| Copyright Ó
2005 by Rodney G. Graves, all rights reserved.
Able Danger;
Why it's time to revisit the 9/11 Commission
Recent developments have cast some serious doubt as to the objectivity,
thoroughness, and impartiality of the commission charged with
investigating the chain of events leading up to the successful terror
attacks against the United States on September 11th, 2001.
The Commission was intended to be a bipartisan (one would hope n
on-partisan) investigation into what happened. It was specifically charged
with reviewing why and how our intelligence agencies failed to identify
and preempt the threat. Once those faults had been identified, it was
further charged with making recommendations to correct the shortcomings
identified.
The Commission met, investigated, reported, and made recommendations.
Most of those recommendations have been acted upon.
Recent developments now cast a pall upon the investigation conducted by,
and thus all the fruits of, the 9/11 commission.
Objectivity
One of the few bombshell revelations of the investigation was the
declassification and revelation a 1995 memorandum
from the Deputy Attorney General. This memorandum "RE: Instructions
on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal
Investigations" was specifically addressed to United States Attorney
Mary Jo White, the Director of the FBI (then Louis Freeh), The Counsel to
the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, and the Assistant Attorney
General heading up the Criminal Division. In this memorandum then- Deputy
Attorney General Gorelick (later, Commissioner Gorelick of the 9/11
Commission) stated:
...we believe that is prudent to establish a set of instructions that
will clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the
more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures,
which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of
creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being used to avoid
procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation.
Note that this same memorandum makes specific mention earlier of the
first world trade center attack and the case of Unites States v. Rahman
et. al. as the basis on which this change in policy is predicated.
We discovered this during the public testimony of then-Attorney General
John Ashcroft, who questioned the objectivity and propriety of the author
of the policy investigating matters effected by that policy. In the debate
which then erupted, we first heard from Commissioner Gorelick herself,
then from a host
of others.
Commissioner Gorelick insisted that:
...I did not invent the "wall," which is not a wall but a
set of procedures implementing a 1978 statute (the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, or FISA) and federal court decisions interpreting it.
Which is not the point in question. The point is that then-Deputy
Attorney General Gorelick imposed "These procedures, which go beyond
what is legally required..." This is not an "invention" but
an extension; a heightening of the "wall."
The Official Report of the 9/11 Commission deals with the matter thus on
page 271):
"Jane" sent an email to the Cole case agent explaining that
according to the NSLU, the case could be opened only as an intelligence
matter, and that if Mihdhar was found, only designated intelligence
agents could conduct or even be present at any interview. She appears to
have misunderstood the complex rules that could apply to this situation.
The FBI agent angrily responded:
Whatever has happened to this--someday someone will die--and wall or
not--the public will not understand why we were not more effective and
throwing every resource we had at certain "problems." Let’s
hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions
then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL, is getting the
most "protection."
"Jane" replied that she was not making up the rules; she
claimed that they were in the relevant manual and "ordered by the [FISA]
Court and every office of the FBI is required to follow them including
FBI NY."
It is now clear that everyone involved was confused about the rules
governing the sharing and use of information gathered in intelligence
channels.
Note from this, and other items mentioned later, that every agency
questioned on the matter suffered under the same confusion "...about
the rules governing the sharing and use of information gathered in
intelligence channels."
Another item revealed at the time but missing from the report is this exchange
between then- Acting Director of the FBI Thomas J. Pickard and
Commissioner Gorelick prior to then-Attorney General Ashcroft's testimony:
Former acting FBI Director Thomas J. Pickard told the September 11
commission in a private interview earlier this year that he was
surprised that Jamie S. Gorelick is serving on the panel because she had
played a key role in setting the very counterterrorism policies being
investigated.
According to a summary of that interview obtained by The Washington
Times, Mr. Pickard said Ms. Gorelick -- who was No. 2 in the Clinton
Justice Department under Attorney General Janet Reno -- resisted efforts
by the FBI to expand the counterterrorism effort beyond simple law
enforcement tactics and agencies.
(none)
"Mr. Pickard indicated that it was a growing concern that the
international terrorism threat was 'bigger than law enforcement,' "
according to the notes from a Jan. 20 meeting at the commission's New
York office.
"Despite expression of these concerns by FBI executive management,
Attorney General Reno and her Deputy Jamie Gorelick believed that a law
enforcement approach was appropriate," the notes say.
In a footnote, the FBI employee who attended the meeting and kept the
notes wrote: "Mr. Pickard stated that he finds her 'membership on
your Commission surprising since it [the decision to counter
international terrorism with a law enforcement-only approach] was her
and Reno's policy.' "
The notes show that concerns about Ms. Gorelick's impartiality on the
commission were raised months before House Judiciary Committee Chairman
F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, called for her
resignation last week.
We also learned at the time that then United States Attorney Mary Jo
White had responded by memorandum to then deputy Attorney General Gorelick.
What we didn't find out until recently is that there were two memoranda
from White to Gorelick. The second was far more prescient, as the title of
the article revealing its existence implies: "NY"S
CASSANDRA"
PRESIDENT Bill Clinton's team ignored dire warnings that its approach
to terrorism was "very dangerous" and could have "deadly
results," according to a blistering memo just obtained by The Post.
...
This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary
walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players,
plans or activities," wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.
"The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat
terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the
intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely
necessary. Excessive conservatism . . . can have deadly results."
She added: "We must face the reality that the way we are proceeding
now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous."
Keep this in mind as we move forward to more recent events.
Able Danger
Able Danger was (or still is under a new code-name, explaining why
the Bush Administration has been so reticent to discuss the matter) a
compartmentalized Military Intelligence project run through the Special
Operations Command. The operation appears to have used essentially off the
shelf tools and publicly available databases to data mine for potential
terrorist threats. This data mining is the correlation of data from
multiple commercial sources to look for trends and commonalities. Data
mining is a common practice in commercial enterprises. Such data mining
projects are anathema to various and assorted "civil liberties"
organizations when performed by any agency of the United States
Government, and thus a political hot potato.
Able Danger reportedly
identified Mohammed Atta and three other of the 9/11 hijackers by name as
members of an Al-Qaeda cell operating within the United States.
By DOUGLAS JEHL
published August 9, 2005
WASHINGTON, Aug. 8 - More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a
small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed
Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al
Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense
intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.
In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared
a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended
to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be
shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman,
Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence
official said Monday.
The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they
said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were
in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United
States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in
intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence
agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr.
Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have
reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing
intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.
Note how closely this ties in with the nonexistant "wall" not
"invented" by then Deputy Attorney General, subsequently
Commissioner, Gorelick.
Slate contributor Eric Umansky immediately jumped in with his Atta
sight, Atta Mind article in which he questioned the reliability of the
information printed in the NY Times on the basis of it having passed
through the offices of Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA).
The next day the AP offered their own conditional independent corroboration
of the NY Times story. The 9/11 Commission demanded to know if the
Pentagon had withheld
information from them. In the same article we discover that:
The former intelligence official said he was among a group that
briefed the former staff director of the Sept. 11 panel, Philip D.
Zelikow, and at least three other staff members about Able Danger when
the staff members visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October
2003. The official said that he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta in the
briefing as a member of the American terrorist cell.
Mr. Kean, the commission head, said the staff members were confident
that Mr. Atta's name was not mentioned in the briefing or subsequent
documents from the Pentagon.
"None of them recalls mention of the name Atta," he said.
"I think if that had been mentioned, it would have been on the tips
of their tongue."
A day later the story of the 9/11 Commission changed. The staff, it
seems, had rejected
the report.
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.
We also leaned from Fox
News that:
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the Sept. 11 commission looked into
the matter during its investigation of government missteps leading to the
attacks and chose not to include it in the final report.
Nor would this prove to be the last word on Able Danger briefings to the
9/11 commission. On August 11th the AP reported:
WASHINGTON - The Sept. 11 commission knew military intelligence
officials had identified lead hijacker Mohamed Atta as a member of al-Qaida
who might be part of U.S.-based terror cell more than a year before the
terror attacks but decided not to include that in its final report, a
spokesman acknowledged Thursday.
Al Felzenberg, spokesman for the commission's follow-up project called
the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, had said earlier this week that the
panel was unaware of intelligence specifically naming Atta. But he said
subsequent information provided Wednesday confirmed that the commission
had been aware of the intelligence.
The information did not make it into the final report because it was
not consistent with what the commission knew about Atta's whereabouts
before the attacks, Felzenberg said.
In what way did it not mesh? A blogger helps us connect
those dots:
The Commissions objection to Able Danger’s Mohammed Atta datapoint
was:
"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."
There is always the distinct possibility that the other information
is wrong and it certainly begs the question of how Able Danger was able
to identify Mohammed Atta and ask to turn their evidence over to the FBI
if he was not in the country.
But this is the second occasion in which the 9-11 Commission has
pooh-poohed other evidence concerning Atta that didn’t
"mesh" with their desired storyline.
The elephant in the corner of the 9-11 Commission’s report has
always been the perfunctory way in which they dismiss the allegation
that Atta met with the intelligence chief at Iraq’s Prague embassy,
Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, on April 8-9, 2001. This meeting was
discounted on the strength of Atta’s cell phone being used on April 6,
9, 10, and 11 and an ATM photo on April 11th and the fact that they
can’t find a record that Atta bought plane tickets with presumably any
of the 63 drivers licenses the hijackers possessed.
The Prague story would not fit the preconception that the operation
was carried out strictly by al-Qaeda without assistance of any other
government. The dismissal of the Able Danger information is inexplicable
without assuming that the Commission had decided in advance who was to
blame.
We also discovered over the course of this narrative that the Able
Danger project tried on three separate occasions (prior to 9/11/2001) to
meet with the FBI to hand over the information they had gleaned. On all
three occasions permission was refused by DoD lawyers.
It seems to me there is a rather large hole in the investigation performed
by the 9/11 Commission.
I think we need to know just how they managed to ignore Able Danger, and
what else they may have ignored as "inconsistent" along the way.
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