Able Danger: Team Members Spoke With Reporters

The Washington Times reports that although Col. Tony Shaffer remains the only person connected to Able Danger to willingly part with anonymity, several other sources met with the press on August 8 when the story went public, including members of the AD team. The meetings with reporters came with the explicit blessings of key Congressmen and the “tacit” approval of the Pentagon, Shaffer says:

House Republican leaders approved in advance plans by a military intelligence official to go public with details of a top-secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger. …
“I spoke personally to Denny Hastert and to Pete Hoekstra,” Col. Shaffer said. Mr. Hastert, Illinois Republican, is speaker of the House, and Mr. Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, is chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
“I was given assurances by [them] that this was the right thing to do. … I was given assurances we would not suffer any adverse consequences for bringing this to the attention of the public,” Col. Shaffer said.
Col. Shaffer said his conversations with Mr. Hastert and Mr. Hoekstra took place before he and members of the Able Danger team spoke as anonymous sources to reporters in the offices of Rep. Curt Weldon, Pennsylvania Republican, on Aug. 8.

This last paragraph gets repeated by Shaun Waterman as fact later in the article, saying that “members of the Able Danger team” joined Shaffer on at least one occasion on August 8. This should change some evaluations of this story. Now we have multiple sources, including people who had their hands on the data, telling reporters what they know about the identification of Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers over a year before the attacks. Up to now, the assumption has been that only two sources came forward, one of which (Shaffer) only worked in a liaison capacity.
This explains why the New York Times and other media ran the story despite the anonymous sourcing. It also explains some of the inconsistencies between the first reporting on the story and Shaffer’s interviews later. We had all assumed that Shaffer and the Navy captain were the only two original sources for the story. However, the original articles on Able Danger just mention “sources” as a generic term, and if the team members took part in this press conference on August 8th as the Washington Times says, then the information gleaned would have had more detail than Shaffer knew from first-hand experience.
We need to have these witnesses come forward publicly. At the least, we need the Times and other media outlets that participated in this August 8 meeting to confirm the number and nature of these sources, even without their names.

9/11 Updates: Able Danger And A New Memo

The full-court press continued on discovering why the Able Danger project did not get any attention or mention from the 9/11 Commission, and the State Department has discovered another memo that the Commission overlooked. Fox News reports that the Senate will consider open hearings on Able Danger as Col. Tony Shaffer traveled to Capitol Hill today to brief their staffers on what he knew about the project:

The military intelligence official who first spoke publicly about Able Danger, the pre-Sept. 11 task force looking for terror threats to the United States, went to Capitol Hill Thursday to brief staffers who work for Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
A congressional source told FOX News that hearings could be in the cards this fall over Able Danger’s findings and its omission from the Sept. 11 commission’s report issued last year. Neither Specter’s office nor Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who made the explosive allegations, would confirm a plan for hearings.

In the meantime, Commission members still attempt to shift blame for their lack of investigation into Able Danger despite hearing about it from two sources. Thomas Kean and Tim Roemer both point to the Pentagon for not supplying them with documentation, and Roemer also insinuates that they didn’t take either source seriously because neither brought their own documentation of the hypersensitive program along with them:

“The files are in the possession of the Defense Department, so really nobody else besides the administration can get to the bottom of it … if there exists a file on Able Danger,” said Chairman Tom Kean. …
“If Atta’s name is mentioned, you send off a host of fire alarms, neon lights, people’s hair gets on fire and you’re going to find out what that’s all about. But you also need evidence, you can’t just say here’s my recollection of something I thought I saw in a notebook. You’ve got to say, ‘Here is the chart,'” Roemer said.

Having heard this from two separate sources, one would expect that the Commission would insist on getting the data from the Pentagon themselves. When people call in tips to investigators on criminal cases, do police refuse to follow up because they didn’t provide video and fingerprint evidence when they called? Kean says that the Commission requested the data three times from the Pentagon and didn’t get the documentation they wanted, but that statement should be evaluated in light of the initial denial from Kean and Hamilton last week of any knowledge of Able Danger’s existence at all. Also, given the highly partisan nature of the public hearings in the spring of 2004 (and the presidential election), I don’t recall any Commissioner that was too shy to say that the administration tried to withhold key information from the panel. In fact, panel members made that allegation repeatedly, especially in demanding public testimony from Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice.
If the Pentagon had been that difficult about delivering documentation at the time, believe me, we would have heard about it.
The State Department also takes center stage again with a new memo showing that the Clinton Administration tried to bargain with the Taliban for Osama bin Laden’s expulsion, promising a “different kind of relationship,” insinuating diplomatic recognition:

A year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a U.S. diplomat assured a top official of Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban regime that international sanctions on that country would be lifted if it expelled Osama bin Laden, newly declassified documents show. …
“The ambassador added that the U.S. was not against the Taliban, per se,” and “was not out to destroy the Taliban,” Ambassador William B. Milam wrote in the secret cable to Washington. Milam told the Taliban official, whose name is excised from the declassified document, that bin Laden was the main impediment to better relations between the Taliban and the United States.
“If the U.S. and the Taliban could get past bin Laden, we would have a different kind of relationship,” Milam said he told the official.
At the time, Washington had no formal diplomatic relations with Afghanistan because concerns over human rights and other abuses by the militant Islamist Taliban regime.

Due to its oppressive regime and diplomatic incompetence, the Taliban actually had recognition from three nations at the time, all Islamic countries, notably Pakistan. The US opposed the Taliban on a number of criteria — human-rights abuses, tyranny, and support for terrorism being among them. An offer that implied diplomatic recognition would have been considered extraordinary and may have created a huge headache for the Clinton administration, but could have disrupted 9/11 had it been successful.
Of course, once again the 9/11 Commission’s final report makes no mention of this overture. I wonder what we will find tomorrow that the Commission overlooked.
UPDATE: Tom Maguire keeps up with today’s developments. Like him, I find the time-based arguments against the Able Danger information rather weak. I also think that the Pentagon’s delayed response has more to do with an upcoming admission that they can’t find any of the relevant documentation now — just a hunch.

Able Danger: Kean Punts

Thomas Kean, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, has once again changed directions on the Able Danger program. As the New York Times reports this morning, the effect of Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer going public with his Able Danger information has forced Kean to punt the entire mess back to the Pentagon, backing away from last Friday’s detailed defense of the Commission’s dismissal of the intelligence:

The chairman of the Sept. 11 commission called on the Pentagon on Wednesday to move quickly to evaluate the credibility of military officers who have said that a highly classified intelligence program managed to identify the Sept. 11 ringleader more than a year before the 2001 attacks. He said the information was not shared in a reliable form with the panel.
The chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, offered no judgment about the accuracy of the officers’ accounts. But he said in an interview that if the accounts were true, it suggested that detailed information about the intelligence program, known as Able Danger, was withheld from the commission and that the program and its findings should have been mentioned prominently in the panel’s final report last year.
“If they identified Atta and any of the other terrorists, of course it was an important program,” Mr. Kean said, referring to Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian ringleader of the attacks. “Obviously, if there were materials that weren’t given to us, information that wasn’t given to us, we’re disappointed. It’s up to the Pentagon to clear up any misunderstanding.”
In a statement last week, Mr. Kean and the vice chairman of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton, said that Able Danger, a computerized data-mining operation run from within the Defense Department’s Special Operations Command, “did not turn out to be historically significant, set against the larger context of U.S. policy and intelligence efforts.”
But Mr. Kean suggested Wednesday that the statement would need to be revised if information from officers involved in Able Danger proved to be true.

Once again, the Commission dissembles somewhat. Shaffer has explicitly stated, on the record now, that the Commission’s staffers did hear that Able Danger identified Mohammed Atta and three of the 9/11 hijackers as early as 15-18 months before the attack. In fact, two different people told them at least once each: Shaffer in October 2003, and an as-yet unidentified Navy captain in July 2004. Shaffer even tried to follow up with the Commission to give them more information in January 2004, but found them uninterested in the evidence.
It’s nice to see Kean acknowledge that any data that identified Atta prior to the attacks is self-evidently an important line of investigation to follow. Why didn’t anyone believe that before all of this became public?
The Pentagon, meanwhile, has not yet issued any definitive statement on Able Danger. Media outlets and anonymous sources have expected one since last weekend, always speculating that the statement would come out the next day. It appears that the Pentagon also has been taken by surprise and may need more time to unravel Able Danger, or it may just need more time to establish the authorization and funding for such an extensive data-mining program. My guess is that Congress never authorized such a program, and probably neither did the Clinton White House. That will make Able Danger somewhat embarrassing to top brass and may also explain their reluctance to coordinate information between Able Danger and law-enforcement agencies.
No matter. The time for sheepishness and squeamishness has long passed. The Pentagon needs to get the records together and provide them to Congress along with a public statement that confirms or denies Col. Shaffer’s account. The Commission, meanwhile, needs to quit issuing statements and let Congress and the White House get to the bottom of their failure, to determine whether it came from incompetence or corruption.
UPDATE: The 9/11 families will not find themselves mollified by Kean’s blameshifting:

A coalition of family members known as the Sept. 11 Advocates blasted 9/11 commission leaders Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton for pooh-poohing Able Danger’s findings last week as not “historically significant.”
“They somehow made a determination that this was not important enough. To me, that says somebody there is not using good judgment. And if I’m questioning the judgment in this one case, what other things might they have missed?” Mindy Kleinberg, a member of the Sept. 11 Advocates, told The Post.
“I don’t think you can understate the significance here. You’re talking about the four lead hijackers. If we shared information and did surveillance on them, there is no telling what we could have uncovered and what we could have thwarted. I think we do need a new commission, and that’s really sad.”

That statement from last Friday was nothing more than an empty bluff, a last stand that depended on Able Danger sources remaining anonymous. Col. Shaffer’s courage in jeopardizing his career to call this bluff has blown the Commission’s credibility away entirely. Not only do we need an investigation into Able Danger and the Commission, but as Ms. Kleinberg suggests, we need to re-investigate 9/11 and the entire Islamofascist war against America, this time from scratch and without preconceived notions revolving around turf protection and election-year politics.

Germans Uncovered Iraqi Spy Ring During 9/11 Planning (Updates & Bump)

The Daily Standard has just published my latest column, which reveals to those who missed my earlier post on the arrests of two Iraqi spies in Heidelberg during February 2001. The discovery of these agents, especially given the time frame, should set off warning bells about potentially devastating connections to the 9/11 plot:

In the years following the 9/11 attacks, there has been much argument about the nature of Saddam Hussein’s connections to terror. How could the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission fail to consider this, given the other activity occurring in Germany during this period:
* Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh meet in Berlin in January 2001 for a progress meeting, around the same time German counterintelligence claimed that they picked up the Iraqi trail.
* Ziad Jarrah, another of the crucial al Qaeda pilots, transits between Beirut and Florida through Germany twice during the 2000-2001 holiday season, flying back to the United States at the end of February.
* Marwan al-Shehhi disappears in Casablanca, then constructs a cover story about living in Hamburg.
In fact, the Commission report notes that three of the four al Qaeda team leaders (excepting Hani Hanjour, who had at that time just begun his pilot training) interrupted their planning to take foreign trips (page 244). Why would these men interrupt their preparations in this manner? Traveling in and out of the United States presented a risk–a manageable risk, as events proved–but having three of the four team leaders outside of their established cells at the same time looks unnecessarily foolhardy from al Qaeda’s point of view. It also appears to be the only time after their first entry into the United States that this travel occurred. All three had some German connection to their trips. In fact, Jarrah left Germany the same week that the Germans captured the Iraqi agents.

The 9/11 Commission never mentions these arrests, nor the discovery of an Iraqi espionage operation involving several German cities during the same weeks that most of the 9/11 plotters traveled into or through Germany. In fact, no one has followed up on the arrests at all.
For a commission that chided two administrations about failing to connect dots, the Omission Commission appears to have left more than a few dots off the map. We need to find out whether the CIA and/or the FBI knew about this, as reported by al-Watan al-Arabi later in March, whether they gave that information to the Commission — and if they did, why they never mention it once in their report. At best, it leaves the final report with yet another crippling gap in its credibility. At worst, it looks like someone has something to hide.
BUMP: To top, 7:30 am.
UPDATE: Austin Bay wants a presidential statement, hopefully announcing a White House inquiry into Able Danger. I agree; it would help to have George Bush in front of this issue, since I doubt Congress will do it unless forced into it.
UPDATE II: CQ reader Murph notes another point that got left out of the Commission report, this one from a book by a former CIA officer:

In a book called The CIA At War, Inside the Secret Campaign Against Terror, by Ronald Kessler, on page 257 it says:
“A 1998 report about a plot to crash a bomb laden plane into the World Trade Center originated with a police chief in the Caribbean. The chief said he had heard from Islamic militants in his country that Libyan officials were planning to attack on behalf of Iraq. The CIA considered such an attacked highly unlikely but distrubuted the report anyway.”
Captain Ed, In the 9/11 commission report, in chapter 11, it mentions in a sentence about this report but leaves out the part about Iraq. Why did they leave out “on behalf of Iraq”? Did they do anymore reseach on this report? If they did not think it was credible why did they mention it and leave out, on behalf of Iraq?

Actually, I haven’t been able to find even the single reference to this threat in Chapter 11 or anywhere else. It doesn’t appear that the Commission knew about it, or included it in the report if they did. It does appear in Kessler’s book, just as Murph quotes it.
Murph also finds a couple of hijackings in the Middle East in October 2000 and January 2001 interesting for their omission from the report. Both tried to reach Baghdad with the planes. The first hijacking successfully took a pair of Saudi hijackers to Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein refused to release them.
The second seems more interesting to me than the first, an aborted hijacking that Yemeni officals stopped. The US envoy to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, coincidentally happened to be on board — during the time when the USS Cole bombing still was being investigated. Did the Commission not know about this, or just assume it had no significance? I don’t think it would connect to the above, but it seems to me that a terrorist act involving a US diplomat might rate a mention, even just a footnote, in the report.

Able Danger: Tony Schaffer Speaks

The New York Times has a late report tonight on the Able Danger story, as one of Rep. Curt Weldon’s sources went public in order to testify to the public about the program. Colonel Tony Shaffer tells Philip Shenon that Able Danger did indeed identify Mohammed Atta as a possible member of an al-Qaeda terrorist cell by mid-2000:

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview that the small, highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger had identified by name the terrorist ringleader, Mohammed Atta, as well three of the other future hijackers by mid-2000, and had tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the F.B.I.’s Washington field office to share the information.
But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 plot was still being planned.
“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,” Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.
He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Defense Department’s Special Operations Command had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States. “It was because of the chain of command saying we’re not going to pass on information – if something goes wrong, we’ll get blamed,” he said.

Not only did Shaffer get stiffed on informing the FBI, it appears that the 9/11 Commission had less than a fully enthusiastic response to his information. He insists that he told Commission staffers about the identification of Atta when he briefed them in October 2003, despite the counterclaims of the Commission staff. In fact, Shaffer says he risked his current security clearance to go public after Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean released their last statement on Friday in order to counter the frustration their latest story change caused him.
At least we know that Rep. Curt Weldon didn’t make up the whole story. The DoD has not responded to Shaffer’s revelations, preferring to wait until it performs an internal investigation into Able Danger. The Times also reports that Shaffer is not the same officer who attempted to brief the Commission in July 2004, which establishes two separate sources for the Atta identification prior to 9/11.
Now we need to hear what the 9/11 Commission has to say next. The Times quotes Commissioner Richard Ben Veniste, easily one of the most partisan of the players, as blaming the Pentagon for not giving them the information:

A Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor, said in an interview today that while he could not judge the credibility of the information from Colonel Shaffer and others, the Pentagon needed to “provide a clear and comprehensive explanation regarding what information it had in its possession regarding Mr. Atta.”
“And if these assertions are credible,” he continued, “the Pentagon would need to explain why it was that the 9/11 commissioners were not provided this information despite request for all information regarding to Able Danger.”

No, Mr. Ben Veniste, the Commission owes us an explanation for why two different sources with the same information about Mohammed Atta’s identification got ignored by the panel. Why didn’t the Commission follow up on this? Were they so married to the Atta timeline that they could not bear to rethink it? If so, why? Blaming the Pentagon for ignoring Colonel Shaffer and the Navy captain sounds a lot like the blame-shifting for which the Commission piously blasted the Bush administration during the ridiculously political public hearings in 2004.
The Commission has a big problem now. As long as Weldon’s sources remained anonymous, they could easily dismiss them as a figment of Weldon’s imagination or worse, phantoms created to help him sell a book. Now we have at least one American officer risking his career to tell the public what we should have already known about 9/11, and what the Commission failed to tell us.
My Weekly Standard column will be out tomorrow. It will discuss another development that never made it into the 9/11 Commission report.
UPDATE: Junkyard Blog has some interesting and detailed thoughts on Shaffer’s career-threatening revelations.

The Able Danger Fox Trot

A lot of fancy stepping has occurred in the week since the first revelations of the Able Danger data-mining program at the Pentagon. After Douglas Jehl first broke the story in the mainstream media, the Commission first denied ever hearing about anything that identified Atta as an al-Qaeda operative and the existence of Able Danger. They then acknoweledged hearing about Able Danger but nothing about any identification of Atta, with specific denials coming from co-chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean. Within hours, that changed to recognition of the Atta identification coming up in a July 2004 briefing that occurred as the report was being finalized, giving them little opportunity to check out the data. Finally, the Commission generated a breathtakingly detailed rebuttal for a subject on which they had attempted to deny any foreknowledge only days earlier.
The 9/11 Commission didn’t come alone to the dance, either. Curt Weldon, whose speech kicked off this headspinning story, backtracked himself on some key details. That led pundits like John Podhoretz and Jim Geraghty to engage in some highly-understandable walkback, reverse walkback, and re-walkback as the media played ping-pong on which sources suffered the most damage to credibility.
Today the Washington Times adds itself to the dance card, finding another Pentagon source for Able Danger which corroborates Jehl and Weldon on their initial story (via Andy McCarthy at The Corner):

Pentagon lawyers, fearing a public-relations “blow back,” blocked a military intelligence unit from sharing information with the FBI that four suspected al Qaeda terrorists were in the country prior to the September 11 attacks, after determining they were here legally, a former Defense Department intelligence official says.
Members of an intelligence unit known as Able Danger were shut out of the September 11 commission investigation and final report, the official said, despite briefing commission staff members on two occasions about the Mohamed Atta-led terrorist cell and telling them of a lockdown of information between the Defense Department and the FBI.
The intelligence official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Pentagon lawyers “were afraid of a blow back” — similar to the public’s response to the FBI-led assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which left more than 70 people dead — and decided to withhold the information from the FBI.

This source also took part in the October 2003 briefing but not the July 2004 attempt by another naval officer attached to the DoD at the time. The source who spoke to Audrey Hudson for this article also attempted to rebrief the Commission in January 2004, according to Hudson, but they refused to meet with him. Staff members told the intelligence agent, “We don’t need to meet with you.”
McCarthy notes something else interesting about the Times article. Hudson reports that the Pentagon’s official response to Able Danger says that they can find no reference in their files to an Atta-led terrorist cell in the US before 9/11 — other than a few intelligence analyses that mention his name. Really? Which intelligence analyses would those be, and where did they originate and when? Most of all, why aren’t they part of the final report from the 9/11 Commission?
This story has not yet run its course, not by a long shot. Something strange has been going on with Able Danger. Either it did a much better job identifying terrorists than anyone wants to acknoweledge, or it uncovered something else that no one wants to release. Either way, Congress needs to start hauling people into the open and start asking for sworn testimony on this program and exactly how much the Commission knew about it.
UPDATE: CQ reader Lauri S. tells me that the Fox Report will feature an interview with an Able Danger officer tonight at 6 pm CT. Catherine Herridge will speak with a Lt. Col. named “Tony”, a 22-year veteran. If I get more on this, I’ll post it here.
UPDATE II: Laura Rozen reveals that “Tony” is Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer:

He served in a liaison capacity between Able Danger and the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, Florida, and he flew into Afghanistan with special ops in a boots on the ground capacity. … It’s still a bit vague as to what exactly on Atta and the “Brooklyn cell” the Able Danger team came up with, but Shaffer did tell Spencer that the Able Danger team briefed then Special Ops commander, now Army Chief of Staff Pete Schoomaker on their findings. Shaffer also told Spencer that he had met with Pentagon intel czar Stephen Cambone in the E-ring today about the Able Danger issue, so clearly the Pentagon is paying attention.

Weldon’s sources are moving into the open on their own. That sounds like a positive development, but we’ll know more about it after the interview tonight. (via John Podhoretz, who is no wimp, folks — just a guy who feels justifiably irritated when sources start waffling.)

Able Danger: More From Other Sources

Jim Geraghty has more information on Able Danger, apart from Curt Weldon, whose own credibility appears to have suddenly started listing to starboard. Mike Kelly from the Bergen Record got to Weldon’s source and started asking questions directly to one of the Able Danger team:

A former member of the military intelligence team told me in an interview that it had enough data to raise suspicions. “But we were blocked from passing it to the FBI.”
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. That’s how close all this was – to us and to being solved, if only the information had been passed up the line to FBI agents or even to local cops. …
The Able Danger sleuth, whose interview with me was arranged by the staff of Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., asked that his name not be revealed so he could maintain his top-secret counter-terror role. He emerged from the shadows of spying and intelligence analysis last week because he wanted to set the record straight.
One of his targets is the 9/11 commission. The commission’s staff, he says, ignored him when he approached them on two occasions to spell out Able Danger’s work.
Another target are Pentagon lawyers. The sleuth says he and other Able Danger team members became so concerned during the summer of 2000 that they asked their superiors in the Pentagon’s special operations command for permission to approach the FBI. Their superiors approached Pentagon legal experts. Those experts turned down the request.

If the Commission’s response had its virtue in its details, then Kelly’s scoop in the Bergen Record matches it. The obvious conclusion — someone is lying, either the Commission or the intelligence source for Kelly and Weldon, or possibly everyone. The Commission and Weldon appear to have enough problems with credibility, especially the former after the denials and evasions they released all week long. Congress has to step in and find out what really happened with Able Danger.

Able Danger ‘Not Historically Significant’: Commission

The Washington Post and the New York Times report extensively on the pushback from the 9/11 Commission’s two co-chairs after a week of denials, evasions, and the resulting devaluation of their project. The joint statement from Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean minimizes the Able Danger program as not “historically relevant” and that the single source who came to the Commission — an Navy officer in military intelligence — did not appear credible. From the Post:

The second person, described by the commission as a U.S. Navy officer employed at the Defense Department, was interviewed by senior panel investigator Dieter Snell and another staff member on July 12, 2004, 10 days before the release of the commission’s best-selling report.
According to the commission, the officer said he briefly saw the name and photo of Atta on an “analyst notebook chart.” The material identified Atta as part of a Brooklyn al Qaeda cell and was dated from February through April 2000, the officer 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,” the statement says, because Pentagon lawyers were worried about violating restrictions on military intelligence gathering in the United States.
But the commission statement said that because no documents or other evidence had emerged to support the claim, “the commission staff concluded that the officer’s account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation.”

This would have been reasonable, under the circumstances, if this happened as Hamilton and Kean say. One person comes to the Commission a week prior to the release of the report and says, “Wait. The Pentagon had a secret program that ID’d Mohammed Atta and three of the other hijackers sometime in early 2000.” The investigator says, “Wow! The Pentagon never mentioned that to us! Let’s see the documents.” The source says, “They don’t exist. The Pentagon destroyed them.”
That I would be inclined towards skepticism at this point would be an understatement. However, I would still follow up with the Pentagon to find out whether it was true. Such a development hardly qualifies as “historically insignificant” if it gets corroborated. The identification of the core group of terrorist pilots more than a year before the attacks would have tremendous significance — to the historical record, as well as to the conclusions drawn.
And yet, from the Kean/Hamilton statement, no one on the Commission or its staff even bothered to pick up a phone to check with the Pentagon on Able Danger — not even when their source turns out to be an officer in the regular Navy attached to the DoD. They dismissed him because of two reasons: he didn’t bring documentary evidence, and his recollection of when Atta became known didn’t fit the timeline on which they had already agreed — which put Atta in the US no earlier than June 2000.
On the first point, it seems to me that such an approach to witnesses demonstrates a certain laziness on the part of the Commission. Witnesses who bring their own documentation obviously make it easier on investigators, but to dismiss those who have none in a case involving the highest type of classified data is ludicrous. Investigators have the responsibility to locate documentation, or at least follow up to find it if they can. People working in the intelligence field do not get handed fliers and bulletins containing top-secret information so they can maintain personal files of it at home and on the road. The notion that an officer in military intelligence bringing an insider tip has to bring his own evidence as a cover charge severely limits the effectiveness of any inquiry.
On the second point, it’s also worth noting that the Commission had an unusual standard for determining Atta’s timeline — they relied on him to travel under his own name at all times. I discussed this in earlier posts, but it bears repeating: terrorists can change tactics situationally. All the report can possibly state was the first time Atta traveled under his own name or any known aliases, and then only if immigration records picked it up. It doesn’t take much imagination, however, to think that he may have traveled here under a separate cover once or twice first to test the system and to do preliminary research for his mission.
Finally, as I posted last night, Hamilton himself has some pretty severe credibility problems himself. After the Commission spokesman denied that Able Danger ever came to their attention, Hamilton himself said, “The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell. Had we learned of it obviously it would’ve been a major focus of our investigation.”
Three days later, we find out that not only did staffers hear about it, they dismissed it without investigating it at all. Hamilton also wants us to believe him when he says that another witness who claims to have briefed them on Able Danger in October 2003 is also unreliable. Somehow Hamilton does not fill me with confidence in his own credibility, nor should he do so with anyone else after this week of lies and evasions.
Curt Weldon, who started this ball rolling, has stated that his sources have offered to testify publicly, under oath, to Congress about Able Danger and what they told the 9/11 Commission. That sounds like a good idea, and Congress needs to make that happen immediately.
UPDATE: Jim Geraghty at TKS reminds us of some other statements from the Commission earlier this week, including Kean:

“I think this is a big deal,” said John F. Lehman, a Republican member of the commission who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration. “The issue is whether there was in fact surveillance before 9/11 of Atta and, if so, why weren’t we told about it? Who made the decision not to brief the commission’s staff or the commissioners?” …
“If this is true, somebody should be looking into it,” said Thomas H. Kean, the commission chairman …

Again, those statements came on August 9th. Three days later, the two co-chairs suddenly remember not only the mention of Able Danger but that they gave it due consideration and serious thought before rejecting it as unreliable and historically insignificant. It certainly is possible, but it sounds pretty strange — and it sounds a lot more like a self-serving reversal.

Commission: Able Danger Only Told Us About Atta

The AP reports tonight that 9/11 Commission co-chairs Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton have changed their story yet again. Now the two say in a joint statement to the press that they do recall hearing that Able Danger had identified Atta, two days after Hamilton categorically denied it — and for a man who had supposedly never heard of Able Danger, Hamilton’s recall of detail of the briefing appears impressive (via Tom Maguire):

In a joint statement, former commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said a military official who made the claim had no documentation to back it up. And they said only 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta was identified to them and not three additional hijackers as claimed by Rep. Curt Weldon, vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees.
“He could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification,” the statement said of the military official.
They also said no else could place the other three hijackers with Atta in a purported terror cell code-named “Brooklyn” during the time period cited by Weldon.

Compare this to what Hamilton said on August 9th:

“The Sept. 11 commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of surveillance of Mohammed Atta or of his cell,” said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. “Had we learned of it obviously it would’ve been a major focus of our investigation.”

Now we hear Hamilton say the exact opposite. The Commission heard about Atta — they just ignored it, claiming now that the evidence shown at the briefing did not match up with their timeline for Atta’s first entry to the US. That would have been an interesting claim had Hamilton made it when first asked. Now, with his categorical denial still ringing in our ears, it sounds more like another excuse to wriggle out of a debacle they themselves made.
The only development this gives us is an admission that the Commissioners themselves had awareness of Able Danger’s assessment of Atta as a terrorist a year before the 9/11 attacks — and they didn’t bother to mention it at all in their report, not even to refute it as contrary information that they could refute. For a group which wound up berating two administrations for only listening to that evidence and intelligence which fit their policies, it at least smacks of the pot calling the kettle black. At worst, it smells much worse than that.

One More Look At Prague (Updates With Corroboration)

Read the updates for corroborating links.
My last post reviews a rather obscure report on the discovery of an Iraqi spy ring in Germany in February or March of 2001, resulting in the capture of two Iraqi Intelligence Services agents. The Arabic newspaper that reported it in March 2001 also reported that the CIA tipped the Germans to the Iraqi operation and that the FBI and CIA interrogated the two captured spies. I looked around for any reporting on this story in the American or British mainstream media (anything in English), even in Nexis, and came up empty.
This story may not pan out. However, it apparently has never been denied, and if it is true, one would have expected the CIA and FBI to bring this to the attention of the 9/11 Commission — or at least the existence of the report itself. The 9/11 report makes no mention of this development at all.
I explained in the last post how this could change the notion that Iraq had no operational involvement in 9/11, as the main effort of the Hamburg cell at that time was supporting Atta for the upcoming attacks. Instead, let’s take a look at the effect this would have had on Atta and his ability to get the logistical support he needed from his cell in Germany, now apparently compromised. After all, Mohammed Atta still had to get sixteen terrorists safely into the US using the Hamburg cell as his line of communication to the AQ network at the time of the purported trip to Prague.
Until Atta could make a new connection to AQ in Europe, he could not travel or communicate back to Germany. To do so would be an unpalatable risk to his cover. Instead, Atta would need to go somewhere that could give him new logistical support and rebuild his lines of communication. When the time came to go to the well again, Atta had to carefully relink to the network.
How does Atta reconnect to his support? With the operation compromised, he won’t feel safe with either going back to Germany or traveling under his own name until he knows how badly the operations have been disrupted. Instead, he uses a safe cover — one he likely would use only once — to make his way to another station to re-establish his logistical support. Prague would be close enough to the situation for others in the network to have assessed the damage done by the Germans and to decide whether to abort the mission altogether.
Again, if the Al-Watan Al-Arabi reports turn out to be correct, this would explain why Atta felt the need to travel under an assumed identity, and why he went to Prague rather than Hamburg to meet with Iraqi agents. That meeting would be necessary for Atta to determine if he and his team should continue to make plans and whether to bring in the “muscle” hijackers, which happened a short while afterwards. If the Germans had found out about their operation and discovered his identity, then sending the other hijackers to the US could have meant walking into a trap.
This would explain why Atta changed his usual routine and traveled under an assumed identity. After reconnecting to the network and getting assurances that the network was secure, he could use his real identity on his next trip.
Does any of this constitute proof? No. But the evidence we see this far fits this theory, and if the Al-Watan Al-Arabi report is true, the 9/11 report doesn’t. We need to start rethinking this from the beginning, dump the preconceived notions, and gather all of the evidence together to understand what really happened to us on 9/11.
UPDATE: Thanks to CQ reader Elly, we have multiple media sources for confirmation. The Germans arrested the Iraqi intelligence agents on February 25th and 27th. First the BBC:

Two Iraqis have been arrested in Germany on urgent suspicion of spying.
The German federal prosecutor’s office said that the two were suspected of working for an Iraqi intelligence agency.
“The two accused are suspected of having carried out missions on behalf of an Iraqi intelligence agency in various cities in Germany since the beginning of the year 2001,” a brief statement said.

Next, Reuters reported it a few hours later (Newsmax had essentially the same report the next day):

German state prosecutors said on Thursday federal police had arrested two Iraqis on suspicion of spying.
The two men were detained in Heidelberg, according to a German television report. German officials declined to comment on the report. … “They are suspected of carrying out missions for an Iraqi intelligence service in a number of German towns since the beginning of 2001,” said a spokeswoman for state prosecutor Kay Nehm in Karlsruhe.

Now we have some corroboration for the existence of an Iraqi espionage operation in Germany. Reuters speculated that the spies may have wanted to conduct sabotage operations against American forces in Germany in retaliation for joint Anglo-American attacks that week on Iraqi radar sites. However, all reports mention that the spies had conducted operations in several German cities — which makes it sound like they had a network-support mission going at least in parallel to whatever else they might have done on their own.
Two weeks later, the Arabic newspaper in Paris might have had better information on the activity of the Iraqi spies, as well as the involvement of the CIA and the FBI. Now that we have some confirmation of the arrests, we need to find out whether any American security services did in fact question these Iraqi agents in Germany, what they found, and whether that information came to the 9/11 Commission. It sure didn’t make it into their report.