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Published: Feb 16, 2006 12:30 AM

Modified: Feb 16, 2006 03:11 AM

Able Danger hearing sets intelligence officers at odds


James Rosen, N&O Washington Bureau

The Pentagon's top intelligence official clashed repeatedly Wednesday with former operatives of the clandestine Able Danger program over how much the government knew about al-Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Much of the testimony focused on whether hijacking mastermind Mohammed Atta had been identified long before the tragedy.

In a rare public display of bitter disputes within the close-knit military intelligence community, three members of a computer data-mining initiative code-named "Able Danger" told Congress that the Sept. 11 attacks might have been prevented if law-enforcement agencies had acted on the information about al-Qaeda they unearthed.

"It shocked us how entrenched of a presence al-Qaeda had in the United States," former Army Maj. Erik Kleinsmith told two subcommittees of the House Armed Services Committee.

J.D. Smith, a defense contractor who also worked on the Able Danger team, said he used Arab intermediaries in the Los Angeles area to buy a photograph of Atta. Smith said Atta's photo was among about 40 photos of al-Qaeda members on a large chart that he personally delivered to Pentagon officials in 2000, more than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Asked by Rep. Curt Weldon, a Republican from Pennsylvania, how certain he was that the chart contained Atta's photograph, Smith responded that he kept a copy of the chart on the office wall.

"I'm absolutely certain," Smith said. "I looked at it every day."

The dramatic hearing came five months after the Pentagon had prevented the former Able Danger operatives from testifying in public at a Senate Armed Services Committee session. It was a victory for Weldon, who persuaded 247 fellow lawmakers to sign a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, demanding open hearings on Able Danger.

"This isn't about finger-pointing," Weldon said. "It's simply about letting the American people know what we knew before 9/11. We can't learn how we can prevent the next attack unless we understand what happened in the past."

Gen. Hugh Shelton, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, set up the top-secret initiative in the late 1990s under the Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla. Drawing together a dozen top computer and intelligence officers and contractors, it used cutting-edge computer software to bore deep into Internet data to identify and draw links among al-Qaeda terrorists around the world.

Shelton, who retired three days after the Sept. 11 attacks, has acknowledged creating the Able Danger program and being briefed on it, but he has denied having any recollection of Atta being identified before the attacks.

Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, testified Tuesday that an extensive Pentagon review of Able Danger under his direction failed to locate the chart its operatives say they produced, and didn't find evidence documenting their other claims.

"There's no one here looking not to bring the information forward. We simply have not found it," Cambone said.

Pentagon officials previously said the al-Qaeda data produced by Able Danger had been destroyed because of regulations that prevent the military from maintaining information on U.S. citizens or legal residents.

But in a series of tense confrontations, Weldon told Cambone that his military sources had informed him some of the Able Danger data still existed.

"What's going on here?" Weldon asked. "Is this a massive effort to deny reality?"

Weldon said that an unidentified current Pentagon employee had, within the last three weeks, run computer searches using pre-9/11 Able Danger data. They had five hits on "Mohammed Atta" and three hits on "Muhammed Atta," Weldon said.

"There's been no investigation!" Weldon said. "There's been no analysis by the 9/11 commission or anyone else."

Cambone denied Weldon's allegations that the Pentagon has tried to punish former Able Danger team members for talking about the program.
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