Special Ops Troops Wanted to Alert FBI re. Four 9/11 Hijackers

[Nickdfresh]

August 09, 2005

'Secret military unit tracked hijackers before 9/11'
By Sam Knight, Times Online

Mohammed Atta and three other men who hijacked aircraft on September 11, 2001 were identified by the US Government as possible members of an al-Qaeda cell more than a year before the attacks, it was reported today.

A highly classified military intelligence unit prepared a chart showing likely al-Qaeda cells in the summer of 2000, which showed the names and photographs of the four men, according to The New York Times.

The secret military team, known as Able Danger, recommended that the identities of the four men be shared with the FBI and other parts of the military, but the recommendation was never taken up, according to a Republican Congressman, Curt Weldon, quoted by the newspaper.

Mr Weldon's account, and the information provided by an unnamed military official to The New York Times, constitute the first claim that Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11, had been identified as a possible terrorist before the attacks took place.

Until now, only two of the 19 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were known to have been identified by US government agencies as threats to American security.

The CIA tracked the men through 2000 before passing their information to the FBI in the spring of 2001.

According to Mr Weldon, who said he has tried to share this information since September 2001, when it first came to his notice, the risk posed by Atta and his cohorts never spread through America'a law enforcement agencies because of the uneasy co-operation between the FBI and the military.

Mr Weldon, a Congressman from Pennsylvania, is a vice chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee.

The 9/11 Commission, appointed to investigate the causes and intelligence failures that led to the events of September 11, did not include information gathered by Able Danger in its report, which was published last year, even though the Commission learned of its existence in 2003, according to the newspaper.

The classified military intelligence unit used sophisticated "data mining" techniques, which process huge amounts of data to find patterns, to identify Atta and the three other men as likely members of an al-Qaeda cell within two months of their arrival in America in 2000.

According to the article, The New York Times was shown a chart similar to the one drawn up by the military team in the summer of 2000.

The "floor-sized chart" showed the names and photographs of Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, as well as al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, as making up an US-based al-Qaeda cell known as the "Brooklyn cell".

According to the anonymous military intelligence source quoted by the newspaper, when the chart was completed it was delivered to the Special Operations Command of the US military, under whose authority the secret team worked.

"We knew these were the bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them," the official told the newspaper.

A spokesman for the US Special Operations Command told The New York Times, that no one at the command now had "any knowledge of the Able Danger program, its mission or its findings".

[Nickdfresh]

With Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff
For the story behind the story...

Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2005 12:06 p.m. EDT

Clinton Admin. Knew of 9/11 Hijackers

More than a year before the 9/11 attacks, Clinton administration intelligence officials had identified four of the 19 9/11 hijackers as a terrorist threat What horseshit! - including al-Qaida team leader Mohamed Atta and his partner Marwan al-Shehhi, whose planes destroyed the World Trade Center and killed over 2,700 people.

But the critical information was not acted on, at least in part, because of prohibitions against intelligence sharing implemented by former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, who was reportedly installed in her post at the insistence of then-first lady Hillary Clinton.

Story Continues Below
Miramax Films

In the summer of 2000, a military team, known as Able Danger, had prepared a chart that included visa photographs of Atta and al Shehhi and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Rep. Curt Weldon and a former intelligence official told the New York Times.

"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them," the former intelligence official said.

However, the recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, in part, said the Times, because the four suspects had entered the United States on valid entry visas.

But Rep. Weldon and the unnamed intelligence official also cited what the paper described as "a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency."

In fact, such intelligence sharing was strictly prohibited under Ms. Gorelick's policy, known at the Justice Department as "The Wall," which, in the spring of 2000, had also prevented the CIA from tipping off the FBI that two additional 9/11 hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had entered the country.

Al-Midhar and al-Hamzi were identified by the Able Danger team as well, the Times said.

In its final report, however, the 9/11 Commission made no mention of the fact that the Clinton administration had identified key members of the hijack team, even though, the Times noted, that information had been shared with 9/11 Commission members.

The account by Weldon and the Times intelligence source is the first assertion that Atta and al Shehhi - who caused the most destruction in the worst attack ever suffered on U.S. soil - had been identified by the Clinton administration.

In testimony before the 9/11 Commission last year, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft blasted Gorelick's "Wall," saying, "The single greatest structural cause for September 11 was the wall that segregated criminal investigators and intelligence agents"

"[Ms. Gorelick] built that wall," said Ashcroft, "through a March 1995 memo."

The Gorelick memo stipulated, in part:

"We believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that [the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."

Ms. Gorelick is expected to be a leading candidate for attorney general should Mrs. Clinton win the 2008 presidential election.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/8/9/120750.shtml

When we talk about media bias, I'll be sure to dredge up what a shitty organization "News"Max is. I love how they took somebody else's scoop and turned it into a bogus, partisan piece of shit.

Here's the orig. article: NY TIMES

[Hardrock69]

I am amazed at the sheer stupidity and/or criminality of those in office.

And don't give me any of that bullshit about "Well they were elected" or "the so-and-so party elected them".

That is irrelevant to the above statement.

The only honest president we have had in recent memory is Jimmeh-Bwah Carter.

99% of those people who gain high office do so because they are criminals with the right connections, and who hunger after the almighty dollar and/or they want to jack off to the power they will wield once attaining their office.

At least JizzyStool is honest in that he only CRAVES THE COCK, and is not going to have innocent people murdered in order to get a meat popsicle to suck on....

Clinton lied about getting a blow job, and they tried to impach him, but it did not work.

Bush lies about EVERY FUCKING THING, yet that fucking asshole is still in office.

And mixed in with the criminals is an amazing mix of stupid people, or people who put their own agenda in front of the welfare of the American People.

And so millions of people die.

The Al-Quadea assholes claim their complaint is against American Policy, not the average Joe Citizen.

Funny how if you live in American as a "Joe Citizen" and you expose the criminal activites of the Bush Administration, or challenge the lies they tell, you run the risk of being called a "terrorist-sympathizer", or being labelled as a "threat to National Security" (like that lady who is protesting outside the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas because Bush's LIES caused the death of her son).

You also run the risk of "disappearing permanently" if you get too close to the truth. There were lots of mysterious "deaths" and "suicides" occuring when Clinton was in office.

The same thing has been happening for the past 5 years since Chimp Boy and his backers stole the Presidency. A good example is the sheer number of prominent micro-biologists who either disappeared, were murdered, or supposedly "committed suicide" in the year or so right after 9/11 and the accompanying Anthrax scare.

**sigh**

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I hope GW Bush burns in Hell.

[DLR'sCock]

Four in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied to Qaeda in '00
By Douglas Jehl
The New York Times

Tuesday 09 August 2005

Washington - 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.

-------

[Nickdfresh]

Proof again that the 9/11 Commission was in full damage control, spin cycle...

[DLR'sCock]

More proof that everything I was talking about right after 9/11 was most likely right on, so far, all is.....

[BigBadBrian]

Originally posted by DLR'sCock
More proof that everything I was talking about right after 9/11 was most likely right on, so far, all is.....

Uh huh.

Yeah, riiiiiiight.

[ashstralia]

A highly classified military intelligence unit prepared a chart showing likely al-Qaeda cells in the summer of 2000, which showed the names and photographs of the four men, according to The New York Times.



does al qaeda exist again?

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by ashstralia
A highly classified military intelligence unit prepared a chart showing likely al-Qaeda cells in the summer of 2000, which showed the names and photographs of the four men, according to The New York Times.



does al qaeda exist again?

Depends on the definition of al Qaeda...

Truth is that we have the majority of people directly involved in planning and carrying out 9/11. But of course, no one can admit this since it makes it even more diificult to justify why Americans are being blown apart in IRAQ. The organization that carried out 9/11 was very small, and very clever. Bin LADEN had very little involvement in the plot...

Khaled Sheikh Mohammed is believed to be the mastermind, and he's currently being waterboarded at a secret location by the CIA. The threat of "al Qaida is widely exaggerrated...

[Warham]

Originally posted by Hardrock69
You also run the risk of "disappearing permanently" if you get too close to the truth. There were lots of mysterious "deaths" and "suicides" occuring when Clinton was in office.

Nobody other president is close to having a body count like Clinton's.

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by Warham
Nobody other president is close to having a body count like Clinton's.

Well, he can't top BUSH's record of killing three thousand of his own citizens on 9/11...

[bobgnote]

Shuttle retired? GOOD. We don't want any Led Zep issues controverting space program

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Proof again that the 9/11 Commission was in full damage control, spin cycle...

Hey. Atta and the others were going to do SOMETHING, but they did it SOONER because the illegal, inflationary power deals went in, starting 2000. Al Queda was rumored to have stepped up the sched, and the UGLY CELL here in the US that hides its own sub-USCA 11 status as favored organized crime conspiracy is able to usually control ALL the spin ALL the churning and burning.

So, YEARS LATER, the inflationary power deals are still killing us, and Bush isn't even getting any flack about it, from YOU ALL. But Al Queda is still busy, Green Day's Holiday seems to predict it.

Don't moan too loud, if YOU LET BUSH DO DEREGULATION OF ENERGY, THEN LET THE STATES DO THEIR INFLATIONARY POWER DEALS. CA. IS INFLATED BY GENERAL GRID WITHHOLDING AND THE MAY-JUNE 2001 NUCLEAR REFURBISHINGS. Al saw it go down, moved up his schedule, and look what's almost here, another SEPTEMBER! I don't think it's THIS one, but there will be another. And YOU let the domestic UGLY CELLS scam us, and they are more illegal than Al Queda, hiding it all behind punked USCA 11.

The latest bombings suggest The WHO, formerly called The HIGH NUMBERS, see 7,9,11 on the terror-bombing schedules and the lack of need to do any actual accounting, TO PROVE THE 2000 POWER DEALS ARE INFLATIONARY AND THE POINT OF INCITEMENT, FOR THE MOVE-UP OF THE 9/11/01 TERROR ATTACKS.

DO NOT, I REPEAT, DO NOT NEGLECT NOTICE THAT WE ARE SUBJECT, TO INTERACTIVE ISLAM. We are in a mutual condition of Jihad, with any jihadis. Islam means the peace. Either we want it, or it wants us. Get it or hit it, but if you think Isreal was a good idea, or if Jesus said to go over there and get whacked, Allah better help us. DO NOT, I repeat, do not wait till the Led Zep or Van Halen commemorative bombings. THOSE will be more unfave, than the recent 7/7/05 London- Leeds things, or did you miss ATOMIC PUNK!?

Don't BS around, mofos, the rock is HERE.

[thome]

Please explain to me how you KNOW ben laden had very little to do with
9/11.

and dont get mad at me for asking

[Nickdfresh]

Originally posted by thome
Please explain to me how you KNOW ben laden had very little to do with
9/11.

and dont get mad at me for asking

Fair question, I agree with the following BBC documentaries:

http://marc.perkel.com/archives/000753.html

Watch number-three, "The Shadows in the Cave." The basic idea is that al Qaeda was not a centralized organization, but a splintered group of factions that had different ideas, and one that had failed...

[thome]

Originally posted by Nickdfresh
Fair question, I agree with the following BBC documentaries:

http://marc.perkel.com/archives/000753.html

Watch number-three, "The Shadows in the Cave." The basic idea is that al Qaeda was not a centralized organization, but a splintered group of factions that had different ideas, and one that had failed...

I saved the page to Fav .

Saved the vid to hard drive i dont have a hour rite now ill respond tomorrow