I suspect we'll be getting more of these every year or so for a decade, but the latest information to splatter all over the pundasphere is that a US Military intelligence unit identified four of the 9/11 hijackers a year before Sept. 11th. This unit, called "Able Danger", identified Atta and three others as members of a Al Qaeda cell operating in the US. They did this in the spring/summer of 2000.
This is a very sketchily documented story. The NYT talked to US Congressperson Curt Weldon (who has a book that came out on the right-wing boutique press Regnery in June that talks about this) and a "former defense intelligence official" (that almost certainly means a civilian, since military personel wouldn't call themselves that way) who "delivered the chart [a network chart showing the links between cells] in summer 2000 to the Special Operations Command headquarters in Tampa, Fla." Curt Weldon has no special information to provide (he has a book to flog), and got his information from this official (or perhaps other members of the unit).
For reasons left unexplored in the story, the information about the potential Al Qaeda cell never climbed the chain of command (the story quotes Weldon and the "official" hypothesizing that in pre-9/11 days the military was nervous about turning over info on civilians to the FBI, that's just Weldon's hypothesis), which is the important part. Lets face it, the US government's intelligence services are a huge, messy bunch. We had already turned our attention to Al Qaeda by the summer of 2000 (they had bombed two embassys and a ship, just to name two things), so it would be very surprising if info about 9/11 personel never made it to counter-terrorism people. The part that is more interesting, and seems to be missing from the story, is what the bureaucracy did with the info. We know they messed up (9/11 happened), but who messed up, why, have we fixed it, and does it work now?
I'm fairly unimpressed by this, as it seems at first blush like bad reporting on a tangential story. The bottom line facts are that the Special Operations Command (based not at the Pentagon, but near CENTCOM - the military command responsible for the Middle East - in Florida) had a very secret (at least partially civilian) group who "mined" unclassified INS and public sources to put together a tentative working network of how Al Qaeda was put together, and this group happened to find four of the 19 hijackers. The information (what overall percentage of which was accurate isn't discussed, so we don't know if they just got lucky on the four, or if they really did figure out most of the network) never seems to have left the military command in Florida (which, in and of itself, isn't unusual. The Special Ops people don't talk much to the regular military, and vice versa. It's not a surprise that they were doing intelligence work, likely as part of contingency planning since if the US ever got a fix on part of Al Qaeda, they would be the ones going in to get them, assuming we didn't use a cruise missile).
I really can't get excited over this.
Posted by baltar at August 9, 2005 10:42 AM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics