Politics and Medicine - Whitewashing the Protection of Terrorists on US Soil

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Whitewashing the Protection of Terrorists on US Soil

kathleen

2005-08-18, 5:56 pm

Whitewashing the Protection of Terrorists on US Soil

Nafeez Ahmed

Exclusive: Well known Mid-East expert questions omission of "Able
Danger" by 9/11 Commission

Exactly one year before 9/11, a highly classified US Army intelligence
unit known as "Able Danger" had already pinpointed four of the 9/11
hijackers. Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid Almidhar, and Nawaf
Alhamzi were identified as members of a "Brooklyn" al-Qaeda cell on a
detailed chart that included visa photographs. The Army unit was
established by the Special Operations Command in 1999 by Gen. Hugh
Shelton, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The startling revelations first surfaced in late June, from
Congressman. Curt Weldon (R-PA), Vice-Chairman of the House Homeland
Security and Armed Services Committees, citing at least three active
military and intelligence officials. The story eventually made the New
York Times headlines, thrice, the latest report on Tuesday quoting Lt.
Col. Anthony Shaffer, who was a liaison with the Able Danger unit at
the Defense Intelligence Agency. Lt. Col. Shaffer gave on the record
confirmation of the details revealed by Rep. Weldon, but further stated
that Able Danger had scheduled three meetings in the summer of 2000
with the FBI's Washington field office to share the findings and
recommend to "take out that cell."
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Those meetings were unilaterally cancelled by military lawyers at the
Defense Department's Special Operations Command, and information
sharing was blocked.

The stated reason? Apparently, Atta and his comrades were in the US on
"valid entry visas" - the law, it was claimed, bars US citizens and
green-card holders from being targeted for intelligence-collection
operations. Although, this does not include visa holders, the law
supposedly provided a disincentive for sharing intelligence with law
enforcement. "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," said another defense intelligence official.

Terrorists don't get and keep visas:

The explanation was disingenuous. "Mohammed Atta and his terrorist
cohorts were clearly and factually established as Al-Qaeda
functionaries of a foreign government [Taliban of Afghanistan] with
Al-Qaeda itself being a Designated Foreign Terrorist Organization
(DFTO)", noted Sean Osborne of the US Army's Program Executive Office -
Command, Control, Communications Tactical (PEOC3T) within the Special
Project Office (SPO).

"Designated terrorist's do not receive and retain 'green card' status,
and any card so previously attained would have to be considered a
priori fraudulent, null and void," Osborne stated.

In fact, there are 13 exceptions within Executive Order 12333 allowing
intelligence-collection on US Persons and bona-fide green card-holders,
including for Counterintelligence purposes, allowing for collection of
against individuals reasonably suspected of involvement in
international terrorism, as well as their associates.

Atta:

But all this is academic. Mohamed Atta was never a green-card holder.
Worse still, he never had a valid entry visa. On the contrary, in
January 2001, Atta was permitted reentry into the United States after a
trip to Germany, despite being in violation of his visa status. He had
landed in Miami on January 10 on a flight from Madrid on a tourist visa
- yet he had told immigration inspectors that he was taking flying
lessons in the US, for which an M-1 student visa is strictly required.

Essentially, Atta had entered the US three times on a tourist visa in
2001, although INS officials knew the visa had expired in 2000, and
Atta had violated its terms by taking flight lessons. So Atta was
illegal - and the Defense Department lawyers who blocked the FBI from
accessing the Able Danger data were lying. So the question remains: why
was the Able Danger report prevented by the DoD from circulating in the
US intelligence community?

According to the 9/11 Commission report, Atta was not identified as a
potential terrorist until after 9/11, and Almidhar and Alhamzi were
only identified in late 1999 and 2000 by the CIA - but the FBI was
apparently only notified in summer 2001. The Able Danger story
demonstrates that the 9/11 Commission's narrative is false - reliable
information that four al-Qaeda members were operating within a cell to
plan a terrorist attack was available, but its circulation was
inexplicably obstructed by the government.

The Able Danger story, however, is only the latest confirmation that
the intelligence community had extensive information on many of the
9/11 hijackers years prior to 9/11.

The Miami Herald (6/7/02) reported that the National Security Agency
had "monitored telephone conversations before Sept. 11 between the
suspected commander of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks and
the alleged chief hijacker." Anonymous NSA officials told the Herald
that "the conversations between Khalid Shaikh Mohammed" - the
operational mastermind of 9/11 - "and Mohamed Atta were intercepted",
while Atta was in the US. How much was gleaned about the plot was not
disclosed. But The Independent (9/15/02) reported that Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed "received a telephone call from Mohammed Atta on 10
September", in which he gave Atta "the final approval to launch the
strikes." Like Able Danger, these facts were also apparently considered
"historically irrelevant" by the Commission.

Las Vegas is not a Muslim destination:

Other facts were also considered irrelevant by the Commission. For
instance, the fact that numerous reports in the San Francisco
Chronicle, South Florida Sun Sentinel, Los Angeles Times, and numerous
other sources, confirmed from multiple eyewitnesses that the hijackers,
including Mohamed Atta, had "engaged in some decidedly un-Islamic
sampling of prohibited pleasures in America's reputed capital of moral
corrosion," in Las Vegas and elsewhere - behavior that just doesn't
quite fit with al-Qaeda's puritan salafist ideology of strict adherence
to Islamic tenets.

More Terrorist Training:

Or the reports that emerged in Newsweek, the Washington Post, and the
New York Times that at least "five of the alleged hijackers received
training in the 1990s at secure US military installations", including
Mohamed Atta who attended International Officers School at Maxwell Air
Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.

The US Air Force later argued that they "might not" be the same
persons, due to some "biographical discrepancies" - which of course
were never revealed to the public. When Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL)
tried to investigate, shocked at the possibility that Pensacola Naval
Air Station could have hosted and trained Saeed Alghamdi, Ahmed
Alghamdi, among others, he was told by the FBI - after several weeks -
that they were trying to work through something "complicated and
difficult."

Daniel Hopsicker, a former Producer at PBS Wall Street Week and
investigative report at NBC News, decided to investigate. After
pressing an official at the Defense Department, he was finally told: "I
do not have the authority to tell you who attended which schools" - in
other words, terrorists did train at secure US military installations,
but who trained where is none of our concern. It is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that these people were, for reasons undisclosed,
protected.

Attempts to silence Able Danger revelations:

Such facts have fallen into the memory hole. There is currently an
active attempt to achieve the same results for the Able Danger
revelations. The 9/11 Commission's attempts to explain its omission of
the revelations from its final report were riddled with contradictions.

First the Commission completely denied any knowledge of Able Danger.
Allegedly, the staff and panel members simply hadn't been told. When it
became clear, from Weldon's military intelligence sources, that the
Commission had been officially briefed on the Able Danger report, they
relented, and claimed instead that they simply didn't take the material
seriously, because it had already established that the hijackers had
not been identified at that early time.

When this explanation started to falter, it was stated that the
briefing made no mention at all of Mohamed Atta, and thus was not
considered to be of value to the investigation.

The Whistleblower:

But Lt. Col. Shaffer has now come on public record confirming that he
had personally "provided information about Able Danger and its
identification of Mr. Atta in a private meeting in October 2003 with
members of the Sept. 11 commission staff when they visited
Afghanistan", according to the newspaper of record. Former
Commissioners suddenly emerged to chorus the insistence that they had
never been briefed so specifically about Able Danger, that the material
was vague, and made no mention of Atta.

The backtracking and side-stepping of the now disbanded Commission
hardly lends its position further credibility.

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is author of four books, including:

The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism
The War on Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11,
2001
Behind the War on Terror : Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for
Iraq

He is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research &
Development in London, and a Doctoral Candidate in International
Relations at the university of Sussex, Brighton.
http://rawstory.com/news/2005/White...n_of__0818.html
11 Comments

David Wright

2005-08-19, 9:01 am

In article <1124397573.892850.110860@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>,
kathleen <kathleen.dickson@snet.net> wrote:

It may be an urban legend, but there are stories that circulate about
groups of people who deliberately invade newsgroups and post off-topic
articles and flamage in an effort to render the newsgroups useless.
Seems like a stupid hobby, but it's possible.

I never really believed it before, but now I'm starting to wonder
if these characters kathleen.dickson@snet.net, iksnizsakdet@yahoo.com,
and "Chuck P Adams" are not such a group. All this political swill
that's completely off topic for every newsgroup to which it's posted.

Anyone have any additional thoughts about this? And thank god for
killfiles.

-- David Wright :: alphabeta at prodigy.net
These are my opinions only, but they're almost always correct.
"There's nothing to be afraid of -- this is America!" I said,
realizing instantly that this was the funniest line I had
ever spoken. -- Jack Douglas

Chuck P Adams

2005-08-19, 9:01 am

David, why do you put my name in there? It is Kathleen who hijacked my
name "Chuck" and is cross posting it all over the dam usenet.

Get your facts right before you bash someone.

Charles P Adams

Ilena Rose

2005-08-19, 9:01 am

On 18 Aug 2005 20:29:13 -0700, "Chuck P Adams" <chuckadams05@aol.com>
wrote:

>David, why do you put my name in there? It is Kathleen who hijacked my
>name "Chuck" and is cross posting it all over the dam usenet.
>
>Get your facts right before you bash someone.
>
>Charles P Adams

Prove that this is your name ...

or prove that you made it up for your game.

www.BreastImplantAwareness.org/Disi....htm#ChuckieMcS

Chuck P Adams

2005-08-19, 9:02 am

What do you mean prove my name? It is no mystery who I am and I even
said what town I live in. I don't hide from anyone, my number is listed
right in the darn phone book. lol

David Wright

2005-08-19, 9:02 am

In article <1124422153.495762.239580@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
Chuck P Adams <chuckadams05@aol.com> wrote:
>David, why do you put my name in there? It is Kathleen who hijacked my
>name "Chuck" and is cross posting it all over the dam usenet.
>
>Get your facts right before you bash someone.
>
>Charles P Adams

It's very difficult to be sure who is who around here.

-- David Wright :: alphabeta at prodigy.net
These are my opinions only, but they're almost always correct.
"If you meet the Buddha on the net, put him in your killfile."
-- Anon.

HCN

2005-08-19, 9:02 am

"Chuck P Adams" <chuckadams05@aol.com> wrote in message
news:1124422153.495762.239580@g49g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> David, why do you put my name in there? It is Kathleen who hijacked my
> name "Chuck" and is cross posting it all over the dam usenet.
>
> Get your facts right before you bash someone.
>
> Charles P Adams
>

There was a "Chuck" who used a Yahoo account with "chuck.p.adams" to post
lots of off-topic things in misc.health.alternative --- I know this because
I killfiled him. See:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group...IHNBXIAZQ&hl=en

Mark Probert

2005-08-19, 9:02 am

Chuck P Adams wrote:
> What do you mean prove my name? It is no mystery who I am and I even
> said what town I live in. I don't hide from anyone, my number is listed
> right in the darn phone book. lol
>

Givng that sort of information to usenet's most notorious net stalker,
the woman who contacts employers and spouses, is just not a bright move.

She will now Google you out of existence.