Posted on 08/20/2005 4:02:03 PM PDT by mercy
Two US military intelligence officer, Navy Captain Scott Phillpott and Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, told the 911 Commission staff that a secret military intelligence unit codenamed Able Danger had identified Mohammed Atta and three of his 9-11 hijacking associates more than a year before the 9-11 attack. It even had a photograph of Atta. (The 911 Commission, which stated that no evidence had emerged that Atta’s identity was known to any US intelligence group prior to the attack, did not include any references at all to Able Danger in its final report.)
According to Lt. Col. Shaffer and Captain Phillpott, Able Danger identified Atta and his associates via a process of cross-referencing information from different sources known as "data mining." If true, one key issue is the criteria that Able Danger used to pluck them out of cyberspace.
Here are three criteria Able Danger might have applied to the data.
(Excerpt. Click on link to see full article.)
http://edjayepstein.blogspot.com/
http://slate.msn.com/id/2124546/
with a funny and yet very though provoking comment.
In tonight's National Geographic program, "Inside 9/11", there was a segment concerning what I believe were intelligence officers at McDill Air Force Base, Florida. They had a chart of terrorist suspects which included pictures of Mohammad Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi. They decided no intelligence sharing regarding these suspects were possible, since they were in the country on valid visas. This dovetails with what Lt. Col. Shaffer has been saying about Able Danger. This could be independent corroboration of his story.
Yes. It looks like this sort of data mining is relatively easy to do for those who have acces to the data. Probably the governments primary method today to keep track of them.
But of course its old news to the terrorist scum which is why they just sneek in over our porous borders these days. They probably come in with excellent fake papers as well.
nice find. it seems that evryone knew of and had complte intel on atta. evryone except the congress , fbi, and american airlines.
animated Möbius strip logo bump
According to Bryant, who has worked at the government agency for 16 years, Atta arrived in her office sometime between the end of April and the middle of May 2000, inquiring about a loan to finance an aircraft.
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.
But I do know it's absurd to suggest he was never in the United States until June 3, 2000, simply because that's what the INS says -- especially when U.S. military intelligence says something quite different.
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