[lit-ideas] Able Danger
- From: JimKandJulieB@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 09:41:56 EDT
_http://www.alternet.org/story/25697/_ (http://www.alternet.org/story/25697/)
<<Pentagon Pushes to Hide 9/11 Mistakes
By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet
Posted on September 20, 2005
Will the press and the public be excluded from this week's Senate Judiciary
Committee hearings concerning a once-secret military intelligence unit called
"Able Danger" that identified four of the 9/11 hijackers in 2000?
Yes, if the Pentagon has its way. According to Fox News, military officials
have been exerting pressure to close the hearings for at least a week. But
Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Penn., is said to be resisting their
request
to classify the "intelligence information sharing" hearings, expected to
feature testimony from several Pentagon sources.
Why should you care? In addition to the fact that members of the once
clandestine intelligence unit say they identified Mohammed Atta and three other
9/11 hijackers as threats a year before the attacks, former Able Danger
analysts
also claim that they tried to turn the information over to the FBI -- but
were repeatedly ignored.
Although Pentagon officials originally cast doubt on Able Danger's very
existence, they now confirm that five former members of the unit remember
Atta's
picture or name being on a chart in 2000.
Rep. Curt Weldon -- a Republican from Pennsylvania -- has been pushing the
issue for weeks. Now he appears to have succeeded in persuading Congress to
look into what the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United
States, (informally known as the Sept. 11 Commission) knew about the Able
Danger
intelligence group, and whether the Commission ignored evidence about the
hijackers' presence in the United States.
Weldon has also been critical of the Commission for not including the Able
Danger project in its report on the attacks. But Commission Chairman Thomas
Kean maintains the panel acquired no evidence indicating that anyone in the
government knew about Atta in advance of the attacks.
"The Sept. 11 commission's statement that it does not believe a secret
military intelligence unit discovered a group of future hijackers more than a
year
before the terrorist attacks is a total denial of the facts," Weldon says.
"For the 9/11 commission to say that this did not exist is just absolutely
outrageous."
Members of Able Danger say their group identified Atta and three other
hijackers as potential members of a terrorist cell in New York City. Able
Danger
analysts Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott add that
Pentagon lawyers rejected a recommendation that the information be turned
over to the FBI in 2000. Shaffer and Phillpott also say they met with staff
members on the Sept. 11 Commission about their findings. But commission
members
say Atta was never mentioned by name at those meetings.
No one questions the credibility of Shaffer and Phillpott, but Defense
Department officials can find no documents to back up the claims, have not
found
the chart and don't even know if it exists, despite having reviewed hundreds of
thousands of documents. Since the Pentagon confirmed this month that
documents associated with Able Danger were destroyed (because of strict
regulations
governing the collection of data on foreign visitors in the United States)
this is not surprising. Nor, given the volatile subject matter, is the
Pentagon
pressure to close the judiciary hearings to the press and public.
What is surprising, however, is the fact that former members of the Sept. 11
commission roundly reject the claim that the Able Danger group identified the
hijackers so early. Commissioner Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator
from Washington, for example, dismissed it out of hand. "Bluntly, it just
didn't happen and that's the conclusion of all 10 of us," Gorton said.
Senator Specter's Communications Director says that no decision on whether
to classify the hearings or not has been made and that discussions with the
Defense Department continue. Speaking on behalf of Rep. Weldon, Communications
Director John Tomaszewski said the Congressman "would be disappointed" if
Pentagon pressure led to the closing of the hearings. "We all want to get to
the
bottom of this," Tomaszewski told me. "We need to bring these issues before
the public, not to hide them."
Maybe it will all be sorted out in front of Arlen Specter and his committee
this week. But if the hearings are in fact closed, we the people may never
know the truth.>>
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