S. Hrg. 109-311: Abel Danger and Intelligence Information Sharing

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After his capture following the Embassy bombings in 1998, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-’Owali, the Saudi who drove the truck, gave FBI agents the number of a safe house in Sana’a Yemen maintained by Sameer Mohammed Ahmed al-Hada, the brother-in-law of Khalid al-Midhar. On September 21, 2006, The Washington Post reported that a Defense Department investigation into Able Danger found that Able Danger did not identify Mohamed Atta or any other hijacker before the September 11 attacks, and that a widely discussed chart was "a sample document passed to the military as an example of how to organize large amounts of data", and was created after 9/11.

After his capture, Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-’Owali admitted that before the August 1998 bombing he was instructed to go to Pakistan. It was Hambali who served with his wife on the board of Konsonjaya, the Malaysian front company that funded the Yousef-KSM Manila cell where the 9/11 plot was born. Declassified on March 21, 2000, the chart showed Ali Mohamed (with his photo from the Fort Bragg video) inside a box with bin Laden, Al-Zawahiri, Atef, Wadih El-Hage, and Mohammed Jamal Khalifa. He also reminded the Feds of al Qaeda’s loyalty to the spiritual leader of the New York cell—blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, whom the Able Danger data-miners had clearly linked to al Qaeda just months before.As it turns out, one of the key FBI agents in the FBI’s squad I-49 had seen some of the Malaysian summit pictures months before. By late summer, that second Able Danger configuration had re-confirmed the previous hits on Atta, al-Midhar, al Hazmi and al-Shehhi,” says Lt. Despite the FBI’s ongoing complaint that they were consistently blindsided by the CIA on the presence of al-Midhar and al-Hazmi, both at the K. A nearly 200-year-old West Point time capsule that at first appeared to yield little more than dust contains hidden treasure, the US Military Academy said. The alleged distortions of the IG report centered around excluding any evidence that Able Danger had identified and tracked Atta years before 9/11.

Some user-contributed text on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. He listed the same address in Hamburg, Germany: 54 Marienstrasse, where he’d been living with hijacker-pilots al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah. There are other “significant inconsistencies” in Shaykh’s statements about the hijackers, including when he first met them and later meetings with them. THE COURT: Your offer is to plead guilty to five counts charging you with conspiracy to kill nationals of the United States, conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim at places outside of the United States, conspiracy to murder, conspiracy to destroy buildings and property of the United States, and conspiracy to destroy national-defense utilities of the United States.It stated the commission had been aware of the Able Danger program, and requested and obtained information about it from the Department of Defense, but none of the information provided had indicated the program had identified Atta or other 9/11 hijackers. Five witnesses who had worked on Able Danger and had been questioned by the Defense Department's Inspector General later told investigative journalists that their statements to the IG were distorted by investigators in the final IG's report, or the report omitted essential information that they had provided. Several hours later, this same desk officer drafted a cable distributed solely within CIA alleging that the visa documents had been shared with the FBI. In December 2006, a sixteen-month investigation by the US Senate Intelligence Committee concluded "Able Danger did not identify Mohamed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker at any time prior to September 11, 2001", and dismissed other assertions that have fueled 9/11 conspiracy theories. Gorton also asserted that "the wall" was a long-standing policy that had resulted from the Church Committee in the 1970s, and that the policy only prohibits transfer of certain information from prosecutors to the intelligence services and never prohibited information flowing in the opposite direction.