Officer: 9/11 panel didn't receive key information

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Officer: 9/11 panel didn't receive key information
8/17/05
WASHINGTON (CNN)

A former member of a classified Pentagon intelligence unit told CNN on Wednesday that information he tried to provide to the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks never made it to the panel's members.

Publicly identifying himself for the first time, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer said he worked this year with Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, and they determined "there was a significant amount of information that was totally deleted or not provided to the 9/11 commissioners."

Shaffer was part of the task force that supported Able Danger, an intelligence unit that was looking for al Qaeda terrorists.

The lieutenant colonel said Able Danger uncovered information in 2000 about lead hijacker Mohamed Atta by searching through public databases and looking for patterns.

Shaffer declined to be specific about what kind of documents linked Atta to al Qaeda, saying intelligence units continue to use such processes.

On Tuesday, Weldon told CNN that Shaffer set up meetings with FBI officials in 2000, but they were canceled because lawyers for the Special Forces unit -- of which Able Danger was a member -- allegedly were concerned military authorities could not legally share information with domestic law enforcement about potential terror suspects in the United States.

"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Shaffer told The New York Times on Wednesday.

In a statement Friday, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, chairman and vice chairman of the now-defunct 9/11 commission, said that Able Danger "did not turn out to be historically significant, set against the larger context of U.S. policy and intelligence efforts that involved [Osama] bin Laden and al Qaeda." (Full story)

Shaffer told CNN he had not come forward earlier because he believed there may have been a classified addendum to the commission's report or there might be some other reason why the information was not disclosed to the public.

The 9/11 panel -- officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States -- released its final report in a nearly 570-page book in July 2004.

9/11 commission learned about Able Danger
Since the allegations gained renewed media interest last week, military officials have said they were looking into Shaffer's account of the meeting requests and refused to comment further. The Pentagon also is checking into the matter, spokesman Bryan Whitman said Tuesday.

In their news release, Kean and Hamilton said the 9/11 panel became aware of Able Danger on October 21, 2003, when Philip Zelikow, executive director of the commission staff, and two staff members met at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with three individuals doing intelligence work for the U.S. Defense Department.

One of the intelligence officers urged the commission to look into Able Danger and complained that Congress had "ended a human intelligence network he considered valuable."

Kean and Hamilton said the official memorandum from that meeting does not mention that Atta's name or any of the other hijackers' names were brought up during the conversation.

"What I know is that their statement on the 12th of August is wrong," said Shafer, who said he was at the Bagram meeting.

He said commission members called back requesting more information, but when he tried to set up a meeting in January 2004, "they changed their mind about talking to me."

Separately, Kean and Hamilton said a senior 9/11 commission staffer met with a "U.S. Navy officer employed at DOD [Department of Defense] who was seeking to be interviewed by commission staff in connection with a data mining project on which he had worked."

But they said the officer's "account was not sufficiently reliable" to include in the final report.

That meeting, they said, took place on July 12, 2004, when the commission's final report already was well into its last stages -- the report was released July 22. The meeting included the senior commission staff member, another staffer, the Navy officer and a Defense Department representative.

According to the official record of the meeting, the officer "recalled seeing the name and photo of Mohamed Atta on an 'analyst notebook chart' assembled by another officer," Kean and Hamilton said in their statement.

"The officer being interviewed said he saw this material only briefly, that the relevant material dated from February through April 2000, and that it showed Mohamed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn," the statement said.

"The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document because DOD lawyers were concerned about the propriety of DOD intelligence efforts that might be focused inside the United States."

But the officer "could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification. Nor could the interviewee recall, when questioned, any details about how he thought a link to Atta could have been made by this DOD program in 2000 or any time before 9/11," the statement said.

CNN's Kevin Bohn contributed to this report.

Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/08/17/sept.11.hijackers

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BBB I heard an interview with this same person re military intel information prior to 9/11 not being passed on.

It really is a shame I hate to imagine what more lies will eventually be outed but alas the damage is done.

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Officer Says 2 Others Are Source of His Atta Claims
washingtonpost.com
Officer Says 2 Others Are Source of His Atta Claims
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, August 19, 2005; A11

The former intelligence officer who says that a Defense Department program identified Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks said yesterday that many of his allegations are not based on his memory but on the recollections of others.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who has been on paid administrative leave from the Defense Intelligence Agency since his security clearance was suspended in March 2004, said in a telephone interview that a Navy officer and a civilian official affiliated with the Able Danger program told him after the attacks that Atta and other hijackers had been included on a chart more than a year earlier.

But because he was not intimately familiar with the names and photographs of suspected terrorists, he did not realize that hijackers were listed until it was alleged to him after the attacks, Shaffer said. All of the charts that could support his claims have disappeared, he said.

"I did see the charts and I did handle the charts, but my understanding of them was like a layman," Shaffer said. "We had identified them as terrorists. . . . But even now I do not remember all the names."

The comments add to the uncertainty surrounding assertions by Shaffer and Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who have said the Able Danger group identified Atta and other hijackers as early as 1999 but was stymied by Defense Department lawyers from sharing information with the FBI. The allegations set off a wave of media reports and have prompted investigations by the former Sept. 11 commission and the Defense Department.

The Sept. 11 panel said last week that it did not find evidence to support the allegations in its files and that the Able Danger program was not "historically significant." A Pentagon official said yesterday that although the investigation into the allegations is still ongoing, "we're not finding information that substantiates these claims."

Shaffer said yesterday that his overall allegations were based on his recollections and those of two others -- Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott and a civilian employee of the former Land Information Warfare Activity at Fort Belvoir, whom he declined to identify. Phillpott did not respond to telephone messages left yesterday with the Navy and at his home.

Shaffer said that Able Danger, by analyzing publicly available databases, produced charts in "the late spring or summer of 2000" showing ties between suspected terrorists. Shaffer said that after the Sept. 11 attacks, the civilian employee showed him a chart allegedly from 2000 that purportedly identified Atta and three other hijackers.

Shaffer, who briefed the Senate Judiciary Committee on his allegations yesterday, said he recognized the charts from his work as a liaison between the DIA and Able Danger. But he said he is relying on the word of Phillpott and the civilian employee, who pointed to one of the charts and said, "We had them."

Phillpott told the Sept. 11 panel in July 2004 that he recalled seeing Atta's name briefly on an Able Danger chart in spring 2000, which was before Atta obtained a visa and entered the United States. The commission, noting a lack of supporting evidence, said Phillpott's account "was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation."

The furor over Atta began earlier this summer with a little-noticed paragraph in Weldon's book, "Countdown to Terror," which focuses on the claims of an Iranian informant that the CIA has deemed a fabricator. Weldon writes that during a meeting with Stephen J. Hadley, then the deputy national security adviser, he presented a chart "developed in 1999" by the Able Danger program that "diagrammed the affiliations of al Qaeda and showed Mohammed [sic] Atta and the infamous Brooklyn Cell."

Time magazine reported last week that Weldon said he is no longer sure that Atta was included on the chart he gave Hadley. But Weldon's chief of staff said yesterday that Atta was on the chart and that it was produced in 1999. Representatives for Hadley, who is now President Bush's national security adviser, have declined to comment on Weldon's claims.

Weldon did not respond to a request for an interview yesterday.

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Second Officer Says 9/11 Leader Was Named Before Attacks
Did the Pentagon shred any evidence of what the two Officers are reporting to cover up the evidence?---BBB

August 23, 2005
Second Officer Says 9/11 Leader Was Named Before Attacks
By PHILIP SHENON
New York Times

An active-duty Navy captain has become the second military officer to come forward publicly to say that a secret intelligence program tagged the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks as a possible terrorist more than a year before the attacks.

The officer, Scott J. Phillpott, said in a statement on Monday that he could not discuss details of the military program, which was called Able Danger, but confirmed that its analysts had identified the Sept. 11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, by name by early 2000. "My story is consistent," said Captain Phillpott, who managed the program for the Pentagon's Special Operations Command. "Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000."

His comments came on the same day that the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, told reporters that the Defense Department had been unable to validate the assertions made by an Army intelligence veteran, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and now backed up by Captain Phillpott, about the early identification of Mr. Atta.

Colonel Shaffer went public with his assertions last week, saying that analysts in the intelligence project were overruled by military lawyers when they tried to share the program's findings with the F.B.I. in 2000 in hopes of tracking down terrorist suspects tied to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Di Rita said in an interview that while the department continued to investigate the assertions, there was no evidence so far that the intelligence unit came up with such specific information about Mr. Atta and any of the other hijackers.

He said that while Colonel Shaffer and Captain Phillpott were respected military officers whose accounts were taken seriously, "thus far we've not been able to uncover what these people said they saw - memory is a complicated thing."

The statement from Captain Phillpott , a 1983 Naval Academy graduate who has served in the Navy for 22 years, was provided to The New York Times and Fox News through the office of Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a longtime proponent of so-called data-mining programs like Able Danger.

Asked if the Defense Department had questioned Captain Phillpott in its two-week-old investigation of Able Danger, another Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Paul Swiergosz, said he did not know.

Representative Weldon also arranged an interview on Monday with a former employee of a defense contractor who said he had helped create a chart in 2000 for the intelligence program that included Mr. Atta's photograph and name.

The former contractor, James D. Smith, said that Mr. Atta's name and photograph were obtained through a private researcher in California who was paid to gather the information from contacts in the Middle East. Mr. Smith said that he had retained a copy of the chart until last year and that it had been posted on his office wall at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. He said it had become stuck to the wall and was impossible to remove when he switched jobs.

In its final report last year, the Sept. 11 commission said that American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks.

The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission acknowledged on Aug. 12 that their staff had met with a Navy officer last July, 10 days before releasing the panel's final report, who asserted that a highly classified intelligence operation, Able Danger, had identified "Mohamed Atta to be a member of an Al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn."

But the statement, which did not identify the officer, said the staff determined that "the officer's account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation" and that the intelligence operation "did not turn out to be historically significant."

With his comments on Monday, Captain Phillpott acknowledged that he was the officer who had briefed the commission last year. "I will not discuss the issues outside of my chain of command and the Department of Defense," he said. "But my story is consistent. Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000. I have nothing else to say."

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Washington Monthly
August 22, 2005
ABLE DANGER FOLLOWUP

Both sides upped the ante today. On the Curt Weldon/Tony Shaffer side, they are now claiming that Shaffer's original anonymous meeting with the New York Times was also attended by "members of the Able Danger team" (who apparently remained not only anonymous but entirely unreferenced). In other words, it wasn't just Shaffer talking: other members of the team were there to back up his contention that Able Danger had identified Mohamed Atta a year before 9/11.

The Pentagon, for its part, has broken its silence and says that its research so far has not verified any of Shaffer's claims and specifically not his claim that Able Danger ID'd Atta.

Somebody's lying, no? There's less and less room for any kind of fudging here.

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Looks like the whole purpose of the 9/11 Commission was to make sure everyones arse was covered to protect the Washington DC culture from having to take any responsibility.

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Brand X wrote:

Looks like the whole purpose of the 9/11 Commission was to make sure everyones arse was covered to protect the Washington DC culture from having to take any responsibility.

You mean certain democrats on the commission wanted to protect a republican administration? Shocking I say!

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Able? Not so much. Danger? You bet.
Able? Not so much. Danger? You bet.
Media Matters
8/26/05

The strange conspiracy theory that is the Able Danger story continues to befuddle journalists and the public alike. On August 24, The New York Times told us that Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott had come forward to back up the claim by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer that military intelligence unit Able Danger identified lead 9-11 hijacker Mohammed Atta prior to the September 11, 2001, attacks. But in fact, Phillpott turns out to be the source for Shaffer's claim in the first place.

Not that that would stop Fox News from getting breathless. On Fox News' Fox News Live, anchor Jon Scott reported that Phillpott "has come forward to back up claims" that Atta was identified in early 2000, while national correspondent Catherine Herridge asked: "If the documents [proving Atta was identified] are never found, will we reach a point when enough people have gone public to say it happened that perhaps the documents may ultimately not be that significant?" Who needs documents?

But somehow or other, this must all be Bill Clinton's fault, right? Of course, or nearly so. According to Fox News host Bill O'Reilly, it's all former deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration Jamie Gorelick's fault, because O'Reilly claims (falsely) that Gorelick's "involvement in building a symbolic wall between U.S. intelligence agencies and those investigating criminal activity" aided in creating "mass confusion among the agencies that are supposed to protect us" before the 9-11 terrorist attacks. That confusion, he suggested, was responsible for the purported failure on the part of Department of Defense officials to pass on to the FBI military intelligence purportedly identifying Atta.

If O'Reilly was looking for support from former Republican senator and 9-11 Commission member Slade Gorton when he had him on his show on August 22, he got a rude surprise. Gorton gave O'Reilly a scolding about his criticism of Gorelick. "We agree on a number of things," Gorton said. "I'm no defender of Janet Reno as an attorney general. But what I'm telling you is that the wall was created by laws sponsored by the Church Committee back in the 1970s. And they went all the way through until after 9-11 was over. And that nothing Jamie Gorelick wrote had the slightest impact on the Department of Defense or its willingness or ability to share intelligence information with other intelligence agencies." Chastened, O'Reilly could only respond, "All right. We'll let the audience decide, Senator."

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Pentagon Bars Military Officers and Analysts From Testifying
September 21, 2005
Pentagon Bars Military Officers and Analysts From Testifying
By PHILIP SHENON
New York Times

The Pentagon said Tuesday that it had blocked several military officers and intelligence analysts from testifying at an open Congressional hearing about a highly classified intelligence program that, the officers have said, identified a ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks as a potential terrorist a year before the attacks.

The officers and intelligence analysts had been scheduled to testify on Wednesday about the program, known as Able Danger, at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Bryan Whitman, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement that open testimony "would not be appropriate."

"We have expressed our security concerns and believe it is simply not possible to discuss Able Danger in any great detail in an open public forum," Mr. Whitman said.

He offered no other explanation of the Pentagon's reasoning.

Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and chairman of the committee, said he was surprised by the Pentagon's decision because "so much of this has already been in the public domain, and I think that the American people need to know what happened here."

Mr. Specter said in a telephone interview that he intended to go ahead with the hearing on Wednesday and hoped that it "may produce a change of heart by the Department of Defense in answering some very basic questions."

Two military officers - an active-duty captain in the Navy and a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve - have recently said publicly that they were involved with Able Danger and that the program's analysts identified Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian-born ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, by name as a potential terrorist by early 2000.

They said they tried to share the information with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the summer of 2000, more than a year before the attacks, but were blocked by Defense Department lawyers. F.B.I. officials, who answer to the jurisdiction of Mr. Specter's committee, have confirmed that the Defense Department abruptly canceled meetings in 2000 between the bureau's Washington field office and representatives of the Able Danger team.

The Pentagon had said that it interviewed three other people who were involved with Able Danger and who said that they, too, recalled the identification of Mr. Atta as a terrorist suspect. Mr. Specter said his staff had talked to all five of the potential witnesses and found that "credibility has been established" for all of them.

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The entire hearings have been cancelled....

Cycloptichorn

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You are absolutely correct that I want to fidn out exactly where the security lapses were and I am not concerned about the "F"ing politics of it.

I want the problem solved so it never happens again.

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Agreed! This is above petty politics. Something is seriously wrong with this picture.

Rummy is obviously covering up something serious to have gone to such lengths....

Cycloptichorn

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Officer: 9/11 panel didn't receive key information

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