Rep. Curt Weldon (R) Talks About "Able Danger" - Video Inside [Archive]

ehnyah

08-16-2005, 05:03 PM

by BooMan
Mon Aug 15th, 2005 at 10:10:41 PM EDT
Sometime on September 11th, 2001, some very important pieces of paper began circulating at the highest levels of government. These were the the passenger manifests for Flights 11, 77, 93, and 175 that had crashed earlier that day, killing everyone on board.

The FBI, CIA, DIA, NSA, INS, and other government agencies were tasked with running all the names through their computers, and searching through all their files, for any mention of anyone that was aboard the flights.

In the wake of the bombings, senior intelligence officials began sifting through the mountains of information that American spies and satellites had collected on bin Laden and his loose-knit organization, often called al Qaeda, or "the base" -- surveillance photos, transcripts of telephone calls, reports from CIA agents.

But the vast electronic "take" on bin Laden, said officials who requested anonymity, contained no hints of a pending terror campaign in the United States itself, no orders to subordinates, no electronic fund transfers, no reports from underlings on their surveillance of the airports in Boston, Newark and Washington.

Instead, the officials said, bin Laden appeared to have used the communications systems that the United States monitored to throw America's spies off his trail.
Miami Herald 9/12/01

We had some other clues as well. We had the recordings of some cockpit transmissions, and we had anecdotal information coming in from last-second phone calls from the planes to representatives of United and American airlines. Some of the flight attendants had given seat assignments for some of the hijackers.

:::flip:::

On September 13th, the government identified eighteen of the hijackers. On the 14th, they identified Hani Hanjour as the 19th hijacker.

Once the hikackers were identified, it stands to reason that all government agencies were tasked to accumulate any and all intelligence or information they had on the men. So far, there has only been one government agency that is known to have identified Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi as threats. That agency is the Pentagon, and more specifically, a unit of Military Intelligence called Able Danger. How much did Able Danger know?

A top-secret team of Pentagon military counter-terror computer sleuths, who worked for a special operations commando group, was well into a project to monitor al-Qaida operations.

The 11-person group called itself "Project Able Danger." Think of them as a super-secret Delta Force or SEAL team. But instead of guns, they relied on advanced math training as their key weapons. And instead of traditional spying methods or bust-down-the-door commando tactics, the Able Danger group booted up a set of high-speed, super-computers and collected vast amounts of data.

The technique is called "data mining." The Able Danger team swept together information from al-Qaida chat rooms, news accounts, Web sites and financial records. Then they connected the dots, comparing the information with visa applications by foreign tourists and other government records.

From there, the computer sleuths noticed four names - Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.The connect-the-dots tracking by the team was so good that it even knew Atta conducted meetings with the three future hijackers. One of those meetings took place at the Wayne Inn...

Atta and al-Shehhi took a room at the Wayne Inn. They rented a Wayne mail drop, too, and even went to Willowbrook Mall. Al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi took rooms at a motel on Route 46 in South Hackensack.
link

Now the government is asking you and me to believe that the members of Able Danger never shared the information they had with anyone in those first few days. In fact, they totally withheld the information from the Congressional investigation, and they only gave the 9/11 Commission generalized information in 2003. It wasn't until a couple weeks before the Commission printed their report that a uniformed officer told the Commission about Able Danger's identification of Mohammed Atta, and the Commission chose to leave that revelation out of the report.

Even Rumsfeld had no clue:

Still, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said this week that he was unaware of the intelligence until the latest reports surfaced.
Fox News

Taking all of this into consideration, we have to conclude that something is terribly amiss. If Able Danger withheld this information from Rumsfeld and from Congress, wouldn't they be afraid to come forward now and admit as much?

Wouldn't Rumsfeld be outraged and be calling for people's heads? If Representative Curt Weldon is lying or exaggerating, why doesn't someone accuse him of lying or exaggerating?

The 9/11 Commission admits that they were told about Able Danger, albeit at the last minute. Yet, that information was not shared with the full commission, and that information was not included in the report.

Why?

That Miami Herald piece (cited above) may hold the clue. The administration immediately claimed that we had no warning, no inkling, that such an attack was coming.

the vast electronic "take" on bin Laden, said officials who requested anonymity, contained no hints of a pending terror campaign in the United States itself, no orders to subordinates, no electronic fund transfers

And yet, the 9/11 Commission report is filled with reports of wire transfers in the tens of thousands of dollars, it is filled with warnings of varying specificity (including the August 6th, 2001 PDB, which warned of hijacking and attacks IN THIS COUNTRY).

If nothing else is clear, it's clear that Bush and Cheney started the cover up on the night of the eleventh. It's time for a third 9/11 Commission. This time, the administration should have no say over the membership of the committee, the investigators on the committee, and they should all take an oath to tell the truth, under penalty of perjury.

Able Danger and 9/11 | 22 comments (22 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2005/8/15/221041/605