Weldon Responds To Omission Of Able Danger From 9/11 Report

WELDON RESPONDS TO OMISSION OF ABLE DANGER FROM 9/11 REPORT

http://curtweldon.house.gov/News/Doc...cumentID=32271

(Gold9472: Probably the last thing I'll post about Able Danger.)

WASHINGTON, D.C., Aug 12, 2005 - Today Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA), Vice Chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security Committees, released the following response to a statement by the former 9/11 Commission regarding the ABLE DANGER operation.

“ABLE DANGER was about linkages and associations of individuals identified with direct links to Al-Qaeda and not about dates and times.

To clarify, ABLE DANGER was a Department of Defense planning effort, tasked to Special Operations Command (SOCOM) by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). The task assigned to ABLE DANGER was to identify and target Al-Qaeda on a global basis and, through the use of cutting edge technology (data-mining, massive parallel processing, neural networking and human factors analysis) and enhanced visualization and display tools, present options for leaders (national command authority) to manipulate, degrade or destroy the global Al-Qaeda infrastructure.

The 9/11 Commission has released multiple statements over the past week, each of which has significantly changed - from initially denying ever being briefed to acknowledging being briefed on both operation ABLE DANGER and Mohammed Atta. The information was omitted primarily because they found it to be suspect despite having been briefed on it two times by two different military officers on active duty. Additionally, the 9/11 Commission also received documents from the Department of Defense on ABLE DANGER.

Despite their varied statements, two critical questions remain unanswered.

1) Why did the Department of Defense fail to pass critical information obtained through ABLE DANGER to the FBI between the summer and fall of 2000?

2) Why did the 9/11 Commission staff fail to properly follow-up on the three separate occasions when they received information on ABLE DANGER and Mohammed Atta?

I will continue to push for a full accounting of the historical record so that we may preclude these types of failures from happening again.”