DrMaddVibe
08-18-2005, 06:44 AM
August 17, 2005
Officer Says Military Blocked Sharing of Files on Terrorists
By PHILIP SHENON
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.
Then there are the morons that think Clinton actually did something and that the Republicans were interested in his sex life. Seems like Clinton should've been doing his job instead of doing interns. Perhaps 3000 Americans would still be alive and we wouldn't have troops stuck in hell holes right now.
Imagine if Clinton actually cared about America.
Documents Show State Department Warned Clinton About Bin Laden
Thursday, August 18, 2005
WASHINGTON — The State Department warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Usama bin Laden's (search) move to Afghanistan would give him more fertile ground to spread radical Islam, according to newly declassified documents.
The documents, released by the legal advocacy group Judicial Watch on Wednesday, say that bin Laden would feel comfortable moving from Sudan to Afghanistan, which "has become an even more desirable location for extremists. Afghanistan may be an ideal haven as long as bin Laden can continue to run his businesses and financial networks."
In the top-secret assessments that summer, State Department intelligence analysts said bin Laden's "prolonged stay in Afghanistan — where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate — could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum" in Sudan.
Bin Laden was becoming an "increasingly confident" militant leader, as seen in press interviews, the intelligence analysts said in the documents, and they "could foreshadow future support for terrorist attacks against UK and French interests." At that time, the Saudi-born bin Laden was viewed as more of a financier of terror rather than a ringleader; the State Department assessment came a year before bin Laden publicly urged Muslims to attack the United States.
The documents also show that intelligence analysts even then believed that bin Laden may have played a role in the Khobar Towers bombings just a month earlier. In that attack, a truck bomb destroyed an apartment building in the Khobar Towers (search) military housing complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 20 people, mostly U.S. service members, and wounding 372.
Bin Laden seemed to be "on the run" at the time the documents were written, the analysts said, particularly with pressure mounting from the United States and some Muslim states, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt. But they said bin Laden may have thought tensions in the Saudi kingdom were "ripe for exploiting through increased terrorism."
It was two years after this State Department warning that bin Laden's Al Qaeda (search) terrorists attacked two American embassies in East Africa, which led to failed attempts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill him in Afghanistan. Bin Laden remained in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told The New York Times that with everything else going on in 1996, "the priority was to deny him safe haven, period, and to disrupt his activities any way you could.… There was a lot we didn't know, and the priority was to keep him on the run, keep him on guard, and try to maximize the opportunities to nail him."
A senior State Department official said Wednesday that officials in the Clinton administration should be the ones to discuss specific decisions taken during that time.
The official wanted to emphasize, however, that attempts over time to get bin Laden have always been a government-wide effort and that "taking one memo from one point in time is taking this out of context."
"The U.S. government was doing everything we could to prevent Usama bin Laden from being a threat," the official said. "State has been part of a concerted interagency effort to get Usama bin Laden from the very beginning and disrupt and prevent him from doing his dirty deeds."
The official acknowledged that, despite the memo's reported warning about Afghanistan's potential for bin Laden, "the priority at the time was to get him out of Sudan, where he already had an established network."
The State Department report concludes that keeping bin Laden on the move might inconvenience him, but predicts his network would remain resilient, saying, "Even a bin Laden on the move can retain the capability to support individuals ... who have the motive and wherewithal to attack U.S. interests almost worldwide."
Sudanese officials claim that they offered to turn bin Laden over to the Clinton administration before he was expelled from the Sudan, but Clinton diplomats deny it was that simple.
Just this week, the former president told The New Yorker magazine that he believed bin Laden was a bigger threat than that perceived by the previous Bush White House.
But Jed Babbin, a Defense Department official who served in the administration of George H.W. Bush, said Clinton mistook bin Laden as a law enforcement problem, not a terrorist threat.
"They were looking at this and Sandy Berger, the national security adviser, and the president, everybody was looking at this as — 'are we gathering information that we could actually indict this guy or what we can actually do with him?' They really didn't have a clue as to how to pull the levels of American power to deal with the problem of terrorism," Babbin said.
P.J. Crowley, former special assistant to Clinton for national security affairs, told FOX News that the State Department memo is reflective of how the administration was watching terrorism, and bin Laden, very closely in the 1990s, particularly activity in the Sudan.
That country at that time was a haven for terrorists, Crowley said, "a who's who ... for almost every nefarious group you could think of."
Bin Laden "was being watched carefully but I don't think we saw him alone as being such a significant threat," Crowley added. "Bin Laden was, in 1996, one of many figures we were watching for some time."
But after the 1998 bombings were traced back to bin Laden, the administration attempted to do more than watch.
"We tried many, many times and many different ways to capture or kill bin Laden with very little success," Crowley said.
Officer Says Military Blocked Sharing of Files on Terrorists
By PHILIP SHENON
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.
Then there are the morons that think Clinton actually did something and that the Republicans were interested in his sex life. Seems like Clinton should've been doing his job instead of doing interns. Perhaps 3000 Americans would still be alive and we wouldn't have troops stuck in hell holes right now.
Imagine if Clinton actually cared about America.
Documents Show State Department Warned Clinton About Bin Laden
Thursday, August 18, 2005
WASHINGTON — The State Department warned the Clinton administration in July 1996 that Usama bin Laden's (search) move to Afghanistan would give him more fertile ground to spread radical Islam, according to newly declassified documents.
The documents, released by the legal advocacy group Judicial Watch on Wednesday, say that bin Laden would feel comfortable moving from Sudan to Afghanistan, which "has become an even more desirable location for extremists. Afghanistan may be an ideal haven as long as bin Laden can continue to run his businesses and financial networks."
In the top-secret assessments that summer, State Department intelligence analysts said bin Laden's "prolonged stay in Afghanistan — where hundreds of 'Arab mujahedeen' receive terrorist training and key extremist leaders often congregate — could prove more dangerous to U.S. interests in the long run than his three-year liaison with Khartoum" in Sudan.
Bin Laden was becoming an "increasingly confident" militant leader, as seen in press interviews, the intelligence analysts said in the documents, and they "could foreshadow future support for terrorist attacks against UK and French interests." At that time, the Saudi-born bin Laden was viewed as more of a financier of terror rather than a ringleader; the State Department assessment came a year before bin Laden publicly urged Muslims to attack the United States.
The documents also show that intelligence analysts even then believed that bin Laden may have played a role in the Khobar Towers bombings just a month earlier. In that attack, a truck bomb destroyed an apartment building in the Khobar Towers (search) military housing complex near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 20 people, mostly U.S. service members, and wounding 372.
Bin Laden seemed to be "on the run" at the time the documents were written, the analysts said, particularly with pressure mounting from the United States and some Muslim states, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt. But they said bin Laden may have thought tensions in the Saudi kingdom were "ripe for exploiting through increased terrorism."
It was two years after this State Department warning that bin Laden's Al Qaeda (search) terrorists attacked two American embassies in East Africa, which led to failed attempts by the Clinton administration to capture or kill him in Afghanistan. Bin Laden remained in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told The New York Times that with everything else going on in 1996, "the priority was to deny him safe haven, period, and to disrupt his activities any way you could.… There was a lot we didn't know, and the priority was to keep him on the run, keep him on guard, and try to maximize the opportunities to nail him."
A senior State Department official said Wednesday that officials in the Clinton administration should be the ones to discuss specific decisions taken during that time.
The official wanted to emphasize, however, that attempts over time to get bin Laden have always been a government-wide effort and that "taking one memo from one point in time is taking this out of context."
"The U.S. government was doing everything we could to prevent Usama bin Laden from being a threat," the official said. "State has been part of a concerted interagency effort to get Usama bin Laden from the very beginning and disrupt and prevent him from doing his dirty deeds."
The official acknowledged that, despite the memo's reported warning about Afghanistan's potential for bin Laden, "the priority at the time was to get him out of Sudan, where he already had an established network."
The State Department report concludes that keeping bin Laden on the move might inconvenience him, but predicts his network would remain resilient, saying, "Even a bin Laden on the move can retain the capability to support individuals ... who have the motive and wherewithal to attack U.S. interests almost worldwide."
Sudanese officials claim that they offered to turn bin Laden over to the Clinton administration before he was expelled from the Sudan, but Clinton diplomats deny it was that simple.
Just this week, the former president told The New Yorker magazine that he believed bin Laden was a bigger threat than that perceived by the previous Bush White House.
But Jed Babbin, a Defense Department official who served in the administration of George H.W. Bush, said Clinton mistook bin Laden as a law enforcement problem, not a terrorist threat.
"They were looking at this and Sandy Berger, the national security adviser, and the president, everybody was looking at this as — 'are we gathering information that we could actually indict this guy or what we can actually do with him?' They really didn't have a clue as to how to pull the levels of American power to deal with the problem of terrorism," Babbin said.
P.J. Crowley, former special assistant to Clinton for national security affairs, told FOX News that the State Department memo is reflective of how the administration was watching terrorism, and bin Laden, very closely in the 1990s, particularly activity in the Sudan.
That country at that time was a haven for terrorists, Crowley said, "a who's who ... for almost every nefarious group you could think of."
Bin Laden "was being watched carefully but I don't think we saw him alone as being such a significant threat," Crowley added. "Bin Laden was, in 1996, one of many figures we were watching for some time."
But after the 1998 bombings were traced back to bin Laden, the administration attempted to do more than watch.
"We tried many, many times and many different ways to capture or kill bin Laden with very little success," Crowley said.