State Department assessment, written July 18, 1996, after Mr. bin Laden had been expelled from Sudan and was thought to be relocating to Afghanistan, said Afghanistan would make an "ideal haven" for Mr. bin Laden to run his financial networks and attract support from radicalized Muslims. Moreover, his wealth, his personal plane and many passports "allow him considerable freedom to travel with little fear of being intercepted or tracked," and his public statements suggested an "emboldened" man capable of "increased terrorism," the assessment said.

While a strategy of keeping Mr. bin Laden on the run could "inconvenience" him, the assessment said, "even a bin Laden on the move can retain the capability to support individuals and groups who have the motive and wherewithal to attack U.S. interests almost world-wide."

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, said the declassified material released to his group "says to me that the Clinton administration knew the broad outlines in 1996 of bin Laden's capabilities and his intent, and unfortunately, almost nothing was done about it."

Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, was highly critical of President Clinton during his two terms in office. The group has also been critical of some Bush administration actions after the Sept. 11 attacks, releasing documents in March that detailed government efforts to facilitate flights out of the United States for dozens of well-connected Saudis just days after the attacks.

Michael F. Scheuer, who from 1996 to 1999 led the Central Intelligence Agency unit that tracked Mr. bin Laden, said the State Department documents reflected a keen awareness of the danger posed by Mr. bin Laden's relocation.

"The analytical side of the State Department had it exactly right - that's genius analysis," he said in an interview when told of the declassified documents. But Mr. Scheuer, who wrote a book in 2004 titled "Imperial Hubris," under the pseudonym "Anonymous," that was highly critical of American counterterrorism strategies, said many officials in the C.I.A.'s operational side thought they would have a better chance to kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan than they did in Sudan because the Sudan government protected him.

"The thinking was that he was in Afghanistan, and he was dangerous, but because he was there, we had a better chance to kill him," Mr. Scheuer said. "But at the end of the day, we settled for the worst possibility - he was there and we didn't do anything."

[SuperScout]

As much as I dislike doing it, I'm compelled to say "I told you so!" Right after the 9-11 Commission was set in motion, I penned that the ultimate results would be about as useful as the final product from the Warren Commission. And like most prophets, I had to wait until history bore me out as having some true insight, and lo and behold, here we are, folks.

And little did I realize that my good friend Sir Scamp was sitting in our living room the other evening, as more news of the Able Danger tale was unfolding. I remarked to my bride that some of the documents that ol' Sandy Berger was stuffing in his underwear formed a paper trail back to Slick Willie and his inept bunch of Keystone Kops that were playing on the world's stage. But then I'm not surprised on his noting that Sandy was doing his illegal best to protect the shaky legacy of Hillbillie Heavy.

Sidebar: is the theft and destruction of Top Secret and higher classified information only punishable by a wrist slap? Why not an orange jumpsuit for this pompous weasel?

[Seascamp]

Col., not to diminish your prophecy one iota, you were absolutely spot-on, but I think it was obvious from the get-go that the intended purpose of the 9/11 Commission was not the stated purpose. In all fairness, it is probably true that a minority number of the commission members and their immediate staffs had a high sense of purpose and mission and totally bought into the mission statement. However, having their mission high jacked must have been one hell of a disappointing experience for those who really cared and were seeking some positive good. I suppose it?s an indelible rule of the human experience that when failure is sought, it is only luck and happenstance that causes failure to be avoided. On the other hand when success is sought, only success oriented actions and mindsets light the path and even then, hungry wolves of failure are never more than a hot breath away and ready to pounce and feast.

And so it was with the 9/11 Commission, doomed to failure before the opening gavel smacked the desk by severe conflicts of interest, skullduggery and later by illegal acts and ill-mannered and rude interrogators driving an unadvertised but real mission statement. The only betrayed ones are those who kept the faith and actually thought that the majority of the 9/11 Commission gave a fig about security or what all the circumstances were, or tried to formulate an objective lessons learned mindset. Didn?t happen, and as things press forth we will most likely learn how horribly compromised and pre-loaded that Commission was from it?s very inception.

Scamp

[SuperScout]

Your statement that "... the intended purpose of the 9/11 Commission was not the stated purpose ..." is profound in its clarity, conciseness, and truth. Thank you for that insight! And if there was ever an understatement, it the inherent and obvious conflict of interest that was institutionalized with Jamie Gorlick as a permanent Commission member. Talk about inviting in the coyote to guard the henhouse......... No wonder the Able Danger notes were not included; it will prove to be a stinging indictment of the Clinton apparashnik, and the rank amateurs he surrounded himself with, including interns.

And speaking of amateurs, does anybody recall the qualifications that Sandy Berger possessed to be appointed National Security Adviser? Wassn't he just some fat-cat investment banker who had donated a wad to Slick Willie's reelection campaign, and was being rewarded? Compare and contrast his resume for the job to Condi Rice, or anybody else the either Bush has appointed.

[Seascamp]

Well let?s just say that Sandy Berger probably won?t make the cut list for 007 stardom and most likely Monica was the only one who knew what she was doing but couldn?t keep her mouth shut :ek:

Scamp

[BLUEHAWK]

Monica, who?

[SuperScout]

Your Freudian slip is showing again! Of course, neither Sandy nor Monica could keep things in the correct places, he by stuffing secrets into his pants, she by secreting stuff out of the White House!

If ever there was a crying need for a special prosecutor, it is now to investigate the true depth of the crimes that Berger committed.
It is also mysterious why the NARA didn't have a better inventory system in place to know exactly what they had, what was returned, ergo, what was stolen, destroyed, or passed on to other unauthorized sources.