Able danger coverup.

This past summer news began to break out about a super-secret Pentagon "data mining" operation that had identified the lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat long before the deadly attacks of September 11, 2001. The operation, code named "Able Danger," was a joint effort spearheaded by Army intelligence and the Special Operations Command. According to Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), Able Danger was in operation from 1998 to 2001 and was an effort "to map out Al Qaeda." Reportedly, the Able Danger staff had linked Atta and three other men (who turned out to be 9/11 hijackers) from al-Qaeda's Hamburg, Germany, operation to a cell in Brooklyn. They wanted to notify the FBI about the danger, but Pentagon officials scotched that idea. That was more than a year before the 9/11 attacks.

Rep. Weldon, who is vice chairman of the Armed Services Committee and the Homeland Security Committee, says that two weeks after 9/11 he was provided with data from Able Danger that included "an extensive analysis chart of Al Qaeda, which I immediately took to the White House and personally delivered to then-Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. Mr. Hadley was extremely interested in the chart and said that he would take it to the President."

But the chart appears to have gone down the memory hole, along with a lot of other data concerning 9/11--from Able Danger and many other sources. There is no mention of Able Danger in The 9/11 Commission Report, the 565-page tome produced by the high-profile National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, although the report does mention Stephen Hadley 91 times. Able Danger team member Army Lt. Col. Anthony Schaffer briefed the 9/11 Commission, but no mention of Schaffer or the briefings are in the commission's best-selling report.

On June 27 of this year, Rep. Weldon took to the floor of the House to outline the Able Danger story. In the ensuing months, the story has gradually gained traction and headline space, but official stonewalling and coverup continue to thwart efforts to get to the heart of the matter. On September 21, Department of Defense officials blocked several Able Danger witnesses from testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Two of the witnesses, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Schaffer and Defense contractor James D. Smith, both of whom worked on Able Danger, showed up at the hearing but were not allowed to testify.

Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and other committee members accused the Pentagon of obstructing their investigation. Rep. Weldon, who testified at the Senate hearing, was clearly upset. "Over the past three months, I have witnessed denial, deception, threats to [Defense Department] employees. character assassination, and now silence," Mr. Weldon said. He noted that if the Able Danger information had been handled properly "it might have had an impact on the most significant attack ever against our country and our citizens."

The congressional charges of obstruction appeared to have prompted a conciliatory response from Bush administration Defense officials. On September 23, Senator Specter announced that hearings had been rescheduled for October 5 and that the Pentagon would allow the witnesses to testify. But Mark Zaid, the attorney for Schaffer and Smith, said the Pentagon told him a different story: his clients would not be allowed to testify.

Much (perhaps all) of the government's Able Danger information has been destroyed. Erik Kleinsmith, a former Army major who supervised the data mining operation, testified to the Judiciary Committee that he had been "forced to destroy all the data, charts, and other analytical products" related to Able Danger. Hopefully, copies of some of those electronic and paper files still exist and will surface at the upcoming hearings.

It is outrageous that four years alter the 9/11 attacks such obstruction and coverup are still being tolerated. And the problem is not going to be solved with a technological fix or further erosion of our constitutional checks and balances. Unfortunately, those are the directions Rep. Weldon and Sen. Specter appear to be heading. Mr. Weldon seems to think that the main lesson to be learned from Able Danger is that we should unleash the Pentagon's super computers to do massive data mining inside the U.S. on U.S. citizens to protect us against future terror attacks. That sounds chillingly similar to Total Information Awareness, the Orwellian program that we helped to expose and slap down in 2003.

Likewise, Senator Specter has suggested we may need to weaken the Posse Comitatus Act, to allow the military to be used more freely within the U.S. for law enforcement and national security purposes. This is an extremely serious matter; for over a century, our Posse Comitatus law has been an essential bulwark against politicians using the military to establish dictatorship. It is one of the important distinguishing features between our republic and banana republics.

We have been closely following the Able Danger developments and will be reporting more fully on them in the next issue of THE NEW AMERICAN.