FYI: Pentagon says it has found no evidence Atta identified before 2001 attacks

[Henk Elegeert]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Pentagon says it has found no evidence Atta identified before 2001 attacks

http://eclipse.usp.net/newsscape/getStory.cfm?frmStoryID=10442392&frmStoryTitle=Pentagon%20says%20it%20has%20found%20no%20evidence%20Atta%20identified%20before%202001%20attacks%20%2D&frmSourceURL=http%3A%2F%2Farticle%2Ewn%2Ecom%2Flink%2FWNAT61BB94118E14AC929E4A7FDB3EDBA9AB%3Fsource%3Dtemplategenerator%26template%3D2000%2Findex%2Etxt

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Mon Aug 22,12:41 PM ET

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A
Pentagon review has so far found no evidence that a secret intelligence
operation identified Mohammad Atta as a member of a US-based Al-Qaeda
cell before the September 11, 2001 attacks, a spokesman said.

Representative Curt Weldon (news, bio, voting record) and Lieutenant
Colonel Anthony Shaffer have charged that Atta and three other September
11 hijackers were identified as early as mid-2000 through a data-mining
program codenamed "Able Danger."

But Lawrence DiRita, a Pentagon spokesman, said a review of materials
related to Able Danger has so far turned up no evidence that it
identified Atta, the reputed leader of the attacks on the World Trade
Center and Pentagon.

The spokesman said he did not know whether the material reviewed
contained the names of any of the other three hijackers.

"What we have found are mostly sort of general reference to terrorist
cells that people were generally aware of," DiRita told reporters.

"But nothing that would seem to corroborate specifically what
congressman Weldon and Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer recall, although as
you know they don't have what they said they saw. That makes it a little
more difficult," he said.

Weldon and Shaffer have said Atta and three other future hijackers
appeared as members of a Brooklyn-based Al-Qaeda cell on a chart that
was presented by Able Danger to the US Special Operations Command in
early to mid 2000.

They said the group had recommended the information be shared with the
FBI, but that the command's lawyers rejected that course of action.

If true, it would have been the first time Atta was known to have been
identified by the US intelligence community as an Al-Qaeda member before
the September 11 attacks. Providing Atta's name to the FBI might have
helped disrupt the attack, according to Weldon.

Neither Weldon nor Shaffer have been able to produce a copy of the chart
itself, however.

Shaffer acknowledged in an interview published Saturday by the
Washington Post that his allegations about the chart were based on the
recollections of a navy officer and an unidentified civilian official
affiliated with Able Danger.

He said that after the September 11 attacks, the civilian employee
showed him a chart from 2000 that had the names of Atta and three other
hijackers.

Navy Captain Scott Phillpott, whose recollections Shaffer also said he
relied on, told a presidential commission investigating the September 11
attacks in July 2004 that he remembered seeing Atta's name on an Able
Danger chart in the spring of 2000.
"

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