Posted on 08/12/2005 9:29:21 PM PDT by conservative in nyc
The Sept. 11 commission concluded that an intelligence program known as Able Danger "did not turn out to be historically significant," despite hearing a claim that the program had identified the future plot leader Mohammed Atta as a potential terrorist threat more than a year before the 2001 attacks, the commission's former leaders said in a statement on Friday evening.
--Snip--
In an interview this week, a former senior military officer disputed that the unit members had ever presented to their superiors information that identified Mr. Atta or other suspected members of Al Qaeda. A second former officer said any information presented by the team to the leaders of the Special Operations Command would have been unlikely to be shared outside the command in the environment that prevailed before Sept. 11.
The former defense intelligence official, who was interviewed twice this week, has repeatedly said that Mr. Atta and four others were identified on a chart presented to the Special Operations Command. The former official said the chart identified about 60 probable members of Al Qaeda.
In interviews, former military officers have said the Able Danger unit was established in September 1999 by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, then the head of the Special Operations Command, under a charter issued by Gen. Hugh Shelton, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. General Shelton, now retired, has said he does not recall the program; General Schoomaker, now the Army chief of staff, has declined to comment, as has Gen. Charles R. Holland, who took over the Special Operations Command in October 2000.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Seems like the NYT has been seeking out commanding officers of the Special Operations Command to comment on Able Danger. Two "former senior military officers" did under condition of anonymity.
"did not turn out to be historically significant,".....
Certainly not to the Clinton legacy.... Of course they are criminally significant...but that is not within the scope of our investigation now is it.
May these people Burn in hell!
yea exactly, "former senior military officers" give me a freaking break. These are guys playing cya right now and the old grey lady is happy to help. God I hope old Kurt got the strait on the flop on this one. I want to see the 911 commission go down hard.
W needs to go out in front of the cameras and say he's appointing a special prosecuter and get all the staffers and commission members under oath. THAT WOULD BE AWSOME!!!
Tell weldon to stay away from Ft marcy park!!!
"did not turn out to be historically significant,"...
To the 9/11 Commission: tell that to the families of the victims of 9/11.
This type of downplaying by this panel will certainly lead to total discrediting the entire matter.
Lending IDs between themselves is a common trick of terrorists and criminals for crossing borders and other purposes. Atta may have lent his ID to another cell member, knowing how sloppy our border controls are.
Able Danger relies on "brilliant data mining" to arrange a picture out of thousands of minute but interrelated factoids. Credit card use, ATM hits, internet use etc are all crunched by computers. But they CANNOT tell WHO exactly USED someone's credit card etc at a particular time.
Some of the discrepancies in the time lines ("Atta was elsewhere when Able Danger said he was in such and such a place") may be the result of Atta and his cell lending IDs, credit cards etc to one another as a matter of convenience.
Able Danger data mining can only tell when an ID or credit card was used, NOT who used it. This does NOT take away from the value of Able Danger information, but it is important to understand this twist.
There will be plenty of these stories on the inner pages of the MSM newspapers today. Saturday is "bury the story" day.
“Okay, well, this is pretty sensitive stuff,” began Silvari. “Not the theory, but what we’re going to do with it. This is not to leave this room, okay? The fact is we’re already making our next lists from our own predictive programs.
“These were originally dreamed up on Madison Avenue to tell advertisers what people wanted, before they even know it. It works so well, it’s almost scary! Computers mine all of the data bases you can imagine, and then some. They check your credit card purchases back for years, they see where you’ve lived and where you go on vacation, the kind of car you buy, the food you eat--ten thousand things that add up to ‘you’. Then they compare that ‘you’ to everybody else, and then they see what folks like ‘you’ just bought.
“Did you ever call a catalog company to make an order, and at the end they ask if you want to hear their list of ‘specials’? Their computer just cranked out the list of specials it thinks you’ll want. Before data mining and predictive programs, they used to average about a ten percent hit-rate on the ‘specials’. Now they get over 80% sales! Think about it; the computer can guess what you’ll want to buy next, 80% of the time!
“Everybody who found out about this got very excited, as you can imagine. CIA, FBI, NSA, everybody. Then after 9-11, there was a big push to use the predictive programs for catching Muslim terrorists, to find the sleepers by their credit cards, their movements, memberships, phone usage patterns, everything. 'Brilliant' data mining at its finest: that’s the essence of the 'Terrorist Information Awareness' program. And let me tell you, it works. They get a lot of false hits, but they catch a lot of bad guys with it too. A lot of them, more than are ever reported in the media.
“Anyway, Malvone got access to some of the predictive program algorithms, and my number one computer geek Charles changed the parameters. Now we can tap into the TIA program and use it for finding our own home-grown terrorists, based on the ones we’ve already busted and jailed over the years. The program looks at the vehicles they drive, the magazines they read, the websites they surf…and of course their credit cards. With gun nuts that’s especially useful, because they buy so much from catalogs and on the internet. I mean, if somebody ordered five thousand rounds of AK-47 ammo in 1999, it’s pretty obvious what kind of weapons he has!
“So we’ll just aim our own modified version of the predictive program at a zip code or a town, and it’ll spit out the most dangerous right wing nut jobs. It’ll bird-dog the next Shiffletts or McVeighs, the ones who are really out on the edge. So that’s where our next list of targets is going to come from: from our own in-house predictive programs.
"And since we’re not in the business of building court cases, it doesn’t really matter if they’ve technically broken the law yet or not. And anyway, with these gun nuts, you can always find something! You know, a gun they bought in one jurisdiction that they failed to register properly when they moved somewhere else, or a barrel that’s too long or too short… “And no matter what happens to the guy, you can always make it a ‘gun accident’ or a ‘premature bomb’, and there’ll be enough incriminating evidence in his house to make it fly in the press. So that part’s easy. But if by some miracle a guy on the list actually turns out to be squeaky clean, well, we still have the militia ‘drop guns’ that Malvone gave us, just in case...”
The STU Team leaders were silent, absorbing the meaning of what they’d just heard. The cutting-edge STU Team was going to smoke out the most dangerous gun nuts and Constitution fanatics using an advanced computer program, and the TIA data bases. This was just about as “proactive” as it could get! No more waiting around until after the bomb went off, or the politician was assassinated.
“Way cool,” said Tim Jaeger.
“I like it. I really like it,” said Michael Shanks.
A current career military officer isnt going to comment on a Top Secret program....no matter what the NYT wants.
Oh god............
Not to mention that not one in a thousand officers in DC would ever have heard of Able Danger, much less understood it.
Here comes the former "paper of record", spinning for their party again. (yawn)
And in other news, the sun will rise in the east.
In the environment that prevailed after Gorelicks Wall Building?
Let me add, can you IMAGINE the spin the Old Gray Whore would be putting out if the attacks took place in 2002 and this "Able Danger" intelligence was available in 2001??
Front page headline, "BUSH KNEW!"
The first to give up, surprise, will be Washington, D.C. Republicans. IMO. I could be wrong. They may not even bother to start.
Whatever became of the Cox Report? Delays, delays, Clinton White House censorship, delays, delays, conflicting lies and half-truths leaked to the MSM employees, delays, delays, and finally released on a Friday afternoon and promptly forgotten.
I hope you are right. I 've never been so surprised and disappointed when it turned out that Ms Gorelick retained her place on the 9/11 Commission.
I'm also looking forward to the Jayna Davies article on Monday. A definite link between OKC and Iraq (I was in Berkley at the time of OKC, and remember the first witness statements on Middle Eastern males etc in the early news reports - and then they just disappeared) will certainly once again turn the search light on Iraq and 911. (Atta & Prague?!)
Jayna has 22 witnesses on tape.
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