Terrorist Atta Intelligence Omitted From 9/11 Report

Ah, the 'Gorelic Wall'......

She should have been booted from the Commission...it's beginning to look like a conflict of interest.

Doesn't do much for the credibility of the 9/11 final report.

Good call BrandX




You damn right there was a wall, and as BrankX has stated it was erected by Jamie Gorelic.......who was unbelievably a member of said 9/11 commission and also as Brank X correctly states, should have been "booted" from the commission and called as a witness instead of being a member of the commission.

The wall created by Gorelic and the Clinton administration contribute mightily to the catastrophe of 9/11 and now it may yet become self evident , as all truth eventually does.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/13/politics/13intel.html

9/11 Panel Explains Move on Intelligence Unit
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Aug. 12 - The Sept. 11 commission concluded that an intelligence program known as Able Danger "did not turn out to be historically significant," despite hearing a claim that the program had identified the future plot leader Mohammed Atta as a potential terrorist threat more than a year before the 2001 attacks, the commission's former leaders said in a statement on Friday evening.

The statement said a review of testimony and documents had found that the single claim in July 2004 by a Navy officer was the only time the name of Mr. Atta or any other future hijacker was mentioned to the commission as having been known before the hijackings. That account is consistent with statements this week by a commission spokesman, but it contradicts claims by a former defense intelligence official who said he had told the commission staff about Able Danger's work on Mr. Atta during a briefing in Afghanistan in October 2003.

The statement was issued by Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton after a week in which the Able Danger program, a highly classified operation under the military's Special Operations Command, rose to public prominence. The Sept. 11 commission report made no mention of the unit, disbanded in 2002, and the statement by Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton defended that omission, saying the operation had not been significant "set against the larger context of U.S. policy and intelligence efforts" that involved Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton also noted that the name and character of Able Danger had not been publicly disclosed when the commission issued its public report in 2004. They said the commission had concluded that the July 2004 testimony by the Navy officer, who said he had seen an Able Danger document in 2000 that described Mr. Atta as connected to a cell in Brooklyn "was not sufficiently reliable" to warrant further investigation, in part because the officer could not supply documentary evidence to prove it.

The leaders said the staff learned about the program in the October 2003 briefing and later sought Defense Department documents about it. But those department documents, they said, "had mentioned nothing about Atta, nor had anyone come forward between September 2001 and July 2004 with any similar information."

Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who has called attention to the program, said the commission had done too little to follow up on the information. Mr. Weldon said he would continue to "push for a full accounting of the historical record so that we may preclude these types of failures from happening again."

Among the questions left by the commission statement is whether the Special Operations Command received information about Mr. Atta and others from the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000 and chose not to forward it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as Mr. Weldon and the former defense intelligence official have said.

If verified, that would be the first indication that Mr. Atta was identified as a threat by any American agency before the Sept. 11 attacks. The Special Operations Command and the Pentagon have declined to comment, and the statement issued by the commission on Friday evening addressed only its own role in reviewing information about the program.

In an interview this week, a former senior military officer disputed that the unit members had ever presented to their superiors information that identified Mr. Atta or other suspected members of Al Qaeda. A second former officer said any information presented by the team to the leaders of the Special Operations Command would have been unlikely to be shared outside the command in the environment that prevailed before Sept. 11.

The former defense intelligence official, who was interviewed twice this week, has repeatedly said that Mr. Atta and four others were identified on a chart presented to the Special Operations Command. The former official said the chart identified about 60 probable members of Al Qaeda.

In interviews, former military officers have said the Able Danger unit was established in September 1999 by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, then the head of the Special Operations Command, under a charter issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Shelton, now retired, has said he does not recall the program; General Schoomaker, now the Army chief of staff, has declined to comment, as has Gen. Charles R. Holland, who took over the Special Operations Command in October 2000.

Able Danger Mystery Solved?
Saturday, August 27, 2005



Able Danger Mystery Solved?
Bloggers may have figured it out.
By Mickey Kaus
Updated Monday, Aug. 29, 2005,

Not so fast? Just when I thought the Able Danger claims might be explained by a conflation of one Mohamed El-Amir (a.k.a. Mohamed Atta) with another, come two potentially complicating developments:

1) Ed Epstein emails to say that J.D. Smith, the Able Danger contractor who made news yesterday (see below) did not say he relied on "public" information, but rather "open source" information, meaning information from sources not classified as secret. Epstein claims those sources could include airline passenger manifests and State Department visa applications. He has revised his post to argue more clearly how Able Danger might have culled Atta's name from these "open" sources in 2000. Update-Contra Epstein: A veteran reporter emails

open source info does NOT include airline manifests and credit card info, which is either protected by law from disclosure (like credit info in the US) or proprietary to the companies involved (and thus not usually available to investigators without a subpoena).

In any case, I'm told Smith was specifically asked at the Friday press conference if Able Danger had visa, credit or airplane info and he said they had nothing like that.

2) The New York Post comes up with a reason why the Able Danger contract to Smith's outfit was terminated--fear on the part of "military brass" that an unrelated chart on China-U.S. connections had put too much "focus on U.S. citizens." At first glance, the story seems to oddly shore up the Able Danger claims, by providing a good reason for a) the Pentagon's hostility to the program and b) the frustration of the Able Danger "whistleblowers" who have come forward. It also adds a slight Keystone Kops quality. (The Able Danger chart on China suggested "Condoleezza Rice and other prominent Americans as potential security risks.")

11:40 A.M. link

Friday, August 26, 2005

'Able Danger' Ball Advances: Fox News reports on this morning's press conference with J.D. Smith, the latest Able Danger figure to step forward. Smith, a defense contractor, claims Mohamed Atta's name and picture were on a chart on his wall well before 9/11. ... Bonus Value-Adding Info! Kf also hears: 1) Smith said the data mined by Able Danger was public data, which would seem to rule out the kind of searches (e.g. of "Arab males who applied for a U.S. visa with a newly issued passport") envisioned by Ed Epstein; 2) Smith acknowledged that the picture of Atta he claims to have seen on the chart was very grainy, but he says he recognized Atta by his distinctive cheekbones; 3) Smith maintains that Able Danger obtained the Atta information from a female researcher in California, whom he declined to identify; and 4) Smith didn't have a very good answer when confronted with the "Two Atta" theory first suggested by Tom Maguire--i.e. that the Able Danger people might have confused the 9/11 hijacker Atta with a known Abu Nidal terrorist with a near-identical name. ... That said, I'm told Smith seemed sincere. And if the Able Danger crew wasn't trying to talk to the FBI about Mohamed Atta, what were they trying to talk about? Were they just bureaucrats scheduling meetings to justify their existence? ... Take it away, Minuteman.

Update--the two El-Amirs: Minuteman delivers! J.D. Smith also said that Able Danger had gotten Atta's name by linking him to Omar Abdul Rahman, the blind sheikh implicated in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. But how could they have linked Atta to Rahman? Easy! It turns out, as blogger A.J. Strata discovered, that there are links--whether accurate or inaccurate [thanks--lawyer]--in the public domain between Rahman and a doctor, Magdy El-Amir--who may be completely innocent! [ditto]--but who has a brother named Mohamed El-Amir who has apparently been linked by Dateline--again, perhaps erroneously--to some intrigue or other. Mohammed El-Amir ... why is that name familiar? Wasn't that the same name used by Mohammed Atta at the beginning 2000? I think it was! In other words, here is a simple explanation for how Able Danger could have fingered an Egyptian with the name of the 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed El-Amir (whom we now know as Mohamed Atta). It was just a different Mohamed El-Amir. ... Why do I feel that through the power of the blogosphere we are asymptotically approaching the truth? ...

Backfill: Umansky flagged a possible El-Amir confusion last week. ...

[If the Able Danger project confused the 9/11 Mohamed El-Amir (Atta) with another Mohamed El-Amir, that might explain why that name would be on a chart. But J.D. Smith emphatically says they had the 9/11 Atta's photo. How to explain that?--ed I've been assuming that if you could account for Able Danger getting Atta's name, the photo might be explained as a case of honest memory confusion. Or maybe they managed to obtain the right photo for the wrong man!] 2:59 P.M. link

New Jaguar : It's astonishingly uninspired, as feared. If Jaguar were a separate stock, you could short it. ... 1:19 P.M.

kf senses a subtle media shift against the visionary Jon Klein. This could disrupt Klein's obvious plan to secure himself a lucrative Pew fellowship when he's forced to leave CNN.