On the fourth anniversary, you can read my article about 9/11 (.pdf). The article was finalized in January 2004, seven months before the 9/11 Commission report was issued. Therefore, it takes no cognizance of any information that was first revealed in the commission report. The article was never published, largely because Richard Clarke’s testimony verified my thesis and made it unnewsworthy.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Pentagon: Able Danger documents were destroyed
The Pentagon said that three more people who worked on a top secret data mining project now corroborate claims that it identified the Sept. 11 ringleader as linked to al-Qaida more than a year before the attack, but that documents the project generated were destroyed.
“We have identified three other individuals … who have a recollection of a chart with a photo of Mohammed Atta or a reference to Mohammed Atta… pre Sept. 11,” said Pat Downs a senior policy analyst in the office of Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steven Cambone.
Two people who worked on the project — code-named Able Danger — have already come forward.
Army reserve Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, who was a civilian analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Navy Capt. Scott Philpott, Able Danger’s team leader, have already said that the effort — which looked for associations, patterns and linkages to known al-Qaida supporters in vast amounts of commercially available data — generated a chart in early 2000, which bore the names of Atta and three other of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
“Capt. Philpott believes he saw the chart in January or February 2000, so that’s the general reference point,” Downs said. She said that the three new witnesses — who were among about 80 individuals interviewed by defense officials as part of a major Pentagon probe into the Able Danger claims — were a civilian analyst from U.S. Special Operations Command, an analyst “associated with” the Army’s Land Information Warfare Activity, and someone who was “at the time” an employee of a defense contractor called Orion.
Thomas Gandy, the Army’s head of counter-intelligence and human intelligence said the three were analysts working to develop intelligence products from the data generated by Able Danger.
Downs said that one of them remembered a chart “with a reference to Mohammed Atta,” and the others a chart bearing his photograph.
However, she said that despite a very extensive search of “hundreds of thousands, probably” of documents and electronic files related to the project — including those held by contractors who worked on the project — no copies of the chart, and no documents referring to it, had been found.
“These people are credible people,” she said of the five who recalled the chart, adding “We haven’t found any corroborating evidence.” But she acknowledged that the chart could have been among documents from the project that were — in accordance with regulations designed to prevent U.S. intelligence agencies spying on citizens — destroyed.
“There are strict regulations about collection, dissemination and destruction procedures for this type of information,” she told a briefing for reporters at the Pentagon, “and we know that that did happen in the case of Able Danger documentation.” She said that the regulations had been “very strictly interpreted pre-Sept. 11.”
“In a major data mining effort like this,” she said, “you’re reaching out to a lot of open sources and within that there could be a lot of more information on U.S. persons. “We’re not allowed to collect that type of information.”
If copies of the chart held by the military were indeed destroyed, it could mean that the sole remaining copy is the one Rep. Curt Weldon says he gave to national security advisor Steven Hadley at a White house meeting on Sept. 25, 2001.
“Steve Hadley looked at the chart and said, Congressman, where did you get that chart from?” Weldon said in a June 27 floor in congress.
“Steve Hadley said, Congressman, I am going to take this chart, and I am going to show it to the man. The man that he meant, Mr. Speaker, was the President of the United States.”
The White House has repeatedly refused to comment on the issue or to arrange an interview with Hadley.
Ballard’s mother, Karen Meredith, of Mountain View, Calif., said in a telephone interview that she is angry and will press for a full explanation. She is a public critic of the war and has attended anti-war protests in Crawford, Texas, outside President Bush’s ranch, with grieving mother and peace activist Cindy Sheehan.
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I spent four years in the jungles of southeast Asia, and I do not beleive it was much more taxing upon my body and soul, than the last 4-5 years under BushCo.
I beleive the death toll, is nearly the same as well, from then, to now. Only, more inocent people are still losing.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, as you stated a few weeks ago, it should become a roar heard round the world.
I wish for nothing but peace, for all.
With exception for those responsible….nothing but jail, in Falujah would be appropriate ; )
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An analysis of four years after 9/11 and Al Qaeda Terrorism.NINE ATTACKS PER YEAR
Now the bad news: since 9/11, there’s been a sharp increase in the number of major al-Qaeda-related attacks worldwide. Whereas before 11 September 2001, the average was one such attack per year, now there are nine per year, claiming some 50 fatalities each. Both governments and independent experts are warning that it’s a matter of time before terrorist networks succeed in deploying weapons that are theoretically capable of claiming many thousands of lives.
Australian Embassy Commemorates 2004 Bali Bombing
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The sentencing capped a bizarre sequence of events in which Berger admitted to sneaking classified documents out of the National Archives in his suit, later destroying some of them in his office and then lying about it.
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I know I posted it as comment in another diary of the 911 events, but I make no excuses:
Alabanza. Praise the cook with a shaven head and a tattoo on his shoulder that said Oye, a blue-eyed Puerto Rican with people from Fajardo, the harbor of pirates centuries ago.
Praise the lighthouse in Fajardo, candle glimmering white to worship the dark saint of the sea.
Alabanza. Praise the cook’s yellow Pirates cap worn in the name of Roberto Clemente, his plane that flamed into the ocean loaded with cans for Nicaragua, for all the mouths chewing the ash of earthquakes.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen radio, dial clicked even before the dial on the oven, so that music and Spanish rose before bread. Praise the bread.
Alabanza. Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations: Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh.
Alabanza. Praise the kitchen in the morning, where the gas burned blue on every stove and exhaust fans fired their diminutive propellers, hands cracked eggs with quick thumbs or sliced open cartons to build an altar of cans.
Alabanza. Praise the busboy’s music, the chime-chime of his dishes and silverware in the tub.
Alabanza. Praise the dish-dog, the dishwasher who worked that morning because another dishwasher could not stop coughing, or because he needed overtime to pile the sacks of rice and beans for a family floating away on some Caribbean island plagued by frogs.
Alabanza. Praise the waitress who heard the radio in the kitchen and sang to herself about a man gone.
Alabanza. After the thunder wilder than thunder, after the shudder deep in the glass of the great windows, after the radio stopped singing like a tree full of terrified frogs, after night burst the dam of day and flooded the kitchen, for a time the stoves glowed in darkness like the lighthouse in Fajardo, like a cook’s soul. Soul I say, even if the dead cannot tell us about the bristles of God’s beard because God has no face, soul I say, to name the smoke-beings flung in constellations across the night sky of this city and cities to come.
Alabanza. I say, even if God has no face.
Alabanza. When the war began, from Manhattan and Kabul two constellations of smoke rose and drifted to each other, mingling in icy air, and one said with an Afghan tongue:
Teach me to dance. We have no music here.
and the other said with a Spanish tongue:
I will teach you. Music is all we have.