U.S. spotted Qaeda cell before 9/11
By Douglas Jehl The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2005
WASHINGTON More than a year before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, a U.S. military intelligence unit identified four future hijackers as likely members of a cell that Al Qaeda was operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.
The intelligence unit, a small, highly classified team called Able Danger, prepared a chart in the summer of 2000 that included visa photographs of the four men, including the ringleader, Mohammed Atta.
The unit recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the FBI, according to the former official and the Republican member of Congress, Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania.
The recommendation was rejected, and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Atta and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas.
Under U.S. law, intelligence agencies may not collect intelligence on individual citizens and permanent residents. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Weldon and the former official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.
A former spokesman for the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program during a trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Atta's name. The report produced by the commission last year does not mention the episode.
Weldon first spoke publicly about the episode in June, in a little-noticed speech on the House floor and in an interview with The Times-Herald in Norristown, Pennsylvania. The matter resurfaced Monday in a report by Government Security News, which is published every two weeks and covers issues related to homeland security.
Speaking by telephone from his home in Pennsylvania, Weldon said he was basing his assertions on similar ones made by at least three other former intelligence officers with direct knowledge of the project, and he said some had first called the episode to his attention shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The account is the first assertion that Atta, an Egyptian, who became the lead hijacker in the plot, was identified by any U.S. agency as a potential threat before the Sept. 11 attacks. Among the 19 hijackers, only Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been identified as potential threats by the CIA before the summer of 2000, and information about them was not provided to the FBI until the spring of 2001.
Weldon has long been a champion of the kind of data-mining analysis that was the basis for the work done by the Able Danger team.
The former intelligence official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that he did not want to jeopardize political support and the possible financing for future data-mining operations by speaking publicly. He said the Able Danger unit had been established by the Special Operations Command in 1999 under a classified directive to assemble information about Qaeda networks around the world.
"Ultimately, Able Danger was going to give decision makers options for taking out Al Qaeda targets," the former defense intelligence official said. He said that he had personally delivered the chart in the summer of 2000 to the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Florida, and that it had been based on information drawn from unclassified sources and government records, including those of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"We knew these were bad guys, and we wanted to do something about them," the former intelligence official said.
Weldon is an outspoken figure who is a vice chairman of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Homeland Security Committee. He said he had recognized the significance of the episode only recently, when he dealt with members of the military intelligence team as part of research for a book, "Countdown to Terror: The Top-Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Terrorist Attack on America and How the CIA Has Ignored It."
Weldon said that he had discussed the Able Danger episode with Peter Hoekstra, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and that at least two congressional committees were now looking into it.
Colonel Samuel Taylor, a spokesman for the Special Operations Command, said no one there had any knowledge of the Able Danger program. Taylor said if the program existed, it was probably one that only a small number of military personnel would have been briefed on.
During an interview in Weldon's office, the former defense intelligence official showed a floor-size chart depicting Qaeda networks around the world that he said was a larger, more detailed version of one prepared by the Able Danger team in the summer of 2000.
But he said the original chart had included the names and photographs of four hijackers - Atta, Mihdhar, Hazmi and Marwan al-Shehhi.
More>http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/09/news/qaeda.php
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