Bush Admin. Briefed on Able Danger After Attacks

Bush Admin. Briefed on Able Danger After Attacks

Thursday, Aug. 18, 2005 10:12 a.m. EDT
Bush Admin. Briefed on Able Danger After Attacks
Two weeks after the 9/11 the attacks, the Bush administration was told that a special military intelligence unit code named Able Danger had developed actionable intelligence two years earlier that could have foiled the 9/11 plot, a member of the Able Danger team revealed on Wednesday.Among the Able Danger evidence shared with the Bush National Security Council: a chart put together before 9/11 featuring a picture of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta.

Asked why he didn't go public before this week with the news that his group had been tracking Atta during the Clinton administration, Able Danger team member Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer told ABC radio host Sean Hannity:
"Within two weeks of the attack, this colleague of mine ... she took that very poster [with Mohamed Atta] to Congressman [Curt] Weldon," Shaffer said. "And I have to say he took it right to Michael Hadley, I believe, over at the NSC."
"It's my understanding that he gave him that chart and Hadley had a great deal of interest in it," he added.
Once the Bush administration had been briefed, Shaffer said, he thought the information would be handled properly. "[I felt] that we were good to go - that everything was going to be solved," he told Hannity.
The military intelligence sleuth stressed, however, "I'm not criticizing the Bush administration here. They're doing everything in their power to prevent this now. I think they're fully behind what we're doing. I think the Pentagon right now is fully behind me trying to get the word out and trying to get to the bottom of this."
Shaffer credited his still unidentified Able Danger colleague with managing the technical side of the program.
"The doctor who put this all together is brilliant. I mean, I cannot speak high enough of her and her brilliance in being able to break the code on this. She was able, through the technology used, to somehow pull out of all this amorphous data usable, actionable information."
"And that's where things kind of got off track," Shaffer explained. "Because at the same time she pulled that out, we then were trying to look at how we could exploit that information. And that's where the lawyers got involved."
Shaffer said that immediately after the 9/11 attacks, this same colleague alerted him to the fact that the Able Danger team had developed intelligence on the hijack team, a detail he hadn't noticed.
"My colleague called me in and said, 'Look, we knew these guys.' And I was shocked. It was like, in the pit of my stomach there was just this sinking feeling, like - we knew. We knew this!"
Congressman Weldon has previously described three attempts by Able Danger to brief the FBI on the Atta intelligence, before being blocked by lawyers at the Clinton Pentagon.
Those lawyers have yet to be identified.