Alarming 9/11 claim is baseless, panel says
By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer
7:03 PM PST, December 24, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Rejecting one of the most disturbing claims about the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, the Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded as untrue a congressman's contention that a team of military analysts identified Mohamed Atta or other hijackers before the attacks, according to a summary of the panel's investigation obtained by The Times.

The findings repudiate assertions by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and a few military officers that U.S. national security officials ignored startling intelligence in early 2001 that might have helped to prevent the attacks.

In particular, Weldon and other officials have repeatedly claimed that the team of military analysts, known as Able Danger, produced a chart that included a picture of Atta and identified him as being tied to an Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, N.Y. Weldon has also said that the chart was shared with White House officials, including Stephen J. Hadley, then deputy national security advisor.

But after a 16-month investigation, the Intelligence Committee has concluded that those assertions are unfounded.

"Able Danger did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker at any time prior to Sept. 11, 2001," the committee determined, according to an eight-page letter sent last week to panel members by the top Republican and Democrat on the committee...

...The recently completed probe also dismissed other assertions that have fueled conspiracy theories surrounding the Sept. 11 attacks.

The panel said it found "no evidence" to support claims by military officers connected to Able Danger that Defense Department lawyers prevented the team's analysts from sharing their findings with counterterrorism officials at the FBI before the attacks.

Nor was the alleged chart or any information developed by Able Danger improperly destroyed at the direction of Pentagon lawyers, a charge that has stoked claims of a cover-up...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-intel25dec25,0,3149507.story?coll=la-home-headlines


This link chart was created by Jacob L. Boesen, an analyst contracted by DIAC: The Defense Intelligence Analysis Center. Using Analyst's Notebook, the same high-end program used to design a number of the Able Danger link charts, Boesen created the chart on August 10th, 1999. It shows a direct link between al Qaeda and the New York cell of blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the original WTC bombing and the 9/11 plots.


The chart, produced just over a year after the bin Laden financed African Embassy bombings on August 7th, 1998, is in direct contradiction to the findings of the 9/11 Commission -- per Senior Counsel Dietrich Dieter Snell -- that the original WTC bombing cell was comprised of a loosely organized group of Sunni Islamists and that Ramzi Yousef played no role in the conception of the 9/11 plots even though his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) was identified by the FBI in 2002 as the "mastermind."

http://www.peterlance.com/PLable.htm

http://www.abledangerblog.com/timeline/

More of note

Foremost 9/11 Whistleblower Discusses Possibility Attack Was Inside Job

http://www.informationliberation.com/index.php?id=13653&comments=40

Charles Goyette's Popular Mechanics 9/11 Interview causes cancellation of later interviews. Ernest Hancock

http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/realityzone/UFNpopmech911interview.mht