Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00
guess this article is the genesis of the new whipping post. i hope everything clears itself up.
here is the key paragraph in this article:
The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger
report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn"
cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta
arrived in the United States. The former intelligence
official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow
and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission
staff about Able Danger when they visited the
Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.
- - - - - - -
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/politics/09intel.html
?ei=5094&en=8cdd39c879100274&hp=&ex=1123646400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
The New York Times
August 9, 2005
Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 - More than a year before the Sept. 11
attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence
unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future
hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating
in the United States, according to a former defense
intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.
In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able
Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of
the four men and recommended to the military's Special
Operations Command that the information be shared with the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman,
Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former
intelligence official said Monday.
The recommendation was rejected and the information was not
shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr.
Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid
entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and
green-card holders may not be singled out in
intelligence-collection operations by the military or
intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to
visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence
official said it might have reinforced a sense of
discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing
intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.
A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al
Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including
Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the
program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included
stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said
the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.
The report produced by the commission last year does not
mention the episode.
Mr. Weldon first spoke publicly about the episode in June,
in a little-noticed speech on the House floor and in an
interview with The Times-Herald in Norristown, Pa. The
matter resurfaced on Monday in a report by GSN: Government
Security News, which is published every two weeks and
covers domestic-security issues. The GSN report was based
on accounts provided by Mr. Weldon and the same former
intelligence official, who was interviewed on Monday by The
New York Times in Mr. Weldon's office.
In a telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania, Mr.
Weldon said he was basing his assertions on similar ones by
at least three other former intelligence officers with
direct knowledge of the project, and said that some had
first called the episode to his attention shortly after the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The account is the first assertion that Mr. Atta, an
Egyptian who became the lead hijacker in the plot, was
identified by any American government agency as a potential
threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 hijackers,
only Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been
identified as potential threats by the Central Intelligence
Agency before the summer of 2000, and information about
them was not provided to the F.B.I. until the spring of
2001.
Mr. Weldon has long been a champion of the kind of
data-mining analysis that was the basis for the work of the
Able Danger team.
The former intelligence official spoke on the condition of
anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political
support and the possible financing for future data-mining
operations by speaking publicly. He said the team had been
established by the Special Operations Command in 1999,
under a classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton,
then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble
information about Al Qaeda networks around the world.
"Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision makers
options for taking out Al Qaeda targets," the former
defense intelligence official said.
He said that he delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the
Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and
said that it had been based on information from
unclassified sources and government records, including
those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something
about them," the former intelligence official said.
The unit, which relied heavily on data-mining techniques,
was modeled after those first established by Army
intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment
Center, now known as the Information Dominance Center, at
Fort Belvoir, Va., the official said.
Mr. Weldon is an outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of
both the House Armed Services Committee and the House
Homeland Security Committee. He said he had recognized the
significance of the episode only recently, when he
contacted members of the military intelligence team as part
of research for his book, "Countdown to Terror: The
Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next
Terrorist Attack on America and How the C.I.A. Has Ignored
It."
Mr. Weldon's book prompted one veteran C.I.A. case officer
to strongly dispute the reliability of one Iranian source
cited in the book, saying the Iranian "was a waste of my
time and resources."
Mr. Weldon said that he had discussed the Able Danger
episode with Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan
Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, and that at least two Congressional committees
were looking into the episode.
In the interview on Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been
aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11
attack, when members of the team first brought it to his
attention. He said he had told Stephen J. Hadley, then the
deputy national security adviser, about it in a
conversation in September or October 2001, and had been
surprised when the Sept. 11 commission report made no
mention of the operation.
Col. Samuel Taylor, a spokesman for the military's Special
Operations Command, said no one at the command now had any
knowledge of the Able Danger program, its mission or its
findings. If the program existed, Colonel Taylor said, it
was probably a highly classified "special access program"
on which only a few military personnel would have been
briefed.
During the interview in Mr. Weldon's office, the former
defense intelligence official showed a floor-sized chart
depicting Al Qaeda networks around the world that he said
was a larger, more detailed version similar to the one
prepared by the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000.
He said the original chart, like the new one, had included
the names and photographs of Mr. Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi,
as well as Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi, who were identified
as members of what was described as an American-based
"Brooklyn" cell, as one of five such Al Qaeda cells around
the world.
The official said the link to Brooklyn was meant as a term
of art rather than to be interpreted literally, saying that
the unit had produced no firm evidence linking the men to
the borough of New York City but that a computer analysis
seeking to establish patterns in links between the four men
had found that "the software put them all together in
Brooklyn."
According to the commission report, Mr. Mihdhar and Mr.
Hazmi were first identified in late 1999 or 2000 by the
C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be involved in a
terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to
Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither
man was put on a State Department watch list before they
flew to Los Angeles in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not
warned about them until the spring of 2001, and no efforts
to track them were made until August 2001.
Neither Mr. Shehhi nor Mr. Atta was identified by the
American intelligence agencies as a potential threat, the
commission report said. Mr. Shehhi arrived in Newark on a
flight from Brussels on May 29, 2000, and Mr. Atta arrived
in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year.
The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger
report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn"
cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta
arrived in the United States. The former intelligence
official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow
and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission
staff about Able Danger when they visited the
Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.
The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a
member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the
staff encouraged him to call the commission when he
returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did
so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.
Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman,
said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former
staff members who participated in the briefing.
"They all say that they were not told anything about a
Brooklyn cell," Mr. Felzenberg said. "They were told about
the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the
Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned
anything that startling, it would have gotten their
attention."
As a result of the briefing, he said, the commission staff
filed document requests with the Pentagon for information
about the program. The Pentagon complied, he said, adding
that the staff had not hidden anything from the
commissioners.
"The commissioners were certainly told of the document
requests and what the findings were," Mr. Felzenberg said.
Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for
this article.
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here is the key paragraph in this article:
The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger
report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn"
cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta
arrived in the United States. The former intelligence
official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow
and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission
staff about Able Danger when they visited the
Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.
- - - - - - -
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/politics/09intel.html
?ei=5094&en=8cdd39c879100274&hp=&ex=1123646400&partner=homepage&pagewanted=print
The New York Times
August 9, 2005
Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 - More than a year before the Sept. 11
attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence
unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future
hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating
in the United States, according to a former defense
intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.
In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able
Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of
the four men and recommended to the military's Special
Operations Command that the information be shared with the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman,
Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former
intelligence official said Monday.
The recommendation was rejected and the information was not
shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr.
Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid
entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and
green-card holders may not be singled out in
intelligence-collection operations by the military or
intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to
visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence
official said it might have reinforced a sense of
discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing
intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.
A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al
Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including
Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the
program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included
stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said
the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.
The report produced by the commission last year does not
mention the episode.
Mr. Weldon first spoke publicly about the episode in June,
in a little-noticed speech on the House floor and in an
interview with The Times-Herald in Norristown, Pa. The
matter resurfaced on Monday in a report by GSN: Government
Security News, which is published every two weeks and
covers domestic-security issues. The GSN report was based
on accounts provided by Mr. Weldon and the same former
intelligence official, who was interviewed on Monday by The
New York Times in Mr. Weldon's office.
In a telephone interview from his home in Pennsylvania, Mr.
Weldon said he was basing his assertions on similar ones by
at least three other former intelligence officers with
direct knowledge of the project, and said that some had
first called the episode to his attention shortly after the
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The account is the first assertion that Mr. Atta, an
Egyptian who became the lead hijacker in the plot, was
identified by any American government agency as a potential
threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 hijackers,
only Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been
identified as potential threats by the Central Intelligence
Agency before the summer of 2000, and information about
them was not provided to the F.B.I. until the spring of
2001.
Mr. Weldon has long been a champion of the kind of
data-mining analysis that was the basis for the work of the
Able Danger team.
The former intelligence official spoke on the condition of
anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political
support and the possible financing for future data-mining
operations by speaking publicly. He said the team had been
established by the Special Operations Command in 1999,
under a classified directive issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton,
then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble
information about Al Qaeda networks around the world.
"Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision makers
options for taking out Al Qaeda targets," the former
defense intelligence official said.
He said that he delivered the chart in summer 2000 to the
Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla., and
said that it had been based on information from
unclassified sources and government records, including
those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something
about them," the former intelligence official said.
The unit, which relied heavily on data-mining techniques,
was modeled after those first established by Army
intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment
Center, now known as the Information Dominance Center, at
Fort Belvoir, Va., the official said.
Mr. Weldon is an outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of
both the House Armed Services Committee and the House
Homeland Security Committee. He said he had recognized the
significance of the episode only recently, when he
contacted members of the military intelligence team as part
of research for his book, "Countdown to Terror: The
Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next
Terrorist Attack on America and How the C.I.A. Has Ignored
It."
Mr. Weldon's book prompted one veteran C.I.A. case officer
to strongly dispute the reliability of one Iranian source
cited in the book, saying the Iranian "was a waste of my
time and resources."
Mr. Weldon said that he had discussed the Able Danger
episode with Representative Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan
Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence
Committee, and that at least two Congressional committees
were looking into the episode.
In the interview on Monday, Mr. Weldon said he had been
aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11
attack, when members of the team first brought it to his
attention. He said he had told Stephen J. Hadley, then the
deputy national security adviser, about it in a
conversation in September or October 2001, and had been
surprised when the Sept. 11 commission report made no
mention of the operation.
Col. Samuel Taylor, a spokesman for the military's Special
Operations Command, said no one at the command now had any
knowledge of the Able Danger program, its mission or its
findings. If the program existed, Colonel Taylor said, it
was probably a highly classified "special access program"
on which only a few military personnel would have been
briefed.
During the interview in Mr. Weldon's office, the former
defense intelligence official showed a floor-sized chart
depicting Al Qaeda networks around the world that he said
was a larger, more detailed version similar to the one
prepared by the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000.
He said the original chart, like the new one, had included
the names and photographs of Mr. Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi,
as well as Mr. Mihdhar and Mr. Hazmi, who were identified
as members of what was described as an American-based
"Brooklyn" cell, as one of five such Al Qaeda cells around
the world.
The official said the link to Brooklyn was meant as a term
of art rather than to be interpreted literally, saying that
the unit had produced no firm evidence linking the men to
the borough of New York City but that a computer analysis
seeking to establish patterns in links between the four men
had found that "the software put them all together in
Brooklyn."
According to the commission report, Mr. Mihdhar and Mr.
Hazmi were first identified in late 1999 or 2000 by the
C.I.A. as Qaeda members who might be involved in a
terrorist operation. They were tracked from Yemen to
Malaysia before their trail was lost in Thailand. Neither
man was put on a State Department watch list before they
flew to Los Angeles in early 2000. The F.B.I. was not
warned about them until the spring of 2001, and no efforts
to track them were made until August 2001.
Neither Mr. Shehhi nor Mr. Atta was identified by the
American intelligence agencies as a potential threat, the
commission report said. Mr. Shehhi arrived in Newark on a
flight from Brussels on May 29, 2000, and Mr. Atta arrived
in Newark from Prague on June 3 that year.
The former intelligence official said the first Able Danger
report identified all four men as members of a "Brooklyn"
cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta
arrived in the United States. The former intelligence
official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow
and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission
staff about Able Danger when they visited the
Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.
The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a
member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the
staff encouraged him to call the commission when he
returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did
so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.
Mr. Felzenberg, the former Sept. 11 commission spokesman,
said on Monday that he had talked with some of the former
staff members who participated in the briefing.
"They all say that they were not told anything about a
Brooklyn cell," Mr. Felzenberg said. "They were told about
the Pentagon operation. They were not told about the
Brooklyn cell. They said that if the briefers had mentioned
anything that startling, it would have gotten their
attention."
As a result of the briefing, he said, the commission staff
filed document requests with the Pentagon for information
about the program. The Pentagon complied, he said, adding
that the staff had not hidden anything from the
commissioners.
"The commissioners were certainly told of the document
requests and what the findings were," Mr. Felzenberg said.
Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for
this article.
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