New Times Article Here (not
covered in this post). Keep this DoD statement in mind while going through this
post - if you can stay awake long enough to!
said a Pentagon spokeswoman,
Air Force Lieut. Col. Ellen Krenke. “Clearly there was information that was
developed through this program, but it is unclear what was provided to the 9/11
Commission.”
Original Post Starts
Since the historic posts have become too cumbersome, and there
have been some new information, I decided to re-align the timeline that focuses
in the summer of 2000. Able Danger has done one thing for me, it has rekindled
my curiousity about Sandy Bergler’s accidental theft and destruction of
documents from that time. So I wanted to get more detail from the 9-11 report
as well. Sorry for the length, but it is better to pull out the pertinent text
than try and wade through the documents.
1993-1997
In the beginning, there was Bin Laden and AQ, and here
is a synopsis of how the CIA saw the threat emerge by Deputy Executive Director
and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence, Christopher
Kojm:
In 1996, as an
organizational experiment, undertaken with seed money, the Counterterrorism
Center at the CIA created a special issues station devoted exclusively to bin
Ladin
…
The CIA believed that bin Ladin’s move to Afghanistan in May 1996 might be a
fortunate development.
…
The CIA definitely had a lucky break when a former associate of bin Ladin
walked into a U.S. Embassy abroad and provided an abundance of information
about the organization.
…
By early 1997, the UBL station knew that bin Ladin was not just a financier but
an organize of terrorist activity.
We will stop here, because this is the stage Bin Laden is
sufficiently noteworthy that all other mentions of connections to him should
raise flags.
1997-1998
Bombings in Africa drive the administration to focus on Bin
Laden. From Sandy Bergler’s testimony
After the bombings of our
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998, the first time we had
established bin Ladin’s role in attacks against Americans, getting bin Ladin
and stopping al Qaeda became a top priority. As has been reported, the
President gave the CIA broad, lethal and unprecedented authorities regarding
bin Ladin and his lieutenants.
Sandy lets us know here that this was the point in time where
they thought Bin Laden first attacked us. Over the next few years they realize
his attacks went further back to 1993.
Also in this time frame, Richard Clarke’s position is expanded
and made a partner to Berger’s NSC position
In 1998, President Clinton
signed a presidential directive that created a new title for the chairman of
that group [The Counterterrorism Security Group]. The chairman had
always been a special assistant to the President. That was the title.
Under the new directive in
1998, the title became national coordinator for counterterrorism.
Fall 1999 - Feb/Mar 2000
Things really kick off with the millennium and the uncovering of
a major plot to bomb LAX just prior to the year 2000. Again, from the Bergler testimony
we see they had a wave of attacks coming at them, and that they successfully
knocked them down:
In late ‘99, as we
approached the Millennium celebrations, the CIA warned us of five to 15 plots
against American targets. This was the most serious threat spike during our
time in office. I convened national security principals at the White House
virtually every day for a month. During this Millennium period, plots were
uncovered in Amman against the Radisson Hotel and religious sites, and against
the Los Angeles airport. Terror cells were broken up in Toronto, Boston, New
York and elsewhere.
These near misses caused the Clinton Administration to go into
high gear because they new it was not their policies alone that thwarted the
terrorist but some well placed luck. From the 9-11
commission staff report we have:
In a January 2000 note to
Berger, Clarke reported that the CSG drew two main conclusions from the
Millennium crisis. First, it had concluded that U.S.-led disruption efforts
“have not put too much of a dent” into Bin Ladin’s network abroad. Second, it
feared that “sleeper cells” or other links to foreign terrorist groups had
taken root in the United States. Berger then led a formal Millennium
after-action review next steps, culminating in a meeting of the full Principals
Committee on March 10. The principals endorsed a four-part agenda to strengthen
the U.S. government’s counterterrorism
efforts:
· Increase
disruption efforts. This would require more resources for CIA operations, to
assist friendly governments, and build a stronger capacity for direct action;
· Strengthen
enforcement of laws restricting the activity of foreign terrorist organizations
in the United States;
· Prevent foreign
terrorists from entering the United States by strengthening immigration laws
and the capacity of the Immigration and Naturalization Service; and
· Improve the
security of the U.S.-Canadian border.
Some particular program
ideas, like expanding the number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the
United States, were adopted. Others, like a centralized translation unit for
domestic intercepts, were not.
More details on the timeline from Bergler’s 9-11 testimony:
MR. BERGER: Let me put it in
context — first of all, I requested the after-action report. It was presented
to me in February. We had a principals meeting on it on March 10th.
What this tells us is the Clinton National Security
infrastructure is on high alert and watching everything they can - at least
that is what they say.
Now we have the odd situation, during this critical time period
in the spring of 2000, where supposedly the Gorelick ‘Wall’ stopped Able Danger
from passing leads to the FBI. Let’s see Bergler’s recollections
on the time period before and after the millenium:
.. .and I do believe it was
important to bring the principals together on a frequent basis for a number of
reasons. Things happen when the number one person is in the room. So Director
Tenet would say I’ve got a lead on so and so, and the attorney general would
turn around to a person sitting behind her and say, “Can we get a FISA on this
person?” And she’d say “the answer is yes, Attorney General.” We got more FISAs
in a shorter period of time than ever before in history.
So it seems unlikely, or unusual to say the least, for FISA to
get in the way.
Feb/Mar 2000 - Fall 2000
We know Able Danger was created in 1999, but more importantly
from the latest reporting in the Washington
Post covering on the 9-11 commission’s CYA statement, we learn when Atta
and Al-Shehhi were first sited:
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.
So the report was created sometime around the period after April
2000 covering the time of February to April 2000 and was presented at least
once in the summer of 2000 for referal to the FBI. The NYTimes
story also provides a hint to when Atta came into the country according to
Able Danger:
The former intelligence
official said the first Able Danger report identified all four men as members
of a “Brooklyn” cell, and was produced within two months after Mr. Atta arrived
in the United States.
My guess is Atta comes into the US in February 2000 - based on
the title of the report, which was probably produced in April, and from the the
statement above.
New to the timeline is the idea put forward by Ed Morrissey (here and here)
that Atta could have traveled to Prague in April to meet Iraq intelligence. A meeting
required to help get the 9-11 muscle in country. A meeting in Prague due to
concurrent arrests in Germany of Iraq intelligence agents - too close to Atta’s
normal home base of Hamburg)
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.
From a reader we find the dates of the Iraqi arrests also
overlap with the Able Danger report
The Germans arrested the
Iraqi intelligence agents on February 25th and 27th
The supposed Atta meeting with the Iraqis in Prague is April 9,
200o.
OK, so right at the time Bergler and Clarke are holding their
major reviews to step up action against AQ, especially in country, the Able
Danger report comes out with at least 60 potential targets, possibly with the
names of 4 9-11 terrorists included.
Let’s jump back to the original NYTimes
story to recall what we believe happened to the Able Danger report:
In the summer of 2000, the
military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa
photographs of the four men and recommended to the military’s Special
Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation…
So here we are, in the summer of 2000 where Bin Laden and AQ are
the top subject of the entire intel community just coming off some close calls
from the millenium celebration. And this is what one source (maybe the same
source from the NYTimes report) from another news report has
to say about the Able Danger referal:
The intelligence officer
recalled carrying documents to the offices of Able Danger, which was being run
by the Special Operations Command, headquartered in Tampa, FL. The documents
included a photo of Mohammed Atta supplied by the U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service and described Atta’s relationship with Osama bin Laden.
The officer was very disappointed when lawyers working for Special Ops decided
that anyone holding a green card had to be granted essentially the same legal
protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had amassed
about the only terrorist cell they had located inside the United States could
not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded.
Again, let’s see what Bergler recalls from this period in time
about the internal AQ threat - because there is an interesting bit of
information regarding Brooklyn in his 9-11 testimony. Ben-Veniste is
questioning Bergler on AQ in the US
… Now with respect to
sleeper cells in the United States, did you have at the time you left
government, during the transition, have any reason to believe that al Qaeda’s
efforts to position sleepers/operatives in the United States had terminated?
MR. BERGER: No. We knew from
the Millennium experience that there were al Qaeda operatives, people linked to
al Qaeda that we busted up in Brooklyn, in Boston, and I believe two or three
other places. The FBI had generally taken the position that there was not a
significant al Qaeda presence in the United States. And that was the position
that they took quite honestly, Mr. Commissioner, through the end of 2000 and
when we left, that there was not a substantial presence and what presence was
here was a sense — we have it covered. But I certainly cannot say —
How close were these people to the brooklyn cell of Atta? Was it
FBI arrogance which caused the Able Danger report to be dismissed? Did everyone
think Able Danger was wrong and the FBI had rolled up the Brooklyn cell?
Now Richard Clarke’s recollections of the time, from his 9-11
commission testimony:
MR. ROEMER: Let me ask you,
with my yellow light on, a question about the summer 2000 alert. You were
saying, the CIA was saying, everybody was saying, “Something spectacular is about
to happen” — spiking in intelligence; something terrible was about to happen.
You told us in some of our
interviews you only wish you would have known at that time, in that summer,
what the FBI knew with regard to Moussaoui, the Phoenix memo and terrorists in
the United States.
….
I would like to think that had I been informed by the FBI that two senior al
Qaeda operatives who had been in a planning meeting earlier in Kuala Lumpur
were now in the United States, and we knew that, and we knew their names — and
I think we even had their pictures — I would like to think that I would have
released or had the FBI release a press release with their names, with their
descriptions, held a press conference, tried to get their names and pictures on
the front page of every paper — America’s Most Wanted, the evening news — and
caused a successful nationwide manhunt for those two, two of the 19 hijackers.
Again, this points to a clear indication that something akin to
the Able Danger report should have lit up the alarm fires. But it is
interesting to recall the Phoenix memo also slippd by the FBI’s radar
screens at this time. Here is an interesting exchange with Ben-Veniste:
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Did you
know that the two individuals who had been identified as al Qaeda [one was
Moussaoui]had entered the United States and were presently thought to be
in the country?
MR. CLARKE: I was not
informed of that. Nor were senior levels of the FBI.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Had you
known that these individuals were in the country, what steps — with the benefit
of hindsight, but informed hindsight, would you have taken, given the level of
threat?
MR. CLARKE: To put the
answer in a context, I had been saying to the FBI and to the other federal law
enforcement agencies, and to the CIA, that because of this intelligence that
something was about to happen that they should lower their threshold of
reporting — that they should tell us anything that looked the slightest bit
unusual.
In retrospect, having said
that over and over again to them, for them to have had this information
somewhere in the FBI and not told me I still find absolutely incomprehensible.
More statements by those who were responsible that there should
not have been any barriers to a report like Able Danger’s.
Side Note: While writing this Richard Cohen, DoD Secretary,
commented on Late Edition about Able Danger. He stated their were many special
ops efforts initiated in this time period - Able Danger could be one of them,
he just not recall it specifically. He also noted a prime candidate reason for
not passsing information to the FBI would be posse comitatus. How’s that for
some real time blogging!
Another note: we do find the precise location of the Able Danger
unit in the NYTimes story. It is here in Northern Virginia, for those who may
know something about that time period and location:
The unit, which relied
heavily on data-mining techniques, was modeled after those first established by
Army intelligence at the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center, now known
as the Information Dominance Center, at Fort Belvoir, Va.
Evidence for Skeptics
All of this could also support the Skeptics Corner’s position
that the entire story doesn’t wash. I am beginning to doubt SOCOM lawyers would
feel restricted by FISA given all the high priority on AQ and the fact FISA was
being dealt with quite efficiently at this point in time.
Also for the skeptics I note this in the NYTimes story - the
chart being shown around now is not the original
During the interview in Mr.
Weldon’s office, the former defense intelligence official showed a floor-sized
chart depicting Al Qaeda networks around the world that he said was a larger,
more detailed version similar to the one prepared by the Able Danger team in
the summer of 2000.
So that calls a lot into question. And there is more reason to
be skeptical
Weldon spoke with Rep. Pete
Hoekstra (R-MI), the chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on
Intelligence, about conversations he has had with several members of the Able
Danger intelligence unit. Weldon has urged Hoekstra to investigate the reasons
why Able Danger’s revelations were not shared with the FBI. Hoekstra looked
into the matter at the Pentagon, but after several days of fruitless inquiries,
was unable to find anyone at the Defense Department who seemed to know anything
about Able Danger or would acknowledge the intelligence unit had ever existed,
explained Caso in a telephone interview with GSN.
The Bergler Connection
And now is a good time to bring into the timeline the Berger
buglary and destruction of Clarke documentation - a topic that still
interests me:
The document, written by
former National Security Council terrorism expert Richard A. Clarke, was an
“after-action review” prepared in early 2000 detailing the administration’s
actions to thwart terrorist attacks during the millennium celebration. It
contained considerable discussion about the administration’s awareness of the
rising threat of attacks on U.S. soil.
…
Officials have said the five versions were largely similar, but contained
slight variations as the after-action report moved around different agencies of
the executive branch.
And most important was Berlger’s plead details
The terms of Berger’s
agreement required him to acknowledge to the Justice Department the
circumstances of the episode. Rather than misplacing or unintentionally
throwing away three of the five copies he took from the archives, as the former
national security adviser earlier maintained, he shredded them with a pair of
scissors late one evening at the downtown offices of his international
consulting business.
Here
is some more details on the documents themselves
The documents Berger took —
each copy of the millennium report is said to be in the range of 15 to 30 pages
— were highly secret. They were classified at what is known as the “code word”
level, which is the government’s highest tier of secrecy.
…
In May, a government official told National Review Online that the report
contains a “scathing indictment of the last administration’s actions.” The
source said the report portrayed the Clinton administration’s actions as
“exactly how things shouldn’t be run.”
And this interesting insight into the documents from AG Ashcroft
in a CBS News
report:
In his April 13 testimony to
the Sept. 11 commission, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the review “warns
the prior administration of a substantial al Qaeda network” in the United
States. Ashcroft said it also recommends such things as using tougher visa and
border controls and prosecutions of immigration violations and minor criminal
charges to disrupt terror cells.
The fact the purloined and destroyed files captured the evolving
positions of this critical time period is very disturbing. This is more than
coincidental in my mind, since Berger and Clarke were responsible for all
successes and failures at this time in 2000, and the biggest failure would be
having Atta and Al-Shehhi identified and located - and then losing them to kill
3,000 people. While the skeptics may be right, the fact this could be a
revelation that was attempted to be covered up in multiple ways warrants a
serious and detailed investigation.
The calls in the blogosphere are for Weldon to get his
information out and make clear this report did cover 4 9-11 terrorists. It is
rumored he has more than one witness to testify. If so, the 9-11 commission may
not have heard from everyone. What is clear is the conditions in the intel
community at this time make it hard to believe word of an AQ cell in the US
would be dismissed. Even if Atta’s name was not in the list, does it seem
likely?
Who knows.
UPDATES:
These sentiments are echoed in commentary today from Mark Steyn
and Jack Kelly.
Steyn has som good points on the possible Prague connection brought out by
Captain Ed.
Steyn has a lot of good points
There was “no way” that Atta
could have been in the United States except when the official INS record says
he was? No INS paper trail, “no way” he could have got in?
Here’s one way just for a
start. Forget the southern border, insofar as there is such a thing. Fact: On
America’s northern border, no record is kept of individual visitors to the
United States. All that happens is that a photo scanner snaps your rear license
plate. The scanner is said to be state-of-the-art, which is to say, as one
Customs & Border official told me, it’s “officially” 75 percent accurate.
On the one occasion my own license plate was queried, it turned out the scanner
had misread it. So, just for a start, without any particular difficulty, a
friend of Mohammed Atta could have rented a car for him in Montreal and driven
him down to New York — and there would be never be any record to connect him to
the vehicle anywhere in the United States or Canada.
Would al-Qaida types have
such contacts in Montreal? Absolutely. The city’s a hotbed of Islamist cells
and sympathizers.
Fact: The only Islamist
terrorist attack prevented by the U.S. government in the period before 9/11 was
the attempt to blow up LAX by Ahmed Ressam, a Montrealer caught on the
Washington/British Columbia frontier by an alert official who happened to
notice he seemed to be a little sweaty. A different guard, a cooler Islamist,
and it might just have been yet another routine unrecorded border crossing.
So, when the 9/11 Commission
starts saying that there’s “no way” something can happen when it happens every
single day of the week, you start to wonder what exactly is the point of an
official investigation so locked in to pre-set conclusions.
For example, they seemed
oddly determined to fix June 3, 2000, as the official date of Atta’s first
landing on American soil — even though there were several alleged sightings of
him before that date, including a bizarre story that he’d trained at
Maxwell/Gunter Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. Atta was a very mobile guy in
the years before 9/11, shuttling between Germany, Spain, Afghanistan, the Czech
Republic, the Netherlands, the Philippines with effortless ease. I’ve no hard
evidence of where he was in, say, April 2000. The period between late 1999 and
May 2000 is, in many ways, a big blur. He might have been in Germany, he might
have been in Florida, attempting to get a U.S. Farm Service Agency loan for the
world’s biggest cropduster, as reported by USDA official Johnell Bryant
Well end this with a comment from Mark Steyn:
Sept. 11 happened, in part,
because the various federal bureaucracies involved were unable to process
information that didn’t “mesh” with conventional wisdom. Now we find that the
official commission intended to identify those problems and ensure they don’t
recur is, in fact, guilty of the very same fatal flaw. The new information
didn’t “mesh” with the old information, so they disregarded it.
History repeats itself, or did it?
UPDATE II:
Ed Morrissey
has a slew of new information out, including a lot of work by John
Podhoretz
UPDATE III:
If you cannot tell I am swinging like a pendulum from skeptic to
supporter you are not seeing things. Today Ed Morrissey and Geraghty and
Podhoretz fall into the skeptic’’s circle. And so I go over to the MinuteMan’s
site to be more convinces to go skeptic - and of course I find information
that puts me squarely back on the wacth-and-see fence! From the detailed, 9-11
commission response
on the first briefing on Able Danger:
The other, sent on November
25, treated ABLE DANGER as a possible intelligence program and asked for all
documents and files associated with “DIA’s program ‘ABLE DANGER’” from the
beginning of 1998 through September 20, 2001. In February 2004, DOD provided
documents responding to these requests. Some were turned over to the Commission
and remain in Commission files. Others were available for staff review in a DOD
reading room. Commission staff reviewed the documents. Four former staff
members have again, this week, reviewed those documents turned over to the
Commission, which are held in the Commission’s archived files. Staff who
reviewed the documents held in the DOD reading room made notes summarizing each
of them. Those notes are also in the Commission archives and have also been
reviewed this week.
Summary: there was an Able Danger group in the Defense
Intelligence Agency apparantly out of Fort Belvoir VA (that all makes 100%
sense). Much of the documentation reveiwed by the 9-11 commission stayed in the
DoD libraries and the commission only reviewed their notes from the time they
reviewed the documents. This means they could have missed something and have no
way of knowing they did. They need to review the DoD original documents.
More importantly, if you wanted to knock down Weldon’s story
completely you would also challenge the claim a report was generated in April
2000 covering activities from Feb-Apr 2000 - the commission did not do that.
You would challenge that SOCOM lawyers were asked to allow an alert on a
probable AQ cell in the US to the FBI - the commission did not deny this. You
would knock down the claim the SOCOM lawyers denied the request to alert the
FBI and told Able Danger to stop monitoring the people they identified in the
US - the commission did not deny this.
Since the only thing the commission is denying is they heard the
name Atta it seems this denial is incredibly focused down to a marginal issue.
Did Able Danger have a report on a cell in 2000 in the US? Did
they make a request to pass this information to the FBI? Was their request
rebuffed?
I did not hear anything about these basic questions. Sorry
skeptics - I have decided to stay out on my limb a bit longer.
UPDATE IV:
Lot’s people walking into the Skeptic’s Corner with a Weldon
Waffle posted on Michelle Malkin’s site here. Now he
claims he is not sure Atta’s name was in the report.
I think I will stay out here on the fence a few more days. I
want to see statements from Able Danger people, now we know it existed. Did the
request to alert the FBI on a cell in brookyln and were they rebuffed. One that
we see above was taken out (according to Bergler’s testimony).