US military team tried to alert FBI about attack in 2000
A US military intelligence team had tried to alert the FBI in 2000 about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, but its efforts had been blocked by US military lawyers, The New York Times reported Wednesday.
The newspaper quoted Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, a veteran Army intelligence officer, as saying that the small, highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with FBI agents to share its information.
But according to Shaffer, US military lawyers forced members of Able Danger to cancel three scheduled meetings with the FBI at the last minute because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.
The information that Able Danger tried to pass on to the FBI might have led to Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 attacks were still being planned, Shaffer said.
Shaffer also told the newspaper that he was not involved in the details of the procedures used in Able Danger to gather information from terrorist databases, nor was he aware of which databases had supplied the information that might have led to the name of Atta or other terrorists so long before the Sept. 11 attacks.
But he said he did know that Able Danger had made use of publicly available information from government immigration agencies, Internet sites and paid search engines like LexisNexis.
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