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Intrigue Over Able Danger Grows
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon appears to have reversed its position on Able Danger, the Army intelligence collection team. A Pentagon spokesman now says "there's no reason to doubt the specific recollections" of the growing number of team members. The team members say the project had pre-Sept. 11 intelligence on al Qaida, which Defense Department lawyers prohibited them from sharing with the FBI. Members of the team say they identified the lead Sept. 11 terrorist Mohamed Atta as a cell leader more than a year before the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. "You could touch the picture and literally drill down and it would give you all the facts that we had from whatever source we had, we identified our sources and then why we had made a link," says defense contractor J.D. Smith, describing how Able Danger's computer software program worked. The team collected and analyzed information gathered by the "deep" data mining operation. Smith says data was gathered from a variety of sources, including about 30 or 40 individuals, but one day it all came to a grinding halt. So why did that happen? "The I.G. (inspector general) came in and shut down the operation because of a claim that we were collecting information on U.S citizens," says Smith. It turned out to be more than just a claim. "On some of my charts I had links to U.S citizens," he says. Smith notes that it's illegal for the military to collect intelligence on U.S. citizens. Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., has alleged a Pentagon coverup regarding Able Danger and is seeking congressional hearings on the matter. Weldon has said coverup will "shake the country to its roots." More info on those "U.S. Citizens": WASHINGTON - The names of U.S. citizens with connections to the military, political organizations and educational institutions reportedly turned up when the Pentagon collected intelligence as part of its Able Danger effort. The Pentagon shut down the data mining operation that uncovered the names of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers a year before the terror attacks. Defense contractor J.D. Smith who worked on the project says his job was to find connections among people and where those connections went. The names and the origin of the information turned out to be so sensitive that Smith says,"It cost me a contract and a eventually my job at the company that employed me at the time." But the names the intelligence group investigated turned out not to be connected with al Qaida. Sources familiar with Able Danger say the project was shut down because it could have lead to the exposure of a separate secret data mining project focusing on U.S Citizens allegedly transferring super-sensitive U.S technology illegally to the Chinese government.
Posted by: Steve 2005-08-31 |
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