The Friends of Phil Zelikow (Able Danger Debunkers)

by Mark Levey

More on the developing story about the US Army surveillance unit, codenamed Able Danger, that detected the 9/11 attackers inside the US, and the decision by Philip Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission staff director, to withhold this information from the Commissioners.

On Saturday, the Washington Post’s Dan Eggen laid out the defense being offered by Zelikow for his failure to tell the Commission about the staff’s multiple interviews with a DIA officer who worked on the Able Danger project, and that a second officer has come forward to confirm that account.

” [A] U.S. Navy officer . . . told the commission staff in July 2004 that he recalled seeing Atta’s name and photograph on a chart prepared by another officer. Panel officials also said they have found no evidence to support similar claims made to reporters by a second person, a former defense intelligence official.”

Then, Kevin Drum in the Washington Monthly weighed in, attempting to dismiss all the commotion as simply the result of the dementia of Congressman Curt Weldon, who has been trying to ride the story into a higher committee assignment and to sell a book.

I respectfully disagree with the would-be Able Danger debunkers, above [editor's note: that would include me]. Read the comments at Drum’s blog to get a sense of the sort arguments that are being made, back and forth.

No one has said Able Danger is a figment of Weldon’s Lucky Charmed imagination. Far from it. Indeed, the Post article on Saturday revealed that there’s a second DIA analyst who has come forward to confirm that a Pentagon unit had detected the hijackers were in the US, but that the unit was ordered to move onto other things, and the FBI was wasn’t notified. The Commissioners still say that information wasn’t passed up to them by Phil Zelikow. That’s a gravely serious matter that needs to be investigated.

Most of the the Able Danger debunking effort seems to be an ad hominem attack on Curt Weldon and an attempt to deflect attention from the bigger picture. Weldon is almost beside the point. Let’s focus on what the DIA guys were saying to Zelikow. There are two DIA intelligence officers who have confirmed that Army Intelligence produced a matrix that showed the primary 9/11 hiajckers inside the U.S. months before the attacks. It was irresponsible in the extreme for the staff director to have thrown this information away and not tell the Commissioners about it, if indeed he didn’t.

The material questions about Weldon’s claim seem to devolve into three very slim, almost irrelevant, issues. Those issues are 1) whether the chart had Atta’s name on it — note, no one is contesting that there was a DoD chart produced that showed four al-Qaeda-linked terrorists detected inside the US — 2) whether it had Atta inside the US in late 1999 or in mid-2000 (note, that’s a discrepancy that needs to be checked out, not something that should have led to Zelikow throwing the information out); and 3) that the UBL cell on the chart was designated the “Brooklyn Cell”, and nothing places Atta in Brooklyn. Well, the chart isn’t about Atta — it’s about al-Qaeda, which I recall had substantial (in the $$$millions) financial ties to the al-Farooq mosque in Brooklyn. What this seems to actually reveal is that DoD was aware in 1999 of funding sources that flowed from the mosque to the UBL cells then preparing an attack inside the U.S. Serious stuff. Should have been thoroughly investigated by the Commission, but apparently wasn’t. Why?

Don’t get diverted from the fact that there’s a forest fire roaring toward you because some of trees might be out of place on the map.

Eggen’s story reads like a lawyer’s brief, citing a list of minor discrepancies between what the 9/11 Commission thought it knew about Mohamed Atta and what US military intelligence had actually determined before the attacks. The Post article is significant for the fact that it confirms that not one but two former Able Danger officers have come forward, a civilan DIA officer who was interviewed for Eggen’s report, and the Naval Officer who originally tried to bring the program to Zelikow’s attention.

The 9/11 Commission has posted a memo on the Able Danger scandal. The 9/11 Commission statement of August 12 on Able Danger is now available.

The Commission statement reveals that the Naval Officer assigned to Able Danger was alarmed that superiors at DoD ordered the diagram identifying the Brooklyn cell deleted from a DIA analyst’s file, and the FBI had not been notified by the Pentagon. The naval officer complained up his chain of command about this, and was then reassigned.

The Able Danger officer thereafter resigned, and went to the 9/11 Commission and to Cong. Weldon with what he knew. Weldon and the former Able Danger analyst were virtually ignored until The New York Times published its front-page story last Tuesday. The would-be debunkers have been at work since, but the Naval officer’s story is holding up, and a second DoD analyst has essentially confirmed it to The Washington Post.