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.