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Title: Did DoD lawyers blow the chance to nab Atta?
Source:
Government Security News
URL Source: http://www.gsnmagazine.com/aug_05/dod_lawyers.html
Published: Aug 8, 2005
Author: Jacob Goodwin
Post Date: 2007-08-16 19:46:56 by honway
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Views: 146
Comments: 4
Did DoD lawyers blow the chance to nab Atta? By Jacob Goodwin In September 2000, one year before the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, a U.S. Army military intelligence program, known as “Able Danger,” identified a terrorist cell based in Brooklyn, NY, one of whose members was 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, and recommended to their military superiors that the FBI be called in to “take out that cell,” according to Rep. Curt Weldon, a longtime Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who is currently vice chairman of both the House Homeland Security and House Armed Services Committees. The recommendation to bring down that New York City cell -- in which two other Al Qaeda terrorists were also active -- was not pursued during the weeks leading up to the 2000 presidential election, said Weldon. That’s because Mohammed Atta possessed a “green card” at the time and Defense Department lawyers did not want to recommend that the FBI go after someone holding a green card, Weldon told his House colleagues last June 27 during a little-noticed speech, known as a “special order,” which he delivered on the House floor. Details of the origins and efforts of Able Danger were corroborated in a telephone interview by GSN with a former defense intelligence officer who said he worked closely with that program. That intelligence officer, who spoke to GSN while sitting in Rep. Weldon’s Capitol Hill office, requested anonymity for fear that his current efforts to help re-start a similar intelligence-gathering operation might be hampered if his identity becomes known. 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. “We were directed to take those 3M yellow stickers and place them over the faces of Atta and the other terrorists and pretend they didn’t exist,” the intelligence officer told GSN. DoD lawyers may also have been reluctant to suggest a bold action by FBI agents after the bureau’s disastrous 1993 strike against the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco, TX, said Weldon and the intelligence officer. “So now, Mr. Speaker,” Weldon said on the House floor last June, “for the first time I can tell our colleagues that one of our agencies not only identified the New York cell of Mohammed Atta and two of the terrorists, but actually made a recommendation to bring the FBI in to take out that cell.” Weldon has developed a reputation for making bold pronouncements and, occasionally, ruffling the feathers of some of his colleagues. His recent non-fiction book, “Countdown to Terror,” which draws on information from an Iranian expatriate source Weldon has dubbed “Ali,” has drawn criticism from the CIA, others in the intelligence community and some congressional colleagues. A longtime champion of firefighters and first responders, Weldon has a particular interest in this subject because he has been openly and actively pushing since 1999 for the establishment of an integrated government-wide center that could consolidate, analyze and act upon intelligence gathered by dozens of U.S. agencies, armed services and departments. Weldon’s proposal was based on the innovative intelligence gathering capabilities he had witnessed at the U.S. Army’s Information Dominance Center, based at Fort Belvoir, VA, (which was formerly known as the Land Information Warfare Assessment Center.) This Army center had employed data mining, profiling and data collaboration techniques before several other intelligence agencies, and was using such cutting edge software tools as Starlight (developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) and Spires. For years, the CIA resisted the congressman’s recommendation, Weldon told GSN in a telephone interview on August 1, claiming that his plan to integrate dozens of discrete and classified intelligence streams was both unworkable and unnecessary. Weldon had dubbed his proposed organization the National Operations and Analysis Hub, nicknamed NOAH, because the center was intended “to protect our nation from the flood of threats,” he explained. Sixteen months after 9/11, such a “data fusion center,” named the Terrorism Threat Integration Center (TTIC) was indeed established by the Bush Administration. At the urging of the 9/11 Commission, the TTIC has since been restructured and renamed the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC). Weldon is pleased that steps have been taken to unify the nation’s intelligence gathering and analysis capabilities, now headed by a newly established Director of National Intelligence, Joseph Negroponte, but Weldon remains concerned that the “stovepipe” mentalities that plagued the intelligence community in the past continue to inhibit true information sharing between intelligence agencies. He is also extremely frustrated by the fact that so little official attention seems to have been paid to the intelligence failure related to the Mohammed Atta cell in Brooklyn. Weldon contends that few in the Bush Administration seem interested in investigating that missed opportunity. “If we had had that [military intelligence] system in 1999 and 2000, which the military had already developed as a prototype, and if we had followed the lead of the military entity that identified the Al Qaeda cell of Mohammed Atta, then perhaps, Mr. Speaker, 9/11 would never have occurred,” Weldon said during his special order remarks. According to Weldon, staff members of the 9/11 Commission were briefed on the capabilities of the Able Danger intelligence unit within the Special Operations Command, which had been set up by General Pete Schoomaker, who headed Special Ops at the time, on the orders of General Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. Staffers at the 9/11 Commission staffers were also told about the specific recommendation to break up the Mohammed Atta cell. However, those commission staff members apparently did not choose to brief the commission’s members on these sensitive matters. Weldon said he was told specifically by commission members, Tim Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana; and John Lehman, a former secretary of the Navy; that they had never been briefed on the Able Danger unit within Special Ops or on the unit’s evidence of a terrorist cell in Brooklyn. “I personally talked with [Philip] Zelikow [executive director of the 9/11 Commission] about this,” recalled the intelligence officer. “For whatever bizarre reasons, he didn’t pass on the information.” The State Department, where Zelikow now works as a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said he was traveling and unavailable for comment. “Why did the 9/11 Commission not investigate this entire situation?” asked Weldon on June 27. “Why did the 9/11 Commission not ask the question about the military’s recommendation against the Mohammed Atta cell?” Weldon is also disappointed with himself for not pushing harder against the intelligence bureaucracy that he saw as resisting his proposal to set up a more integrated intelligence-gathering operation. But he saves some of his greatest ire for the lawyers within the Department of Defense -- he is not sure if they were working within the Special Operations Command or higher up the organizational chart, within the Office of the Secretary of Defense -- for their unwillingness to allow Able Danger to send to the FBI its evidence and its recommendation for immediate action. “Obviously, if we had taken out that cell, 9/11 would not have occurred and, certainly, taking out those three principal players in that cell would have severely crippled, if not totally stopped, the operation that killed 3,000 people in America,” said Weldon. Shining a spotlight on this intelligence gaffe has not been easy. Russ Caso, Weldon’s chief of staff, explained to GSN the steps his boss has taken to shed light on the situation. 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. Unwilling to let the matter drop, Weldon arranged for a face-to-face meeting in late July between Hoekstra, himself and the former intelligence officer who had worked with Able Danger, and who outlined his former unit’s evidence and recommendations for Hoekstra. “Congressman Weldon has met with several people who were working on Able Danger to identify where Al Qaeda was set up around the world,” said Caso. “They made the suggestion that this information be passed to the FBI, and lawyers within the Defense Department -- whether within Special Ops or within OSD, we don’t know -- and the lawyers said, ‘No’.” A report about some of these events appeared last June 19 in The Times Herald newspaper, of Norristown, PA, which is located in the Philadelphia suburbs that Rep. Weldon represents in Congress.
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Bump for posterity. May they know the truth.
New facts back tale of brush with Atta NEW intelligence reports suggesting that 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta arrived in the US in late 1999 or early 2000 - six months earlier than previously thought - are likely to spark a reassessment of public servant Johnelle Bryant's incredible story of a face-to-face meeting with the terrorist. In an extraordinary 2002 interview later branded a hoax by some media -- including the ABC's Media Watch -- Ms Bryant claimed to have met Atta in late April or early May of 2000 when she worked as a loan officer with the US Department of Agriculture's farm services agency in Florida. Ms Bryant, who was medically retired from the department last year, said Atta had tried to apply for a $US650,000 US government loan to buy a six-seat, twin-engine aircraft that he wanted to convert to a crop duster. In her interview with the US's ABC network, Ms Bryant told how Atta became angry when told he was ineligible for the loan and how he became fixated with an aerial photo of Washington DC hanging on her office wall. When told the picture was not for sale, Ms Bryant said Atta became "very bitter". "I believe he said: 'How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it'." But despite some independent support for her claims, Ms Bryant's account was dismissed as a fake on the grounds that Atta did not get a visa to enter the US until May 18, 2000, and did not arrive until June 3 that year on a flight from Prague that landed at New Jersey's Newark airport. Her claims were ignored in last year's 9/11 commission report on the events leading up to the terrorist attacks. The commission accepted the advice of US immigration authorities that Atta did not arrive until June 2000. But revelations that a military intelligence unit known as Able Danger believed Atta had actually arrived in the US in late 1999, or at the latest very early in 2000, have lent new credibility to Ms Bryant's claims, while at the same time raising questions about the exchange of intelligence between US security agencies. Investigations are now under way into what was done before September 11, 2001, about Able Danger's identification of Atta and three of the other future hijackers as members of an al-Qa'ida cell operating in the US and why the 9/11 commission also chose to ignore the unit's intelligence findings. Republican congressman Curt Weldon has accused the commission of ignoring material that would have forced a rewriting of the September 11 events. Spokesman Al Felzenberg admitted this week the commission had been sceptical when an Able Danger officer briefed it in July last year and said Atta had been in the US in late 1999 or early 2000. The investigators knew this was impossible, Mr Felzenberg said, since travel records confirmed he had not entered until June 2000. "The information that (the officer) provided us did not mesh with other conclusions that we were drawing," he said. "There was no way that Atta could have been in the US at that time." But British columnist Mark Steyn, who wrote an opinion article for The Australian last month describing Ms Bryant's meeting with Atta as "the defining encounter of the age", claims US immigration did not keep then -- and still does not keep now -- reliable and comprehensive records of entry by foreigners. "It (US immigration) cannot authoritatively state the date of Atta's first visit to the US," Steyn said. "If you choose to believe June 3, 2000, as the definitive date of his first visit, that's basically an act of faith. There were a number of sightings of Atta in the US before that time, in Florida and elsewhere." In his column Steyn attacked Ms Bryant for failing to realise the danger Atta represented because of political correctness. "She knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one," he wrote. In her interview, Ms Bryant said Atta had threatened to cut her throat and initially didn't want to deal with her because she was a woman. But she said: "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from. I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation to our country as easy for him as I could." Ms Bryant recognised Atta from a newspaper photograph after the 9/11 attacks and defied Agriculture Department orders in telling her story to the media. "The American people, the public, need to be aware that if these men can walk into my office, they can walk into your office, they can walk into anyone's office," she said. Ms Bryant could not be reached for comment this week but Bob Epling, president of Community Bank of Florida, which let office space to the agency Ms Bryant worked for, said he had no doubt Atta visited the premises. He said Ms Bryant had referred Atta to the "agriculture-friendly" CBF. "Atta was 15 steps away from walking into our loan department and making an application," Mr Epling said yesterday. "He chose not to."
http://www.courttv.com/assault_on_america/...fakeids_ap.html 9/25/2001 Virginia man charged with helping hijackers get IDs WASHINGTON (AP) — The FBI is seeking nearly 400 people for questioning in the terrorist attacks probe while federal prosecutors build a criminal case involving identification cards for five of the now-dead hijackers. One man has been charged. As the investigation proceeded on several fronts Monday, a Florida bank president said he had been told that one of the men suspected in the Sept. 11 hijackings of four airliners tried to get a loan from the U.S. Agriculture Department to buy a crop dusting plane. Attorney General John Ashcroft told Congress the FBI had gathered information raising fears that crop dusters could be used in a biological or chemical attack. At the FBI's request, the planes were grounded Sunday and Monday. The grounding was lifted early Tuesday. In the criminal case, the government said Herbert Villalobos accompanied Abdul Aziz Al Omari and Ahmed Saleh Al Ghamdi to a lawyer's office in Virginia on Aug. 2 to help the two suspected hijackers obtain state identity cards. When shown photos of the hijackers by the FBI, Villalobos recognized three other suspects "believed to have commandeered American Airlines Flight 77" from Washington Dulles International Airport that crashed into the Pentagon, according to court documents. Villalobos said Hani Hanjour, Salem Al Hazmi and Majed Moqed were at the Arlington, Va., office of the state Department of Motor Vehicles on Aug. 2, just as Al Omari and Al Ghamdi were. "Virginia DMV records ... show that all five men did in fact conduct various transactions relating to Virginia identification cards at the Arlington DMV," said a seven-page affidavit by an FBI agent. The affidavit did not say whether the five used the IDs to become ticketed passengers aboard the doomed flights, which also crashed in New York City and a field in Pennsylvania. The FBI says Al Omari was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 that struck the north tower of the World Trade Center. Al Ghamdi was aboard United Flight 175 that hit the trade center's south tower. Villalobos was charged with unlawfully signing a Virginia residency form for Al Omari. More than 6,000 people are missing and presumed dead from the attacks, in which Saudi exile Osama bin Laden has been named the leading suspect. Ashcroft said 352 people have been arrested or detained in the investigation and 392 others who "we think ... have information that could be helpful" were being sought for questioning. There was concern over the potential for further attacks. Robert Epling of Community Bank of Florida said he's been told that Mohamed Atta, one of the suspected hijackers, sought a USDA loan for a crop duster. The USDA is a tenant in the bank, which checked its files about Atta at the request of the FBI. "We understand he was turned down" at the USDA "and they referred him to us," said Epling. A loan officer at the bank remembered a phone call from someone inquiring about crop dusters, an unusual request because there are so few of the planes left in the area, Epling said. Nothing came of the inquiry from the unnamed person. James Lester, an employee of South Florida Crop Care in Belle Glade, told the FBI that Atta was among the men who in groups of two or three visited the crop dusting firm nearly every weekend for six or eight weeks before the attacks. Atta was a persistent questioner and "I recognized him because he stayed on my feet all the time. I just about had to push him away from me," Lester said. Crop dusters weren't the only concern. In Michigan the president of a truck driving school confirmed two men arrested last week had attended the school and one of them obtained a permit to transport hazardous materials. Karim Koubriti, 23, and Ahmed Hannan, 33, taken into custody Sept. 17, attended the U.S. Truck Driver Training School in Detroit this summer, said the school's president, Joseph LaBarge. Koubriti passed the state commercial drivers license exam on Aug. 22 and received a permit to transport hazardous materials. Hannan failed the road test, LaBarge said. Koubriti and Hannan were living in the same Detroit residence as an earlier tenant who also is under arrest in the probe, Nabil Al-Marabh. Al-Marabh also was certified to transport hazardous materials and is licensed to drive trucks and other large vehicles. Al-Marabh, a former Boston cab driver, was transferred to New York following four days of questioning, FBI spokeswoman Virginia Wright said. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AFTER THE ATTACK; New Crop-Dusting Restrictions Weighed; Aircraft: Report that terrorists may have visited a company that flies the agricultural planes spurs concerns about chemical and biological weapons. The Los Angeles Times; Los Angeles, Calif.; Sep 25, 2001; AARON ZITNER;JOHN-THOR DAHLBURG; Excerpt Epling said the loan officer recalled the incident after the FBI asked his bank last week to search its records for any signs of contact with Atta, particularly in connection with crop-dusting. The FBI also said that Atta had approached an area branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in person, for a loan. Epling said his bank shared a building with a branch office of the Agriculture Department.
Her claims were ignored in last year's 9/11 commission report on the events leading up to the terrorist attacks. The commission accepted the advice of US immigration authorities that Atta did not arrive until June 2000. But revelations that a military intelligence unit known as Able Danger believed Atta had actually arrived in the US in late 1999, or at the latest very early in 2000, have lent new credibility to Ms Bryant's claims, while at the same time raising questions about the exchange of intelligence between US security agencies. The key point of this thread is: Ms Bryant's account was dismissed as a fake on the grounds that Atta did not get a visa to enter the US until May 18, 2000, and did not arrive until June 3 that year on a flight from Prague that landed at New Jersey's Newark airport. The claims of the military personnel that participated in Operation Able Danger were dismissed on the grounds that Atta did not get a visa to enter the US until May 18, 2000, and did not arrive until June 3 that year on a flight from Prague that landed at New Jersey's Newark airport. Ms Bryant, who was medically retired from the department last year, said Atta had tried to apply for a $US650,000 US government loan to buy a six-seat, twin-engine aircraft that he wanted to convert to a crop duster. Based on the evidence, it is very likely that at one time there was a paper trail to support Ms. Bryant's claims. Applying for a loan normally includes filling out paper work. Government offices are very sensitive to potential claims of discrimination in lending practices and hence procedures are in place to document the reasons loans are declined.
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The Australian
August 13, 2005
David Nason, New York correspondent
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(Edited)
#4. To: All, *9-11* (#3)
(Edited)
But despite some independent support for her claims, Ms Bryant's account was dismissed as a fake on the grounds that Atta did not get a visa to enter the US until May 18, 2000, and did not arrive until June 3 that year on a flight from Prague that landed at New Jersey's Newark airport.
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