ABLE DANGER, Part One

There have been many conflicting stories about what was involved in Able Danger, a Pentagon effort to use data-mining techniques to track Al Qaeda. There have been numerous efforts to prevent the public from knowing about Able Danger. It is hard to believe that Al Qaeda and many foreign intelligence agencies do not have almost complete information on the project. Why are American citizens kept in the dark? We already knew that US intelligence people had been tracking the future highjackers in Hamburg, Germany for years, and that Al Qaeda Cells in Brooklyn and in the west had also long been in the sights of the FBI. With the revelation of the Able Danger project, it becomes difficult to escape the conclusion that the federal government had more than enough information to prevent 9-11. The 9-ll commission either was not told about Able Danger or it chose to ignore the information because it would have derailed its major conclusions. Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton said the conclusions would have been different had they known about Able Danger, but he is the man who presided over what seemed to be a clumsy cover up of an October 19, 1980 deal with Iran to hold 52 hostages until after the U.S. election.

In 1999, the Pentagon Special Operations Command in Tampa established Able-Danger, a secret program, to gather information on Al Qaeda. It was begun on the order of General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, and its driving force was General Peter Schoomaker, another four star officer. Some of the advanced software employed were Spire. Starlight, and Parentage. The project purchased information from various brokers, including some who had kept track of people entering mosques around the world. Sometimes the work simply involves thoroughly mining and analyzing information available on the internet. The data was processed by civilian contractors, most important of whom was Raytheon. Able Danger worked closely with a Defense Intelligence operation called Stratus Ivy and the Army Information Dominance Center, but the CIA refused to work closely with the new project. The operation was seen as so promising that then Major Anthony Shaffer briefed the jaunt chiefs of staff twice and CIA Director George Tenet once. The projects day-to-day operations were run by Navy Captain Scott Phillpott.

By 2000, Able Danger identified Mohammed Atta, the architect of 9-11, and three others as members of the cell that attacked the complex in 1993 and as part of the Hamburg, Germany Al Qaeda terrorist cell. .Email Salem, an FBI informer, had warned that some sort of attack was coming, but was driven off before he could provide better information. There was clear evidence linking Atta to Sheik Omar Adbel Rahman, who was behind the 1993 bombing. Atta would mastermind the 9-11, and the other three were also among the hijackers. They knew that Atta and the three others were also tied to the Brooklyn cell of Al Qaeda, but they did not know if they were in the United States. They also identified four Al Qaeda cells outside of the United States. Tracking them in the United States was not their mission, so it became urgent for them to pass what they knew to the FBI. Pentagon superiors refused to permit the information to be passed on. However, it now seems clear that other US agencies knew that Mohammed Atta was in Florida before 9/11.