Curt Weldon: Gorelick Aide Blocked Able Danger Testimony

An aide to former Clinton Justice Department official Jamie Gorelick blocked the 9/11 Commission from hearing bombshell testimony about the findings of the elite Able Danger military intelligence team, Rep. Curt Weldon said late Friday.

"The person who debriefed [Able Danger analyst] Scott Philpot was, in fact, the lead staffer for Jamie Gorelick," Weldon told the Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes." "His name was Dieter Snell."

Weldon contended: "It was Dieter Snell who did not brief the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commissioners were never briefed on Able Danger."

Weldon said Able Danger team members have been "gagged" by the Pentagon and by Defense Intelligence Agency leaders who stand to be embarrassed by their revelations.

"The Defense Intelligence Agency has people who were held over from the previous administration," he told Fox News. "They were there when [Able Danger] brought forward this information."

The Pennsylvania Republican said that besides identifying Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as terrorist threats, Able Danger had warned of the impending attack on the U.S.S. Cole.

"Two weeks before the attack on the U.S.S. Cole," he told "Hannity & Colmes, "they sensed that something was about to happen in Yemen. Two days before the attack on the Cole - and the arrival of the Cole in harbor - they warned that the ship should not enter the harbor."

"This information needs to be brought to the public," Weldon said. "We lost 3,000 people here. This cannot be covered up. This is 3,000 times worse than Watergate."

This is 3,000 times worse than Watergate

And 3,000 times worse then Plamegate!

All of this is beginning to make more sense.

Bruce Hardcastle was a senior officer for the Middle East for the Defence Intelligence Agency. When Bush insisted that Saddam was actively and urgently engaged in a nuclear weapons programme and had renewed production of chemical weapons, the DIA reported otherwise. According to Patrick Lang, the former head of human intelligence at the CIA, Hardcastle "told [the Bush administration] that the way they were handling evidence was wrong." The response was not simply to remove Hardcastle from his post: "They did away with his job," Lang says. "They wanted only liaison officers ... not a senior intelligence person who argued with them."

According to Patrick Lang, former head of Middle East intelligence for the DIA, "The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the C.I.A."

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity

Steering Group

Gene Betit, Arlington, VA
Pat Lang, Alexandria, VA
David MacMichael, Linden, VA
Ray McGovern, Arlington, VA

All friends of JOE WILSON who are screaming the loudest about PLAMEGATE (except for FORMER CIA, Larry Johnson, that is).

Bruce Hardcastle, the Defense Intelligence Agency officer assigned to Bill Luti, provides (did provide) Luti's office with intelligence briefings. But his reports are not appreciated by Luti or his colleagues, because they do not support neoconservatives' assumptions about Iraq's weapon capabilities and terrorist activities. [Salon, 3/10/04 Sources: Paul O'Neill]

a secret September 2002 report of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency informed Secretary Rumsfeld, "There is no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or whether Iraq has--or will--establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities," according to a report obtained by U.S. News & World Report. When Bruce Hardcastle, a defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Counterterrorism, explained to the Bush officials that they were misreading the evidence, according to Patrick Lang, former head of Human Intelligence at the CIA, the Bush Administration not only removed Hardcastle from his post, "they did away with his job.

One senior intelligence officer in the Defense Intelligence Agency told the committee that some officials working for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were convinced that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was behind the 1993 World Trade Center attack and may even have been involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"They did not tell us what to say," the intelligence officer told the committee. "There wasn't pressure in that sense. But you certainly had to make sure that your analysis was on target and that you were very precise in the words that you used."

At one point, the committee said, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith established a team that reviewed intelligence on the links between Iraq and al Qaeda. Feith told the committee that the team "found some things that looked very interesting in the year 2002 that apparently didn't register with people or were not given great prominence." Feith's team put together a briefing for Rumsfeld and, later, for CIA Director George J. Tenet, and then attended a meeting of intelligence analysts in August 2002 that sought to assess Iraq's links to terrorism.

Anthony Cordesman, a national security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, criticized the report for failing to investigate the question of pressure on analysts more deeply. "I know of DIA senior officers pressured out of the Pentagon, and younger analysts who left the community over political pressure," he said in an e-mailed assessment. He said that the committee also failed "to examine the fact that the intelligence community almost always responds to the user's demands and perceptions."

The committee's report said that it made repeated calls for analysts to step forward and reveal whether they were pressured by administration officials, and that the committee sought out and interviewed analysts who had been identified in news reports. Bruce Hardcastle, a senior DIA official for Middle Eastern affairs, was interviewed after a report in The Washington Post said he avoiding meeting with Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William J. Luti because he sharply disagreed with Luti over the imminence of the threat posed by Iraq.

But Hardcastle denied the Post account, telling the committee his dispute with Luti was not over Iraq but concerned the use of the word "assassination" to describe the killings of terrorist leaders by Israeli Defense Forces. He said he did not experience pressure to change assessments on Iraq, but he added: "Generally it was understood how receptive [Defense policy officials] were to our assessments and what kind of assessments they would not be receptive to."

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Upon her retirement, Kwiatkowski took her story to Jeff Steinberg, editor of the Executive Intelligence Review, the journal of Lyndon LaRouche's movement. Pat Lang, former chief Middle East analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, circulated Kwiatkowski's deposition to Steinberg in a September 16, 2003, e-mail in which he carbon-copied, rather than blind carbon-copied his distribution list. Among the recipients were prominent journalists and producers, scions of the alternative press, and a smattering of current and former intelligence analysts who often serve as sources in news analyses and articles.

Many journalists and pundits ignored the deposition, tainted as it was by innuendo and falsehood. LaRouche, after all, has both peddled the theory that Queen Elizabeth II is a drug dealer and that former Vice President Walter Mondale was a Soviet agent. They dismissed Lang's endorsement that "Jeff Steinberg is a first rate scholar. I am not concerned with where he works." That a former high-ranking Defense Intelligence Agency official — one that is still welcomed to frequent lunches and meetings with former colleagues — appears to maintain close ties to members of the LaRouche organization is a separate issue.

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Kwiatkowski prides herself on her expose of a "neoconservative coup." She explained this to the Executive Intelligence Review editor. But, many of the people she alleged to be part of the Office of Special Plans, either worked in other Pentagon departments, or had long since retired from government. The errors are not surprising. In the 18 months I served in Special Plans, she did not visit the office (which would also explain subsequent errors in relating the location of the office).

Progressing from the ridiculous to the sublime, the Kwiatkowski-Steinberg memorandum suggests that one staff member pretended to care for his wheelchair-bound wife in order to travel on undercover secret missions. Unfortunately, Kennedy staff members took the LaRouche organization at its word, and dragged the career government employee in for questioning on this allegation. In her conversation with Steinberg, Kwiatkowski chided colleagues for alleged violations of standard Pentagon procedure, and yet ironically got wrong such basics as the escort ratio between Pentagon employees and visitors.

snip

Kwiatkowski's extremism undermined her competence. Her enthusiasm for conspiracies was matched by a lack of focus on national security. In a January 15, 2003, e-mail to a colleague, Kwiatkowski wrote that neither Osama bin Laden nor al Qaeda, let alone nuclear North Korea, posed "a serious threat" to the U.S. national security. There is a place for debate in policy — and, within the Pentagon, debates are frequent and fierce. But, living in denial about the threat al Qaeda posed after the Pentagon itself was hit in a terrorist attack did not inspire confidence.

snip

But a few journalists said they had an "inside source," and continued to pursue the conspiracies; several found their way into print, corroborated by sources like Lang and retired intelligence professionals like Vince Cannistraro, Ray McGovern, and Judith Yaphe on the Lang distribution list.

In April 2003, the LaRouche organization published a pamphlet entitled "Children of Satan." The pamphlet contained a Steinberg essay alleging that students of the late University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss had formed a secret "cabal" to drag the United States into war by falsifying evidence.

The following month, I returned from a meeting at the National Security Council to Special Plans' suite of offices on the first floor of the Pentagon (Kwiatkowski falsely wrote that we worked in the basement). Several colleagues were pouring over a fax. Public Affairs had just brought it over, saying that a New Yorker fact checker had inquiries and that Seymour Hersh was planning an expose of our office. We answered his questions immediately. Many of his statements were factually wrong and repeated Kwiatkowski's mistakes verbatim. But, when the article was posted on the Internet on May 5, 2003, Hersh had not incorporated any corrections; his article is rife with errors.

But, with the Pentagon leadership's decision to concentrate on work rather than on public relations, falsehoods transformed into conventional wisdom. Take Hersh's opening sentence: "They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal." We had never called ourselves that, although we were aware that Lang (whom Hersh cites openly), Defense Intelligence Agency official Bruce Hardcastle, and some Central Intelligence Agency officials used the term to describe Jewish colleagues. Before Hersh, it was The Washington Report for Middle Eastern Affairs which popularized the term "cabal" to describe certain Pentagon officials. The Washington Report is not a mainstream publication. Rather, it is a fringe magazine which has put in print theories such as that the Mossad was behind John F. Kennedy's assassination.

Robert Dreyfuss, contributing editor to The Nation, repeated many Kwiatkowski conspiracies as fact, in a series of article for The Nation, The American Prospect, and Mother Jones. Ironically, until Dreyfuss pegged me as part of the conspiracy based on five weeks as a research associate at the American Enterprise Institute, no one in the Pentagon leadership knew me.

snip

Accompanying the Mother Jones article was a wire diagram outlining the alleged conspiracy to falsify intelligence. Unfortunately, the diagram, like the article, is replete with basic errors of fact. Dreyfuss and Vest confuse portfolios, positions, and such basics as who was and was not a government official. Colonel Bill Bruner, for example, was not Chalabi's handler. Chalabi did not have a set handler. I doubt Chalabi knows who Bruner is. He tended to not know the office administrators. It was Bruner's job to take notes when his superiors were absent from meetings, make sure his staff worked on deadline, and that our responses to congressional letters and Rumsfeld snowflakes were free of grammatical errors. Harold Rhode likewise did not leave the Pentagon, where he has served as a career employee under both Democratic and Republican administrations.

How did such basic errors make it into Mother Jones? Only the editors know. But, neither Dreyfuss nor Vest sought to interview any member of Special Plans, nor did either apologize for their inaccuracy. Instead, the two journalists appear to have relied on interviews with Kwiatkowski, and those on the Lang list like Greg Thielmann, a former State Department Intelligence and Research official who was uninvolved in Iraq policy.

While the Office of Special Plans conspiracy had its origins in the LaRouche organization, writers like Hersh, Dreyfuss, and Vest, broke the stigma and mainstream newspapers like the Philadelphia Inquirer and Miami Herald began to run with the story. The New York Times Magazine published an overview of prewar planning based almost exclusively on second-hand sources and a background briefing with State Department lawyer Tom Warrick, a Gore campaign donor, who also had a slash-and-burn track-record among colleagues and in the interagency process. Allegations unchallenged by the administration became convention wisdom. Major columnists and correspondents from the New York Times and Washington Post repeated falsehoods, sometimes helped along by "unnamed State Department officials" seeking to score points in internecine battles.

A FAILURE OF LEADERSHIP
The tragedy of the Special Plans conspiracy is multifold. Journalists allowed themselves to be spun by a false source; fearful that doublesourcing might undermine their scoops, many journalists ignored basic fact-checking procedures. The resulting revelations pleased a partisan audience but, in retrospect, soiled the reputations of numerous newsmagazines and newspapers. Some editors may want to reexamine reporting to see whether they sourced stories to Kwiatkowski and Lang; the resulting stories were often little more accurate than those of the New York Times's Jayson Blair and USA Today's Jack Kelley. Some academic pundits who have repeated the allegations of alternative journalists and "intelligence correspondents" may want to consider whether their sources were accurate, or were merely using them to wage ideological and policy battles.

snip

The failure of leadership spreads wide. By failing to respond to falsehoods at their start, the Pentagon allowed a false conventional wisdom to develop. The Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and his deputy have failed repeatedly to defend their subordinates.

More troubling, though, is the reaction of some in the White House. Many in the National Security Council realize that conspiracies woven around prewar planning are untrue. But, rather than stand by principle, they have rewarded those responsible for malicious leaks and false confirmations by changing policy as a result of falsehood. By succumbing to policy blackmail, the White House has ensured that the tactics of LaRouche and Kwiatkowski remain a factor in Washington policymaking for years to come. When the White House fails to stand by its men and women, it signals adversaries that they can target officials one by one. At the end, Bush will stand alone.

Michael Rubin, an NRO contributor, is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

******

You can read the entire article here...

http://tinyurl.com/dh8l6

"The second half of the book chronicles this whitewash and focuses particularly on Dietrich Dieter Snell, the former Asst. U.S. Attorney (AUSA) who co-prosecuted Yousef in the 1996 Bojinka case."

This is a very, very, very long article but it is EYE POPPING...(READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE, PLEASE!)

Cover Up
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 27, 2005

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Peter Lance, a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter and author of the bestselling 1000 Years for Revenge: International Terrorism and the FBI -- The Untold Story. He is the author of the new book Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror.

snip

he two big questions, which I sought to answer at the end of that book were:

1) Why did the U.S. Justice Department ignore probative evidence from the Philippines National Police (PNP) in 1995 that Ramzi Yousef, the original World Trade Center bomber, had conspired with his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) as early as 1994 to set in motion the plot that culminated on 9/11?

In the spring of 1995, Col. Rodolfo B. Mendoza, a leading PNP investigator who had interrogated Yousef's lifelong friend and co-conspirator, Abdul Hakim Murad, gave the U.S. Embassy in Manila evidence that Yousef and KSM already had chosen had six targets: the WTC, The Pentagon, CIA HQ at Langley, VA, The Sears Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco and an unnamed nuclear facility.

Col. Mendoza also had evidence that up to 10 Islamic radicals were then training in U.S. flight schools. This was 1995.

I found FBI NO/FORN memos from that year proving that the Bureau had this intelligence, but they dropped the ball. I wanted to find out why.

snip

Col. Mendoza, who was the Richard Clarke of The Philippines, when it came to his knowledge of Islamic radicalism, was very clear with the U.S. government and warned our officials in in the spring of 1995 of that PRECISE plot which unfolded six years later.

The Justice Department seemingly failed to pursued this extraordinary warning and I wanted to know why.

2) The second question left unanswered, when I had finished my first book, was why did the FBI and Justice Dept. treat the hunt for KSM so differently than the public hunt for his nephew -- which had successfully brought Yousef to ground?

Yousef was arrested in early February, 1995 in a bin Laden controlled guesthouse in Islamabad, Pakistan after a tip to the U.S. State Department from an informant that Yousef had recruited. This young South African (Istaique Parker) wanted the $2 million reward being offered under a program called Rewards for Justice that was the brainchild of the late Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) agent Bradley Smith.

snip

In fact, KSM was so audacious that he gave an interview to Time magazine on the Yousef takedown using his own name "Khalid Shaikh." But by the time FBI agent Brad Garrett got there KSM was gone.

This didn't stop Garrett from participating in a 60 Minutes II story in the fall of 2001 in which he took false credit for the Yousef takedown.

Meanwhile, back in 1995, rather than doing a Wild West style worldwide search using the same rewards posters that had brought Yousef down, the Justice Dept. changed tack. For unknown reasons they indicted KSM along with Yousef in 1996 but kept the indictment sealed and his name from the press.

The first mention of KSM came on the inside "jump" page of a New York Times story in Janaury, 1998, on the day after Yousef was sentenced in the Southern District of New York for both the WTC and Bojinka plots. The story covering the sentencing had a cryptic reference to one "Khalad Shaikh" believed to be a relative of Yousef's.

By this time -- by all accounts -- KSM was well into executing the 9/11 plot.

snip

In any case, I got the answer to both of my questions as I was research book two: Cover Up.

snip

-how the staff was riddled with conflicts of interest -- almost half of the staff members were alumni of the very intelligence agencies they were asked to judge;

snip

-how, in effect, the fix was in on this Commission from day one -- there was an intentional decision to limit the damage across three presidential administrations and eliminate ANY accountability or blame for what I call the biggest intelligence failure since The Trojan Horse.

The second half of the book chronicles this whitewash and focuses particularly on Dietrich Dieter Snell, the former Asst. U.S. Attorney (AUSA) who co-prosecuted Yousef in the 1996 Bojinka case.

Snell, who could have answered both of the questions left over at the end of my first book, should have been a WITNESS before the 9/11 Commission, but instead they hired him as Senior Counsel and one of the Team Leaders.

It was Snell who took my "testimony" after I "testified" before the Commission on March 15th, 2004. When I showed up in the closed door conference room at 26 Federal Plaza (the same building that houses the FBI's NYO) Snell was accompanied by Marco Cordero, an FBI agent on loan to the Commission.

No stenographer was present, nor was there a recording device. Snell, merely pulled out a small notebook and started jotting down notes. I was warned ahead of time, by a source inside the Commission that more than 90% of the witness intake was anecdotal like this -- that the image of people like Condi Rice delivering sworn testimony in open session -- was more of an aberration.

Anyway, later in this interview you'll understand what it sham it was for somebody like Dieter Snell to take my "testimony." In my mind he was one of the fixers, hired early on to sanitize the Commission's final report.

snip

The first half of Cover Up is the most explosive. I present probative evidence that the crash of TWA #800 on July 17th, 1996 which killed 230 people, was an al Qaeda act of terror -- a bombing that was effectively the second biggest mass murder in U.S. history.

I prove this using the FBI's own documents: #302 memos, and, for the first time I shatter the FBI/NTSB K-9 theory -- the only explanation for the presence of high explosive residue in the wreckage absent a bomb.

I had eluded to this in 1000 Years of Revenge -- along with a chapter, by the way, which linked Ramzi Yousef and KSM via Terry Nichols to the Oklahoma City bombing.

This was long before Jayna Davis' intriguing book The Third Terrorist which was the object of one of your earlier interviews. She agrees with me on the Yousef-Nichols connection, but we disagree as to Yousef's paymaster. She suggests it was Iraq. I say OBL and furnish proof in the form of evidence showing that Yousef's Manila cell was financed directly by bin Laden via his Saudi brother in law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa.

However, in 2003, in neither case -- OKC or TWA #800 did I have the level of evidence I uncovered in the Spring of 2004. Much of it is in the pages of Cover Up or on my website under FBI #302's.

http://www.peterlance.com/

In the weeks prior to the downing of TWA 800 the FBI was alerted by Colombo crime family member Gregory Scarpa Jr. that Ramzi Yousef -- who was in a cell next to Scarpa Jr. at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) -- was arranging to have his al Qaeda cohorts plant a bomb aboard a U.S. airliner. The reason? To provoke a mistrial in the Bojinka case, the first of two federal trials facing Yousef.

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The incredible Yousef-Scarpa intelligence from 1996 proves the following:

-that al Qaeda had an active cell in New York City as early as 1996 -- something that contradicts Condi Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission that they possessed no "actionable intelligence" of an al Qaeda presence on U.S. soil between the 1993 WTC bombing and 9/11;

-that the FBI could have grabbed Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in 1996 as he plotted the 9/11 attacks. For a contribution of just $2,500.00 more to his commissary account at the MCC, Yousef had offered to put Scarpa's "people" who he believed to be mobsters, in touch with his "people," one of whom was KSM then residing in Qatar. But the Feds failed to take Yousef up on his offer and another opportunity was blown;

-that as early as 1996 Osama bin Laden intended to hijack planes in order to free blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman -- one of the spiritual driving forces for the 9/11 plot. This intelligence contained in a Scarpa-Yousef FBI #302 predated identical warnings which showed up in Presidential Daily Briefings to President Clinton in 1998 and the famous August 6, 2001 Crawford, Texas, PDB to President Bush.

-hat KSM and al Qaeda may have had a role in the June, 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia which was blamed on Iranian members of Hezbollah.

-that Yousef and his al Qaeda cell had an Iranian connection -- not necessarily with the government in Teheran, but certainly with elements, including his own family members living in the Iranian section of Baluchistan -- an Islamic radical no man's land where Yousef and KSM have their roots.

By the way in a speech last fall at Claremont, College in California, 9/11 Commission, John Lehman, the former Secretary of the Navy, let it slip that intelligence indicated that Baluchistan is where OBL was now hiding.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16795

Peter Lance, a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter and author of the bestselling 1000 Years for Revenge: International Terrorism and the FBI -- The Untold Story. He is the author of the new book Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror.

go to peterlance.com and read that 32 page color Timeline they will be blown away at how many opportunities the FBI had to stop Ramzi Yousef -- before the '93 bombing, before the '95 Bojinka plot where he killed a 24 year old Japanese man in his "wet test," in 1996 before he conspired with his uncle to put a bomb aboard TWA #800 killing 230 and many years before 9/11 when almost 3,000 died in New York as a result of Yousef's fiendish plan.

On the night of 9/11 -- it was 13 hours ahead in the Philippines. As Col. Mendoza sat working on a report he got an text message on his Nokia cell phone. It said, "urgent turn on CNN." When he did, only to see the South Tower fall, the first words out of his mouth when he called backed his friend were "They have done it. They have DONE it..." That's how certain he was that Yousef's plot exposed to him by Murad in 1995 -- which he had warned the Feds about in the spring of 1995 -- had been executed.

FP: How does all of this tie in to the 9/11 Commission?

FP: Do you remember Dietrich Dieter Snell, the AUSA who was the co-prosecutor on the Bojinka case. Well, an FBI #302 memo from 3/7/96 on my website shows that he was a direct party to all of the Scarpa-Yousef intelligence on TWA #800. Yet in early April, 2004 when forensic investigators Angela Clemente and Dr. Stephen Dresch, presented these #302's to the 9/11 Commission, not a word of any of this showed up in their final report published in late July, 2004. The report nominated for The National Book Award.

Understand the significance of this. Here is evidence from the FBI's own files of al Qaeda involvement in the second biggest act of terror in U.S. history and the 9/11 Commission -- lead by investigators like Dieter Snell, flushes it all.

Furthermore, Snell took all of the evidence from Col. Mendoza in the Philippines, which I presented following my testimony to the Commission in March, 2004 -- evidence which sets the genesis of the plot with Yousef and KSM in the fall of 1994 and he reduced it all to a end note at the end the book pushing the genesis of the plot FORWARD to 1996 and claiming that KSM had acted alone and that only recently had he joined al Qaeda.

My authority was Col. Rodolfo Mendoza, the man who interrogated Abdul Hakim Murad for 67 days. I sent the 9/11 Commission a transcript of my interview with the colonel in March, 2002, the video tape of the interview and multiple declassified PNP memos showing that all of the Yousef-KSM Manila plots 9n 1995-95 -- Bojinka, the plot to kill the Pope and the plot executed on 9/11 -- were funded directly by OBL via his brother in law.

But Dietrich Snell's source for the genesis of the plote in 1996 -- two years later -- in which an alleged lone KSM came up with the plan -- was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed himself.

From the 9/11 Commission's statement, 8/12:

On July 12, 2004, as the drafting and editing process for the Report was coming to an end (the Report was released on July 22, and editing continued to occur through July 17), a senior staff member, Dieter Snell, accompanied by another staff member, met with the officer at one of the Commission’s Washington, D.C. offices. A representative of the DOD also attended the interview.

According to the memorandum for the record on this meeting, prepared the next day by Mr. Snell, the officer said that ABLE DANGER included work on “link analysis,” mapping links among various people involved in terrorist networks. According to this record, the officer recalled seeing the name and photo of Mohamed Atta on an “analyst notebook chart” assembled by another officer (who he said had retired and was now working as a DOD contractor).

...The Commission did not mention ABLE DANGER in its report. The name and character of this classified operation had not, at that time, been publicly disclosed. The operation itself did not turn out to be historically significant, set against the larger context of U.S. policy and intelligence efforts that involved Bin Ladin and al Qaeda. The Report’s description of military planning against al Qaeda prior to 9/11 encompassed this and other military plans. The information we received about this program also contributed to the Commission’s depiction of intelligence efforts against al Qaeda before 9/11.

From the Bergen Record, 8/14:

Perhaps just as alarming, even the Able Danger team understood its limits. When lawyers blocked Able Danger's request to approach the FBI, the team simply went back to its work and kept quiet - even after the 9/11 attacks occurred.

Why? If the Able Danger team was so concerned about U.S. security, why didn't it approach Congress or even the press to sound an alarm?

When I posed that question in my interview with the Able Danger team member, he fell silent. Listening on a speaker phone, a congressional staffer interrupted: "Have you ever seen what happens to whistleblowers?"

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