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Officer Says Military Blocked Sharing of Files on Terrorists
SOURCE:
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - A military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the
F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell
that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran
Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by
discussing the information publicly.
The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the
team from sharing any of its information with the bureau.
Colonel Shaffer said in an interview on Monday night that the small, highly
classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the
terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name
by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the
Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share its
information.
But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to
cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left
the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr.
Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 attacks were still being
planned.
"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was
something important, that this was something that should have been pursued,"
Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence
program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.
He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations
Command of the Defense Department had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because
they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation
that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United
States.
"It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on
information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.
The Defense Department did not dispute the account from Colonel Shaffer, a
42-year-old native of Kansas City, Mo., who is the first military officer
associated with the program to acknowledge his role publicly.
At the same time, the department said in a statement that it was "working to
gain more clarity on this issue" and that "it's too early to comment on
findings related to the program identified as Able Danger." The F.B.I.
referred calls about Colonel Shaffer to the Pentagon.
The account from Colonel Shaffer, a reservist who is also working part time
for the Pentagon, corroborates much of the information that the Sept. 11
commission has acknowledged it received about Able Danger last July from a
Navy captain who was also involved with the program but whose name has not
been made public. In a statement issued last week, the leaders of the
commission said the panel had concluded that the intelligence program "did not
turn out to be historically significant."
The statement said that while the commission did learn about Able Danger in
2003 and immediately requested Pentagon files about it, none of the documents
turned over by the Defense Department referred to Mr. Atta or any of the other
hijackers.
Colonel Shaffer said that his role in Able Danger was as liaison with the
Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, and that he was not an intelligence
analyst. The interview with Colonel Shaffer on Monday was arranged for The New
York Times and Fox News by Representative Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania
Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a
champion of data-mining programs like Able Danger.
Colonel Shaffer's lawyer, Mark Zaid, said in an interview that he was
concerned that Colonel Shaffer was facing retaliation from the Defense
Department, first for having talked to the Sept. 11 commission staff in
October 2003 and now for talking with news organizations.
Mr. Zaid said that Colonel Shaffer's security clearance was suspended last
year because of what the lawyer said were a series of "petty allegations"
involving $67 in personal charges on a military cellphone. He said that
despite the disciplinary action, Colonel Shaffer had been promoted this year
from major.
Colonel Shaffer said he had decided to allow his name to be used in part
because of his frustration with the statement issued last week by the
commission leaders, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton.
The commission said in its final report last year that American intelligence
agencies had not identified Mr. Atta as a terrorist before Sept. 11, 2001,
when he flew an American Airlines jet into one of the World Trade Center
towers in New York.
A commission spokesman did not return repeated phone calls on Tuesday for
comment. A Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben-Veniste, the
former Watergate prosecutor, said in an interview on Tuesday that while he
could not judge the credibility of the information from Colonel Shaffer and
others, the Pentagon needed to "provide a clear and comprehensive explanation
regarding what information it had in its possession regarding Mr. Atta."
"And if these assertions are credible," Mr. Ben-Veniste continued, "the
Pentagon would need to explain why it was that the 9/11 commissioners were not
provided this information despite requests for all information regarding Able
Danger."
Colonel Shaffer said he had 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, where he was
then serving. Commission members have disputed that, saying that they do not
recall hearing Mr. Atta's name during the briefing and that the name did not
appear in documents about Able Danger that were later turned over by the
Pentagon.
"I would implore the 9/11 commission to support a follow-on investigation to
ascertain what the real truth is," Colonel Shaffer said in the interview this
week. "I do believe the 9/11 commission should have done that job: figuring
out what went wrong with Able Danger."
"This was a good news story because, before 9/11, you had an element of the
military - our unit - which was actually out looking for Al Qaeda," he
continued. "I can't believe the 9/11 commission would somehow believe that the
historical value was not relevant."
Colonel Shaffer said that because he was not an intelligence analyst, he was
not involved in the details of the procedures used in Able Danger to glean
information from terrorist databases, nor was he aware of which databases had
supplied the information that might have led to the name of Mr. Atta or other
terrorists so long before the Sept. 11 attacks.
But he said he did know that Able Danger had made use of publicly available
information from government immigration agencies, from Internet sites and from
paid search engines like LexisNexis.
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