*** The former commission members said the information, if true, could rewrite an important chapter of the history of the intelligence failures before Sept. 11, 2001.
***Lha memang 911 itu satu konspirasi untuk memulai perang salib George Bush... 9/11 panel asks if Pentagon withheld suspect warning By Philip Shenon and Douglas Jehl The New York Times THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 2005 WASHINGTON Members of the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 terror attacks have called on Congress to determine whether the Pentagon withheld intelligence information showing that a secret American military unit had identified Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers as potential threats more than a year before the attacks. The former commission members said the information, if true, could rewrite an important chapter of the history of the intelligence failures before Sept. 11, 2001. "I think this is a big deal," said John Lehman, a Republican member of the commission who was navy secretary in the Reagan administration. "The issue is whether there was in fact surveillance before 9/11 of Atta and, if so, why weren't we told about it? Who made the decision not to brief the commission's staff or the commissioners?" Lehman and other commissioners said that because the panel had been formally disbanded for a year, the investigation would need to be taken up by Congress, possibly by the House and Senate intelligence committees. Detailed accounts about the findings of the secret operation, known as Able Danger, were offered this week by Representative Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, and by a former defense intelligence official. Their comments were the first assertion by current or former officials that Atta, an Egyptian who was the lead hijacker, had been identified as a potential terrorist before the attacks. Spokesmen for the panel members said this week that although the staff was informed by the Pentagon in late 2003 about the existence of a so-called data-mining operation called Able Danger, the panel was never told that it had identified Atta and the others as threats. In a final report released last summer called the authoritative history of the attacks, the commission of five Democrats and five Republicans made no mention of the secret program or the possibility that a government agency had detected Atta's terrorist activities before Sept. 11. The Pentagon has had no comment on the credibility of the accounts from Weldon and the intelligence official. At a news briefing Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said he could not comment on reports about Able Danger and said that he knew nothing about such an operation. "I can't," he said. "I have no idea. I've never heard of it until this morning. I understand our folks are trying to look into it." A spokesman for the Pentagon, Lieutenant Colonel Christopher Conway, said later that "there were a number of intelligence operations prior to the attacks of 9/11" but that "it would be irresponsible for us to provide details in a way in which those who wish to do us harm would find beneficial." Weldon went public with his information after talking with members of the unit in his research for a new book on terrorism. He said by telephone Tuesday that he had spoken with three team members, all still working in the government, including two in the military, and that they were consistent in asserting that Atta's affiliation with a Qaeda terrorism cell in the United States was known in the Defense Department by mid-2000 and was not acted on. An outspoken member of Congress on military and intelligence questions, Weldon, a champion of data mining efforts like Able Danger, has helped arrange interviews for reporters with the former military intelligence official. The official insisted on anonymity, saying he did not want to jeopardize political support for future data mining in the military. The official said in an interview Monday that the Able Danger team was created in 1999 under a directive signed by General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to assemble information about Qaeda networks around the world. He said that by the middle of 2000 the operation had identified Atta and three of the other future hijackers as members of an American-based cell and that the information was presented that summer in a chart to the Pentagon's Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article. http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/08/10/news/intel.php ------------------------ Yahoo! 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