NYT: 9/11 Commission's Staff Ignored Military's Early ID of Chief Hijacker

[DeepModem Mom]

9/11 Commission's Staff Ignored Military's Early Identification of Chief Hijacker
By DOUGLAS JEHL and PHILIP SHENON
Published: August 11, 2005


WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 - The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.

The officials said that the information had not been included in the report because aspects of the officer's account had sounded inconsistent with what the commission knew about that Qaeda member, Mohammed Atta, the plot's leader.

But aides to the Republican congressman who has sought to call attention to the military unit that conducted the secret operation said such a conclusion relied too much on specific dates involving Mr. Atta's travels and not nearly enough on the operation's broader determination that he was a threat.

The briefing by the military officer is the second known instance in which people on the commission's staff were told by members of the military team about the secret program, called Able Danger.

The meeting, on July 12, 2004, has not been previously disclosed. That it occurred, and that the officer identified Mr. Atta there, were acknowledged by officials of the commission after the congressman, Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, provided information about it....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/11/politics/11intel.html

[lovuian]

1. Now why would the 9/11 commission want to ignore that???

The commission wasn't after the TRUTH but there to bury it!!!

[mallard]

10. And they're back ....

... to patch up a nasty spot on their open-pit grave, indicting that mastermind Atta once more for keepsake. Let there be no more doubt.

Why this suddenly now, 47 months after?

[The Backlash Cometh]

19. Sibel Edmonds?

Maybe whatever she has to say, is going to make them look like goose droppings.

[Mairead]

14. But every such committee is meant only to stall around and apply

lashings of whitewash.

Feynman blew the lid off in his exposé of the Challenger commission. All those commissions are meant to do is make the rest of us believe that Something Is Being Done so that we'll keep quiet about whatever the problem is.

It was reading Feynman's account of how not merely pointless but actually obstructive the Challenger commission was that made clear to me the real motives behind convening such things. Until then, I was so naive that I thought they were real, that the people in charge actually wanted to get to the bottom of things and fix them. What a dope!

We peons are just too stupid to understand how ridiculous and inconceivable it is that any of the high mucky-mucks whose stupidity or criminality cause these disasters should ever have to in any smallest way suffer for them. They're above all that--they set policy and take decisions; we do any suffering that's to be done.

That must change.

[The Backlash Cometh]

21. When you recognize how swiftly the Yard handled the bombings

in England, you begin to realize that here in the U.S., either our intelligence agencies are incredibly stupid, or there's a lot of politicking going around to protect the culprits. We know now that it has to be the latter.

How can we, as a civilization, continue to exist when we have so many secrets? There is a whole faction of people out there who have been duped by Republicans, and their entire system of belief is nothing more than a house of cards.

[pk_du]

2. and Fux News is already blaming Clinton Admin

assholes.

[spotbird]

16. During the first year a new administration

cannot protect the country. Who knew?

[bribri16]

24. These reports had better be vetted closely.

Here is a snipet from one analyt's comments:

"Mr. Felzenberg said staff investigators had become wary of the officer because he argued that Able Danger had identified Mr. Atta, an Egyptian, as having been in the United States in late 1999 or early 2000. The investigators knew this was impossible, Mr. Felzenberg said, since travel records confirmed that he had not entered the United States until June 2000.

"There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report," Mr. Felzenberg said. "This information was not meshing with the other information that we had." "

[shraby]

3. Big question I can see is why didn't the

Pentagon notify the FBI about Atta?

[dooner]

4. yes, that's the question all right.

[wli]

5. I expect more dirt to come out surrounding that question.

Well, if more dirt comes out before Cheney declares martial law.

[fearnobush]

6. I believe Keith Olbermann tonight said that the FBI was informed.

It was one of his 2 second bits of real news.

[StrafingMoose]

11. Well, according to the story on GSN they did try...

But the DoD lawyers said "no" since Atta had a green card, and they didn't want to send the FBI after a greencard holder. So the info was never send to the FBI. Lame eh?

http://www.gsnmagazine.com/aug_05/dod_lawyers.html

[Marine Inspector]

26. Well, according to the story on GSN they did try..."

Atta never had a "Green Card". He was here on a visa.

[DeepModem Mom]

29. Thanks for posting, Marine -- and welcome to DU!

[leesa]

30. The DOD was still busy giving him flight lessons so they could later

pretend he was involved in 9-11. Maybe he was, but there has been no investigation and many of the others they accused were alive and well after 9-11. I think he was set up and was just a passenger or not on there at all.

[DFWdem]

15. They weren't allowed to

If my understanding is correct, the dept. of defense is not (or was not) allowed to share intelligence information with domestic law enforcement because Atta et al had their green cards and were in the US legally. DOD lawyers advised team Able Danger to cover the faces of the people in their report and not give all the information in their report to the FBI because of a gov't policy that forbade them from sharing that info with the FBI.

[leveymg]

17. Your understanding is wrong. That was not gov't policy

For one thing, DoD knew damned well that Atta, Al-Shehhi, Al-Midhar and Al-Hazmi were not "U.S. persons" (citizens or lawful permanent residents, aka "green card" holders) because Able Danger had compiled its data from entry records provided by INS, which clearly showed them all coming in as non-immigrants with visas.

This is basic national security and immigration law. Anyone who's familiar with FISA warrant and information sharing guidelines in place at that time knows this is a lame-ass cover story. CIA, DOD and other intelligence agencies could do all the electronic monitoring they wanted on the al-Qaeda guys, AND SHARE IT WITH THE FBI, because they were all non-resident aliens, exempt from FISA warrant requirements. DoD lawyers didn't get this one wrong. It's a flimsy CYA cover now being resurrected to blame Clinton.

Now, let me tell you why things got complicated, and stickies were applied. The surveillance of the al-Qaeda cells was just part of an enormous ongoing multi-agency monitoring operation of international terrorism, WMD proliferation, arms and drug dealing, political influence peddling, and money laundering. The Army's Able Danger Intelligence unit apparently had access to a lot this data, which also included data gained from warrantless taps of the communications of US persons and non-US persons, alike.

Intelligence analysts were supposed to separate this out, and obtain FISA warrants where US persons were involved to continue these intercepts. But, the agencies by and large didn't bother to seek warrants -- which is a violation of the law. That made this data the fruit of illegal searches, and the FBI didn't want to touch it, for fear that it would ruin its criminal investigations that overlapped the CIA and DIA's domestic operations.

Furthermore, the FBI was uncovering a maelstrom of terrorist groups, Saudi financiers, Israeli espionage, corrupt politicians, and corruption within the US intelligence agencies. This is what Sibel Edmonds blew the whistle about. The whole thing got too hot, and the bureaucracy overloaded. For its own reasons, the Bush Administration shut down much of the remaining counter-terrorism apparatus. By 2001, it was widely known within law enforcement and intelligence circles that some strange things were going on at the FISA court, and within FBI counter-terrorism. The number of FISA warrant requests actually declined during the 18 months leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

For more info, please see: THE CRIMES OF 9/11 (Part 4):
Bush White House, CIA, FBI Bungled Risky Warrantless Surveillance Operation - 3,000 Died, http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0310/S00257.htm

The whole thing could have been avoided if the agencies had complied with the law regarding FISA warrants. But, for reasons that aren't yet completely clear, they didn't. This is an area, not surprisingly, the 9/11 Commission didn't even touch on.

[DFWdem]

18. Here's some more info

A secret US military intelligence team identified the September 11 hijack leader Mohammed Atta and three of his accomplices as probable al-Qa'eda terrorists a year before the attacks.

But its suspicions were never shared with the FBI because the military was nervous about breaking restrictions on spying on US territory imposed after the Watergate scandal.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/08/10/watta10.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/08/10/ixworld.html

Atta escaped arrest even though investigators in an Army intel program called Able Danger got the goods on him and recommended the FBI be called in to "take out that cell."

A hands-off order was slapped on the cell because, at the time, intelligence agencies were prohibited from spying on Americans, and the military believed that prohibition extended to foreigners with green cards, the Government Security News said in a story posted on its Web site.

A former Able Danger officer corroborated the details of Weldon's claims for GSN. He recalled carrying documents to the offices of Able Danger, which was being run by the Special Operations Command, headquartered in Tampa.

"We were directed to take those 3M yellow stickers and place them over the faces of Atta and the other terrorists and pretend they didn't exist," the intelligence officer told GSN.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/story/335744p-286804c.html

But Mr Weldon's remarks will fuel controversy over the opportunities that were missed by US government agencies to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

He spoke publicly about the issue on 27 June in a little-noticed speech on the house floor, and to a local paper in his Pennsylvania constituency.

He says the unit prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to Special Operations Command that the FBI be informed.

The course of action was said to have been rejected in part because the men were in the US on valid entry visas.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4135400.stm

However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because they said Atta and the others were in the country legally.

"In fact, I'll tell you how stupid it was, they put stickies on the faces of Mohammed Atta on the chart that the military intelligence unit had completed and they said you can't talk to Atta because he's here on a green card," Weldon said.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0809Sept11Hijackers09-ON.html

[Roland99]

20. What's Weldon up to here? What's the truth behind why Atta wasn't touched?

[Marine Inspector]

28. Atta did not have a "Green Card"

He was here on a visa.

[Marine Inspector]

27. If my understanding is correct

Atta did not have a "Green Card", he was here on a visa.

[mallard]

25. There are official communication links involving records,...

...specific names, dates, contact numbers, etc, but there are also off-the-record or classified links and it's very hard to believe no rumors ever reached ANYONE at the FBI because of a dead-end response from Pentagon handlers. But it's also no surprise they have relieved the FBI of heat (under the new pro admin intelligence csar) by now admitting the disconnect - in this latest version of events. It suggests bureaucratic error and still allows the blame to be averted more-or-less.

The Pentagon saying 'leave them alone' for the record in 2000 doesn't mean the information was actually ignored either. It only means that's when the word was more-or-less available to be acted on off the record - even if by other planners and fixers wanting no traces, with proven interests in arranging a huge costly and unnecessary war,
willing to contribute anonomously, perhaps with financing available.

Industry reps could have been sent out with the real players seeing the opportunity involved with enough impetus to push for - rather than prevent - attacks. Who backed these people? Who backed the war?

And didn't it go completely full circle for the Pentagon on 9/11, especially if this information really was ignored? It's like they literally bit themselves right in the ass - but certainly not by choice, one would think.


Still wondering why this 'breakin news' has taken 47 months to hit the news-stands.

[pauldp]

7. Hey if the Republicans want to go there - lets have a NEW INVESTIGATION !!

A real investigation this time whadda ya say huh?
Jeez we'd really like to know if Clinton did anything wrong so let's shit can the 911 commission report since it ommitted evidence that the evil Bill Clinton may have not acted on something, and we'll start from scratch OK? Then maybe we'll get Condi back on the stand and ask her why she lied the first time to the 911 commission, and we can ask about that check that Pakistan's ISI wrote to Atta that the first commission ignored, and we can ask about WTC7 which the first commission completely ignored and we can ask about the Bush Family's ties to the Bin Laden Family and P-Tech etc. etc. etc.

Think we can get some Republicans to go along with that? After all we wouldn't want mean old Bill Clinton to get away with something would we? So lets re-open the can of worms and see whats REALLY inside.

[DoYouEverWonder]

12. And while we're at it maybe we can put Bush and Cheney under oath

this time and make them testify separately in public. What do they have to hide?

[Frederik]

13. I like that angle

There should be bipartisan consensus on the need to thoroughly investigate any negligence on the part of the Clinton administration. Of course that means we'll need to have an independent investigation from scratch. How could the right-wingers possibly say no to that?

[drfresh]

8. That's not all they ignored.

Try Condi's scheduled 9/11/01 speech outlining national security policy... key focus: missile defense. doh

[Supersedeas]

22. a report that leaves many many things 'unstated': is it a report at all?

or just propoganda?

[GoBlue]

9. My how time flies...

seems like only yesterday that Kean and/or Hamilton were pleading ignorance to knowing anything about this info. Back to the Future anyone?

[DeepModem Mom]

23. IMPORTANT: Please see this GD thread re. Weldon's "pre-emptive strike"

from Daily Kos.

Cong.Weldon's Preemptive Strike Against the CIA

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x4315880