Able Was I - The Commission Pushes Back

The embattled 9/11 Commission pushed back late on Friday against charges that they had failed to investigate important revelations from a secret Pentagon project code-named "Able Danger".  The stage is set for the Sunday talk-show brawls!  [The NY Times and the WaPo pick this up.  Focus on the Times, which buries two great tidbits.  See UPDATE]:

Here we go, from the AP:

The leaders of the 9/11 commission late Friday disputed a congressman's criticism that the panel did not adequately investigate a claim that four hijackers were identified as al Qaeda members more than a year before the attacks.

In a joint statement, former commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said a military official who made the claim had no documentation to back it up. And they said only 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta was identified to them and not three additional hijackers as claimed by Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees.

"He could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification," the statement said of the military official.

We also see a bit of haze about the quality of the briefing:

During the July 12, 2004, meeting with the military official, the officer said he recalled seeing Atta's name and photo on an analyst's chart made by the secret Able Danger unit, the statement released by Kean and Hamilton said.

The relevant data discussed by the officer showed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell in New York City from February to April 2000, the statement said.

But the commission knew that according to travel and immigration records, Atta first obtained a U.S. visa on May 18, 2000, and first arrived in the United States on June 3, 2000, the statement said.

Kean, a former Republican New Jersey governor, and Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said records had been sought from the U.S. Special Operations Command and none mentioned Atta or any other September 11 hijackers. They were requested after staff members from the commission were told about Able Danger during a meeting in Afghanistan.

Weldon said Friday that Atta's name was specifically mentioned during the Afghanistan meeting, but Kean and Hamilton denied that Friday in the statement.

So, no documentation from the July 12, 2004 briefer, and no documentation mentioning Atta from the Special Operation Center in response to a follow-up request after the Oct 2003 briefing.

And the briefer "recalled seeing Atta's name and photo on an analyst's chart".  That's just great - did he recall when the analyst *made* the chart?  Would he have a copy of the chart for the appropriate people to peruse?  Did the chart shown to Gen. Shelton at his Jan 2001 briefing also show Atta's name, or was that name added later?

[The WaPo has more:

According to the commission, the officer said he briefly saw the name and photo of Atta on an "analyst notebook chart." The material identified Atta as part of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell and was dated from February through April 2000, the officer 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," the statement says, because Pentagon lawyers were worried about violating restrictions on military intelligence gathering in the United States.

Oh, boy - the dog ate the documents.  And if the reference was deleted "soon afterward", what was in the briefing to Gen. Shelton in Jan 2001?]

With all that said, it does seem that the description of the briefing given here by Kean and Hamilton does not conflict with the version presented in the NY Times by Weldon's side.  Was Weldon's source failing to highlight some of the shortcomings of his briefing?

And from a different perspective - do we trust this Commission to investigate itself?  Do we need a new commission to investigate the old one?  [The Captain trusts this Commission about as far has he could throw all ten of them; MacMind is still in the Skeptic's Corner.]

There is no statement (yet) at the 9/11 Public Discourse Project website.

UPDATE:  [Reaction links with Betsy Newmark].  The Times has some great material at the end:

In an interview this week, a former senior military officer disputed that the unit members had ever presented to their superiors information that identified Mr. Atta or other suspected members of Al Qaeda.

Ahh!  Is the "former senior military officer" Gen, Shelton himself, or an aide?

And many have asked, how many names did "Able Danger" generate - a mini-phone book is not actionable.  Here we go:

The former defense intelligence official, who was interviewed twice this week, has repeatedly said that Mr. Atta and four others were identified on a chart presented to the Special Operations Command. The former official said the chart identified about 60 probable members of Al Qaeda.

On the main explanation offered by the Commission and covered by the AP, the Times is also stronger:

The Sept. 11 commission concluded that an intelligence program known as Able Danger "did not turn out to be historically significant," despite hearing a claim that the program had identified the future plot leader Mohammed Atta as a potential terrorist threat more than a year before the 2001 attacks, the commission's former leaders said in a statement on Friday evening.

The statement said a review of testimony and documents had found that the single claim in July 2004 by a Navy officer was the only time the name of Mr. Atta or any other future hijacker was mentioned to the commission as having been known before the hijackings. That account is consistent with statements this week by a commission spokesman, but it contradicts claims by a former defense intelligence official who said he had told the commission staff about Able Danger's work on Mr. Atta during a briefing in Afghanistan in October 2003.

...

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton also noted that the name and character of Able Danger had not been publicly disclosed when the commission issued its public report in 2004. They said the commission had concluded that the July 2004 testimony by the Navy officer, who said he had seen an Able Danger document in 2000 that described Mr. Atta as connected to a cell in Brooklyn "was not sufficiently reliable" to warrant further investigation, in part because the officer could not supply documentary evidence to prove it.

The leaders said the staff learned about the program in the October 2003 briefing and later sought Defense Department documents about it. But those department documents, they said, "had mentioned nothing about Atta, nor had anyone come forward between September 2001 and July 2004 with any similar information."

Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who has called attention to the program, said the commission had done too little to follow up on the information. Mr. Weldon said he would continue to "push for a full accounting of the historical record so that we may preclude these types of failures from happening again."

Again - do we trust the Commission to investigate itself?  And do we trust Weldon not to hype his pet projects?

Comments

[peapies]

then why did they (commission spokes people) initially deny any briefing took place? Additiionally, you have the best question...

And from a different perspective - do we trust this Commission to investigate itself? Do we need a new commission to investigate the old one?

Sorta like the UN investigating Oil for Food. The AB information, if even to illustrate why intelligence sharing is good, should have at very the least been MENTIONED. I mean I would be tangently interested in knowing the military was conducting a secret data mining operation at least.

also, there are (accordding to Weldon) 4 info on AD sources and I seem to recall the military source said he was eagar to testify under oath in hearings...if his "briefing" was so flimsy flamsy, and he couldn't recall specifics then seems like he wouldn't be so cocksure ready to testify.

yes this is the classic CYA push back, only creepy that it is the 911 commission vs. the secret military ops guy

[Seven Machos]

I tend to think this is classic August news slowness.

We don't need any more (public and, therefore, political) investigations. Personally, I am confident that John Negroponte and Porter Goss will right the intel ship.

[JJ]

Sorry, self-serving denials don't prove anything. Is it really far fetched to think that commission staff members might have "fixed the evidence around" (to borrow a phrase from the Downing Street memo) their pre-conceived conclusion that Clinton did no wrong and that the war in Iraq had no connection with the War on Terror. After all, this is the commission whose staff members drafted the cockamamie report summary that said there was no "operational relationship" between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Then, when Dick Cheney challenged that statement and was attacked by the media, Chairman Lee Hamilton told reporters that Cheney's statement asserting that there was such a connection was correct. The summary's conclusion also contradicted many of the commission's own findings (not to mention the Clinton Justice Dept. which presented evidence of just such a connection in their 1998 indictment against Bin Laden).

This commission was politicised from the beginning and Democrats wanted their witch hunt. They misstated their own findings in their own summary which their own chairmen contradicted. Try as you might to confuse the issues, Mohammed Atta and three other highjackers were identified as dangers to our security in 2000 and the Clinton administration didn't tell domestic law enforcement because of the Gorelick Wall and the base political calculation that it might look like they were discriminating against Arab men.

The issue isn't what we know now about Atta (and there are a lot of things we don't know). Instead, the purpose of the commission was to analyze what went wrong with our intelligence and counter terrorism operations prior to 9/11. The Able Danger report is what's called a smoking gun. Clinton valued his approval rating over our national security and this episode proves it. The commission staffers tried to sweep this information under the rug because they didn't want this evidence coming out.

[Dwilkers]

"Personally, I am confident that John Negroponte and Porter Goss will right the intel ship."

I wish I was Seven. They are only 2 against an apparent snake pit of partisan warfare in our intelligence agencies. What's going to happen in '08 when Jilly gets elected and Sheila 'hurricane' Jackson Lee is our new intelligence director?

I'm beginning to think they need to fire everyone, bulldoze Langley and start over.

OT though, who are we to believe about this? The 9/11 commish or a high level military officer? I know where my money is.

[boris]

Hmmm ... so in the same breath they justify ignoring the information they claim they never saw.

[BumperStickerist]

And do we trust Weldon not to hype his pet projects?

Great Moments in Future History:

"Representative Weldon contends that the use of V-22 Osprey by both military and civilian law enforcement agencies might have foiled 9/11 attacks and the Osprey's future use would enhance our national security against terrorism."

[Anonymous Liberal]

JJ,
Do you really believe that the 9/11 commission was a Democratic "witchhunt"? Do you have any idea how looney that sounds? For a party that has controlled all branches of government for the last 5 years, there is still a remarkable amount of paranoia in conservative circles. Thankfully, this particular blog is consitently fact-based and reasonable.

[Lesley]

Interesting article at Intel-dump. Even more interesting is the comment exchange at the end of the article between Anon and Jon Holdaway (the author of the Intel-dump article). I have quoted the comment exchange between Anon and Jon Holdaway below:

From Intel-dump:

More on Data Mining and Able Danger

[Jon Holdaway, Wednesday August 10, 2005 at 3:42am EST]

Anon (www):
"OK smart guys - with your "smell tests" and "Thats just flat out wrong" opinions shown above - I hope you don't mind, but let me clear up a few things - I was there and I lived through the ABLE DANGER nightmare.

First - yes - The lawyers involved in this (and similar projects) did interpret the 9-11 terrorists as "US persons" - so while you can second guess them all you want - but that was their "legal" call as wrong as it was and is. Unfortunately, the chain of command at SOCOM went along with them (and this, I expect, will be a topic that will become more clear in the near future).

And lawyers of the era also felt that any intelligence officer viewing open internet information for the purpose of intelligence collection automatically required that any "open source" information obtained be treated as if it was "intelligence information"...does this sound like idiocy to you? It did to me - and we fought it - and I was in meetings at the OSD level, with OSD laywers, that debated this - and I even briefed the DCI George Tenet on this issue relating to an internet project.

And yes, Virgina - we tried to tell the lawyers that since the data identified Atta and the others as linked to Al Qaeda, we should be able to collect on them based on SecState Albright's declaration of Al Qaeda as transnational terrorist threat to the US...well the lawyers did not agree...go figure...so we could not collect on them - and for political reasons - could not pass them to the FBI...I know because I brokered three meetings between the FBI and SOCOM to allow SOCOM to pass the informaton to the FBI. And, sadly, SOCOM cancelled them every time...

Oh - and as to your opinion that ABLE DANGER was a precursor to the IDC - you are flat out wrong - and obviously not keeping up with what is coming out in the press. ABLE DANGER partnered with LIWA/IDC to use the LIWA/IDC capability to obtain the data on Atta and the other 9-11 terrorists. I brokered the relationship...
And - wrong again on the IDC using only "classified" databases - IDC used 2.5 terabytes (a whole hell of a lot of data) - all open source - to identify Atta and the others that have been identified. Classified data bases were only use to "confirm" the links subsequent to the open source data runs.

Oh - and DATA MINING is not overt or clandestine - it just "is" - it is something that is done with either open source or classified information. ABLE DANGER used an array of both open and close databases...

So...good try, gentlemen - good to see there is intellectual riggor here...but before you start doubting the story, perhaps you need to do better research."
8.12.2005 11:27pm

(link)Jon Holdaway (mail) (www):
Anon,

"Sounds like you and I might have crossed paths somewhere or at least know some of the same people.

However, your story (while making sense based on my experiences) makes some serious allegations. You've posted as "anon" for obvious reasons and haven't left an email. In order to verify your creds, I'd like you to email me or contact me in some way.

BTW, I agree with everything you say. My original comments of skepticism are waning because much more has come out. The problem is that skepticism over the story is changing to frustration that DOD lawyers that should have known better about the rules of passing information to FBI didn't and they should have. This is the bigger story."
8.13.2005 1:55am

[kim]

Velly intellesting.
====================

[Syl]

holy cow! (ooops, I guess that's not politically correct...)

If 'data mining' and 'Atta' were in the same testimony, no matter the lack of backup docs, it should have raised eyebrows and caused mouths to gape wide open.

The commission's incurious attitude is what bothers me the most...so the docs they got back said nothing? Ask for more docs. Bring back the guy to tell them more.

But, no. It was too close to print to change anything now, besides the dates were wrong...doesn't fit the narrative consensus.

I suspect that it wasn't about protecting the wall builder so much as being frightened of data mining.

[Lesley]

Yes, Kim, if Anon is to be believed (and that's a big IF), the ABLE DANGER intel was (incorrectly) boxed-in by DOD lawyers. If so, this story may morph away from the 911 Commission and put the spotlight the Pentagon instead. We'll see.

[j.foster]

anonymous liberal-- i don't think it was a witch hunt , but a cya move by all concerned. it is iteresting though that the media had a complete book on atta within a day or so. someone had that intel before the attack. it can't hurt to find out why. we don't need to attack anybody here. but we don.t need the commision changing their position on a daily basis.

[Syl]

Oy. This Able Danger thang makes at least TWO sources the 9/11 Commission had that placed Atta in this country BEFORE the official timeline.

Remember the Dept of Agriculture worker who claimed she met him? I had totally forgotten all about that until Mark Steyn brought it up in a recent article.

Here's an article by JFBeck concerning it. You can follow links and links to links to get the whole story.

http://rwdb.blogspot.com/2005/08/media-watch-mugs-mugged.html

[TM]

Here is a link to the Intel Dump post.

[MaDr]

Who started this BS that a "mini-phonebook" is not actionable?!!! What the hell do you you think "intel" is? Laser straight singularities? How big a mini-phonebbok do you think the FBI started with after the "93" WTC bombings? That's what law enforcement deals with - hundreds if not thousands of leads which they then check out. That's what they should have done with the Able danger info even if it was a mini-phonebook as some (uniformed) have shrieked in defense.

Pathetic

[kim]

Ah yes, the rule of law. Blessing, oh my yes, but some of those blessings have two edges. We've been collaterally sliced by one, if what anon says is true.
================================================

[kim]

The DOD, all armoured up then on its high horse, is now down on the ground, rolling around, dodging the yeomen's sharp sticks seeking chinks.
=================================================

[kim]

The perversion is pervasive, the corruption now unconscious; ironies bubble up in increasing tempo. MSM and the CIA want Plamegate investigated; the worst actors there turn out to be journalists and Langley employees. The Department of Defense gets so defensive they fail to defend. The UN? Why even bother to peel the layers. It's enough to make you cry.

What is the warping agent?

There just seems to be some kind of incompetent credo at work here.
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[vimax]

If my children are silly, I must hope to be always sensible of it... This is the only point, I flatter myself, on which we do not agree. I had hoped that our sentiments coincided in every particular, but I must so far differ from you as to think our two youngest daughters uncommonly foolish.

[samuel]

just go get some will ya

[vimax]

its good stuff

[kim]

Incompetent credo, indeed. Should I have said 'criminal'?
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