Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Able Danger: Pentagon Advances In Different Direction

Lost in all of the coverage about Hurricane Katrina was this tidbit picked up by Strata Sphere:
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.
Strata Sphere believes that the Pentagon has just advanced on the 9/11 Commission and is preparing to open fire with all guns blazing.

The 9/11 Commission's last gasp of credibility is hanging by a thread here. Who will throw them a lifeline?

Congress wont - they're investigating all angles of the story with multiple angles and multiple committees.

The President might, but then again, it would be in his best interest to let the investigations proceed. He was also against the 9/11 Commission in the first place, so his credibility is unaffected by the outcome.

The Pentagon appears to have gotten its story straight, which is a good thing. Problem is that it needed to do so much earlier - like when the 9/11 Commission was meeting in the first place. Someone should look into why the Pentagon delayed informing the Commission, though I believe it probably involves declassifying information.

With Congress reconvening after Labor Day, expect the focus of the Congressional investigations to look into Gorelick and the White memos though that may all be overshadowed by the continuing Katrina issues and the Roberts confirmation hearings.

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