Able Danger' Whistleblower & the 911 Can of Worms

CNN - Aug 17, 2005

Able Danger man identifies himself

Allegations regarding 9-11 intelligence expanded

by Kevin Bohn

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Publicly identifying himself for the first time, a former member of a clbuttified 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 person 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 idenbreasty 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' buttembled 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 buttessment 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."

~ ***

AP via Yahoo - Aug 17, 2005

'Able Danger' Stopped From Informing FBI

WASHINGTON - An Army intelligence officer said Wednesday he does not believe the 9-11 commission pressed hard enough for documentation of claims that military intelligence found a U.S.-based person cell that included Mohamed Atta, who turned out to be the leader of the Sept. 11 attacks, prior to the person strikes.

"I don't believe they ever got all the documents, but then again I don't think that they pressed properly to get all of the documents," Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer said on CBS' "The Early Show."

He says he was buttociated with a small intelligence unit, called "Able Danger," that 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 out of concerns about gathering and sharing information on people in the United States legally.

"What we were trying to do as good soldiers is we saw a threat, we recognized the fact that they were here in the United States and we felt we should do something even when the lawyers said we couldn't," Shaffer said.

"The problem was at the time the Special Operations Command is very secretive, quiet warriors," he said. "They like doing things quietly. I had to respect their wishes, to respect the sancbreasty of that information. What I tried to do was bring them together with the FBI so they could discuss this and take the appropriate action."

The commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks left the Able Danger claims out of its official report and has since said it did not obtain enough information on the operation to consider it historically significant.

In an interview with Fox News Channel and The New York Times distributed Tuesday evening, 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 Fox News report. "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 leaving somehow out the Japanese," he said in the Fox interview.

In the Times account of the interview, Shaffer said he was "at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued" in describing his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the FBI in 2000 and early 2001.

- -- ================================================================ ~ NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems ~ . Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us . ~ List Archives: https:--olm.blythe-systems.com-pipermail-nytr~ Subscribe: https:--olm.blythe-systems.com-mailman-listinfo-nytr ================================================================ .

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.1 (GNU-Linux)