Able Danger, Walls, and "Historical Significance"

A Navy officer recalled seeing Mohammed Atta's name 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."

Pentagon lawyers were worried about violating restrictions on gathering military intelligence on green card holders. Convoluted because the restrictions didn't apply to Atta, who had a visa, not a green card.

The 9/11 commission has concluded that the officer's account was not "sufficiently reliable", nor backed up by documentation. It's not brain surgery, guys. If the info in the document is deleted, there won't be any documentation.

Get this -- there's a second dude making the same claim. A former defense intelligence official says he briefed some commission staffers about Able Danger's identification of Atta during a meeting in Afghanistan in October, 2003.

Staffers say: we don't remember this and anyway, it's not in our notes -- no documentation.

The Able Danger program is not mentioned in the final report because "the operation itself did not turn out to be historically significant".

The commission can't document Atta's presence in the US before June, 2000. They must not know that there are about 11 million illegal aliens here right now. It's doubtful they left a paper trail of their arrival. Atta could have been in the US Feb - April, 2000 as Able Danger's intelligence claims.

Military recommendations to share this intelligence with the FBI were flat out rejected because of Jamie Gorelick's Clinton-era "wall of separation" that banned info sharing.

The "wall" prevented Able Danger's info on Atta being investigated further by the FBI. I would call that "historically significant".

More here, here.

-- LynZee