Some new information on Able Danger seems to have broken earlier today in the NY Post which I missed until now. Seems Atta was detected up to 13 times before 9-11:
An active-duty military intelligence analyst has told congressional investigators that 9/11 pilot Mohamed Atta surfaced 13 times in a controversial Pentagon computer program before he executed the attacks, The Post has learned.
Congressional sources said last night that an officer in the Pentagon’s secretive Land Information Warfare Center told the staff of Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) about the computer hits.
The revelation is significant because the 9/11 commission has asserted that Atta was not on the intelligence community’s radar screen before the attacks.
Looks like Weldon has a new witness for tomorrow’s session.
Update: to put this in context, Able Danger was up basically a year with a couple month hiatus in the middle. So 13 hits in that period means Atta was very, very visible. And from him all other 9-11 terrorists could have been tracked down.
UPDATE:
Another short version from AP here. Some audio clips from the Able Danger session on whistleblowers linked at QT Monster’s site.
UPDATE II:
Full transcript of the Weldon press conference can be found at the Able Danger Blog.
As I suspected in this earlier post it appears the data still exists. From the transcript:
We had testimony that all of the Able Danger data-mining material was destroyed. I now know that that’s not the case. In fact, I now know there’s data still available. And I am in contact with people who are still able to data mining runs on pre-9/11 data. In those data runs that are now being done today, in spite of what DOD said, I have 13 hits on Mohammed Atta, spelled Mu and Mo. Not Mohammed Attif, not Mohammed Attel; Mohammed Atta.
I’ll do a more detailed analysis later. But the data purging that went on in 2000 was at LIWA and Orion on the unclassified data sets. Lt Col Shaffer had some copies at DIA (the bridge between LIWA-Orion and SOCOM-Able Danger) which apparently were destroyed while he was in Afghanistan and talking to the 9-11 Commission.
It has always been my belief that the classified data sets sent to SOCOM still existed. Apparently I was correct.
AJ–
I wonder who else might be showing up on this Able Danger stuff?
What about people who may have helped the hijackers but weren’t on the plane?
Those people might still be around, especially if they are Americans.
Left by Snapple on February 14th, 2006