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Able Danger

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Main article: 9/11 Intelligence Failures

Able Danger was a U.S. Army intelligence gathering team under the command of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command (or SOCOM).

In June 2005 Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, alleged in his book Countdown to Terror and a house floor speech that he had personally presented an Able Danger chart produced in 1999 identifying September, 11th hijackers Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi to then Deputy National Security Adviser Jim Steinberg. This allegation was picked up by national media in August 2005.

The claims have drawn denials from Pentagon officials that any Able Danger material named Atta. The claim that Atta was in the US before 2000 also conflicts with the timeline for the 9/11 attacks developed by the 9/11 Commission. Weldon has claimed that this intelligence was also provided to the Commission but Commission members Timothy J. Roemer and John F. Lehman have both claimed not to have received the intelligence.

A Time Magazine article [1] reports that Weldon admitted he is no longer sure that Atta's name was on the chart he presented and that he was unable to verify whether this was the case having handed over his only copy and that a reconstruction was used for post-9/11 presentations. Weldon gave a talk at the Heritage Foundation with a chart he described as the one handed over on May 23, 2002. [2](Time 33:33).

House intelligence committee chairman Peter Hoekstra is currently investigating the matter at Weldon's request but is reported by Time as having cautioned against “hyperventilating” before the completion of a “thorough” probe

On August 12, 2005, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, former Chair and Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission, issued a statment in response to media inquiries about the Commission’s investigation of the ABLE DANGER program. [3] They stated that the Commission had been aware of the ABLE DANGER program and requested and obtained information about it from the Department of Defense, but none of the information provided had indicated that the program had identified Atta or other 9/11 hijackers. They further stated that a claim about Atta having been identified had been made to the 9/11 Commisson on July 12, 2004 (just days before the Commission's report was released), by a U.S. Navy officer employed at DOD, but that:

The interviewee had no documentary evidence and said he had only seen the document briefly some years earlier. He 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 Department of Defense documents had mentioned nothing about Atta, nor had anyone come forward between September 2001 and July 2004 with any similar information. Weighing this with the information about Atta’s actual activities, the negligible information available about Atta to other U.S. government agencies and the German government before 9/11, and the interviewer’s assessment of the interviewee’s knowledge and credibility, the Commission staff concluded that the officer’s account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation.

On August 14, Mike Kelly, a columnist for the Bergen (New Jersey) Record, described a telephone interview, arranged by the staff of Rep. Weldon, with a man who identified himself as a member of the Able Danger team but asked that his name not be revealed. [4] In the interview the man claimed that his team had identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as likely al Qaeda terrorists operating in the United States, but were prevented from passing this information on to the FBI by government lawyers. He also claimed that he was ignored by the 9/11 Commission's staff when he approached them on two occasions to explain Able Danger's work.

On August 16, 2005 Michael Savage continued pushing this story using his radio show The Savage Nation. He interviewed Congressman Curt Weldon, and his formerly anonymous source - Lt. Colonel Tony Shaefer, an active member of the military intelligence community who worked with the Able Danger team. In Savage's opinion if Able Danger was prevented from delivering the information on Atta to the FBI, then those who responsible should also be held responsible for the deaths that occurred on 9/11.

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