With the latest news on "Able Danger" isn't it safe to say that the 9/11 Commission..

[Guest $iLk]

... was a whitewash?

In early 2000 a DoD task force code-named "Able Danger" identified 4 of the 19 September 11, 2001 hijackers (including Mohammed Atta) as members of an al Qaeda cell named "Brooklyn".

Under guidelines set about by 9/11 Commission member Gorelick - post-it notes were placed over their faces and all action was refused to be taken against them because they had valid US Visas.

I don't know which of the "Enemy Within" in our government was responsible - but I believe that we deserve answers. Google "Able Danger" for more available information.

[Guest $iLk]

It was extensively reported last week that a military intelligence group called 'Able Danger' was tracking at least two of the 9/11 hijackers, including ringleader Mohammed Atta, at least a year before the attacks. Furthermore, it was said that the Able Danger folks tried to warn the FBI, but were prevented from doing so by 'The Wall' set up between federal agencies by the Clinton Justice Department. These are explosive allegations that threaten to rewrite the history of 9/11.

The 9/11 Commission is getting back together to investigate. This looks like yet another case of the Clinton administration turning a blind eye to terrorism and of the 9/11 Commission making a mockery of their mission. Perhaps they were covering for former Clinton Deputy Attorney General and fellow Commissioner Jamie Gorelick. Perhaps they just dropped the ball. At a minimum, this looked like a serious flaw in their report.

Or was it?

Now we're starting to get a bit from the other side of things, courtesy of our good buddy John Podhoretz and National Review. As everyone has come to know, the original source for all of this is Republican Pennsylvania Congressman Curt Weldon. Turns out he's about to release a book, which is where all of this Able Danger business comes in. Time magazine has a report in this week's issue that calls the whole thing into question, and they even interview Weldon. It also turns out the much-vaunted chart that showed Mohammed Atta's name on it in 1999...well...may not have had Atta's name on it at all. Weldon says he can't be sure. Oops. That's not what he told anybody and everybody who would listen last week.

It gets worse...the 9/11 Commission says they read every single Able Danger document, and none of them mentioned the hijackers. Looks like somebody has some explaining to do.

[Guest $iLk]

And more:

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.

Source: Liberally Biased New York Times

[Guest $iLk]

quote:

---

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Publicly identifying himself for the first time, a former member of a classified Pentagon intelligence unit elaborated on what he claims were attempts he made to share information about potential al Qaeda operatives in the United States before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer claims he alerted the FBI in September 2000 about the information uncovered by the secret military unit "Able Danger," but he says three meetings he set up with bureau officials were allegedly blocked by military lawyers, according to Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., who has set up interviews for Shaffer.

Last week, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairman and vice-chairman of the now-defunct 9/11 Commission, said in a statement that Able Danger "did not turn out to be historically significant, set against the larger context of U.S. policy and intelligence efforts that involved (Osama) bin Laden and al Qaeda."

Shaffer has refused to reveal his identity up until now. Weldon has discussed in the past week the allegations of the blocked meetings.

Shaffer and Weldon allege there was information developed in September 2000 by the Able Danger unit identifying Mohamed Atta as a potential al Qaeda operative in the United States.

They have said the information was developed from "open source" public material, but have not provided any details.

Weldon told CNN on Tuesday Shaffer set up the meetings with FBI officials at the time, but they were all canceled because lawyers for the Special Forces unit -- of which Able Danger was a member -- were allegedly concerned military authorities could not legally share information with domestic law enforcement about potential terror suspects in the United States.

"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," Shaffer told The New York Times in Wednesday's editions.

Since the allegations gained renewed media interest last week, military officials have said they were looking into Shaffer's allegations and refused to comment further.

Shaffer also met with the 9/11 Commission when it was investigating the government failures that preceded the terror attacks.

After criticism from Weldon and others saying the panel erred in not including these allegations in its final report, Kean and Hamilton issued the statement last week.

Shaffer has identified himself now because "he wants to set the record straight," Weldon told CNN.

In their joint written statement, Kean and Hamilton said the 9/11 Commission first became aware of Able Danger on Oct. 21, 2003, when then-executive director Philip Zelikow and two staffers met at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with three individuals doing intelligence work for the Defense Department.

One of the intelligence officers urged the commission to look into Able Danger and complained that Congress had "ended a human intelligence network he considered valuable."

Kean and Hamilton said the official memorandum from that meeting does not mention that Atta's name or any of the other hijackers' names were brought up during the conversation.

According to The New York Times, Shaffer claims he participated in the October 2003 meeting.

Separately, Kean and Hamilton said a senior 9/11 Commission staffer met with a "U.S. Navy officer employed at DOD who was seeking to be interviewed by commission staff in connection with a data mining project on which he had worked."

But they said the officer's "account was not sufficiently reliable" to include in the final report.

That meeting, they said, took place on July 12, 2004, when the commission's final report was already well into the final stages -- the final report was released on July 22.

The meeting included the senior commission staff member, another staffer, the Navy officer and another Defense Department representative.

According to the official record of the meeting, the officer "recalled seeing the name and photo of Mohammed Atta on an 'analyst notebook chart' assembled by another officer," Kean and Hamilton said.

"The officer being interviewed said he saw this material only briefly, that the relevant material dated from February through April 2000, and that it showed Mohammed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn," the joint statement said.

"The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document because DOD lawyers were concerned about the propriety of DOD intelligence efforts that might be focused inside the United States."

But the officer "could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification. Nor could the interviewee recall, when questioned, any details about how he thought a link to Atta could have been made by this DOD program in 2000 or any time before 9/11," the statement said.

Kean and Hamilton said Pentagon "documents had mentioned nothing about Atta, nor had anyone come forward between September 2001 and July 2004 with any similar information."

"Weighing this with the information about Atta's actual activities, the negligible information available about Atta to other U.S. government agencies and the German government before 9/11, and the interviewer's assessment of the interviewee's knowledge and credibility, the Commission staff concluded that the officer's account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation."

The commission did seek information about the covert operation, eventually resulting in the meeting with the Navy officer in July 2004, they said.

Although the final report did not mention Able Danger by name, the information the commission received about it "contributed to the commission's depiction of intelligence efforts against al Qaeda before 9/11."

---

Source: Liberally biased CNN (Commie News Network LOL)

[Guest]

The 911 commission was told about able danger, but because it would show poorly on one of the panels members it was ignored.

That panel member should be arrested for treason, if not just ouright idiocy, and be gone for a good long time, and the Clintons knew it, so they tossed her on the commission in order to protect her. You want to hide something, put it right out in the open where everyone can see it.

[John Prezioso]

This makes me so mad, I don't think I can discuss it without using profanity, so I'll leave it to others. GRRRRR!!!!