Able Danger and 9/11 Heartstrings
Under Secretary of Defense Stephen Cambone testified before Congress yesterday that 90 people spent some 6,500 hours searching through documents and interviewing people involved in the Able Danger program and that they were unable to find any evidence that U.S. intelligence identified Mohammad Atta prior to 9/11.
Cambone says that as part of its investigation, the Pentagon used state-of-the-art data mining capabilities to determine if there was any information about hijacker Atta resident in U.S. databases from before 9/11. No information was found.
Cambone says his investigators found no deliberate restrictions on the transfer of any military intelligence information to the FBI.
On all three counts, Cambone is being truthful.
Yet, at the same time, the Pentagon can hardly be candid or put to rest conspiracy theories about Able Danger and its potential role in preventing 9/11. The reason is that around the edges of this secret operation were other secret operations that probably broke the law regarding the collection of information on U.S. citizens and conducting covert activity.
The existence of a set of overlapping secret counter-terrorist organizations before 9/11 should punctuate the failures of the government and thus create an environment of deep skepticism today about the government's competence to pursue terrorists. What appears to be happening instead is the perpetuation of the myth that secret organizations -- properly managed and given free reign -- will protect us in the future.
The Secret History of Able Danger
Ever since Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) claimed in August that Pentagon analysts had identified 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta in early 2000, a secret intelligence operation code named Able Danger has become the latest fantasy of left and right wing conspiracy theorists.
The matter was to have come to a head last week when the Senate Judiciary Committee held a special Able Danger hearing. But the Pentagon declined to allow even unclassified testimony at the open hearing, arguing that the matter better rested with the Intelligence Committee.
Chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) accused the Pentagon of "stonewalling," and all of a sudden, Weldon seemed vindicated in his claims that the Defense Department, and the 9/11 Commission, had something to hide.
The Pentagon is hiding something. But it’s not what Weldon thinks.
First, to debunk the myths:
* As best as I can determine, having spent tens of hours talking to military sources involved with the issue, intelligence analysts did not identify anyone prior to 9/11, Mohammed Atta included, as a suspect in any upcoming terrorist attack.
* It is not even clear that a "Mohammed Atta" was identified, let alone that it is the same Atta who died on 9/11.
* No military lawyers prevented intelligence sleuths from passing useful information to the FBI.
* Able Danger itself was not an intelligence program.
As a representative of U.S. Special Operations Command said at a special Pentagon briefing arranged on September 1, Able Danger "was merely the name attributed to a 15-month planning effort" to begin building a war on terrorism. This is the real story.
In early October 1999, three months after Osama bin Laden was added to the U.S. “ten most wanted” list as the mastermind behind the attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and more than a year after President Clinton signed a Presidential Directive laying out a renewed counter-terrorism program, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Hugh Shelton, tasked U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) to develop a "campaign plan" against transnational terrorism, specifically al Qaeda. The code name assigned to the planning effort, and the name of the cell of about 10 planners in SOCOM was Able Danger.
Like most government activity associated with counter-terrorism in the late 1990's, Able Danger was a "compartmented" effort. After the 1998 embassy bombings, National Security Advisor Sandy Berger directed that a tightly compartmented process be put in place to keep all counter-terrorism military planning secret. Under “this” Polo Step compartment, the Navy was required to station a force of Tomahawk cruise missile-shooting submarines off the Pakistani coast at all times, and the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), regionally responsible for Afghanistan, worked with the Joint Chiefs to develop a set of 13 military options against Al Qaeda under a war plan called Infinite Resolve.
As the Able Danger cell began its work, its first questions were: What is al Qaeda? How big is it? Where is it?
As the 9/11 Commission said in its final report: "Despite the availability of information that al Qaeda was a global network … policymakers knew little about the organization. The reams of new information that the CIA’s Bin Laden unit had been developing since 1996 had not been pulled together and synthesized for the rest of the government."
Able Danger reached out to intelligence organizations that were not only involved in monitoring al Qaeda, but also those that were specialists in synthesizing new information.
One such organization was the new Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA), a part of the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM). LIWA was organized in March 1995 to integrate "information warfare" into Army operations. On paper, that meant everything from manning new command centers in order to protect Army Internet connections from hackers to providing support for battlefield "psychological operations."
But LIWA, along with other information warfare organizations, was also developing offensive information warfare capabilities, including computer network attack and other cyber-related covert operations. And for that, there was a widespread recognition of the need for intelligence of much higher "granularity," or specificity, particularly about people, than had ever before been compiled on a large scale.
Starting in 1996, LIWA deployed teams to Bosnia. They were part of a new vanguard of information warriors. They required detailed information on factions and individuals: decision-maker identities, biases and inter-relationships, identification of critical communications and information links and nodes, demographic data, populace biases and pre-dispositions. The goal was to harness this information to determine potential pressure points to leverage decision-maker/populace behaviors.
Back at Ft. Belvoir, VA, the LIWA Advanced Concepts and Analysis division, and later the Army's Information Dominance Center (IDC) was employing new means for achieving "information dominance." With the explosion of electronic information and the ability to move vast quantities of data quickly, analysts were increasingly facing the same problem confronting forensic accountants, insurance fraud investigators, and bank examiners: Large amounts of data was increasingly available, but it needed to be put in relational form in order to develop patterns, and then sense needed to be made of the patterns to reveal what had already happened or was about to happen.
In academia, in government, in the information industry, even in marketing, hundreds of different technical approaches were being pursued, both classified and unclassified. One such effort immediately enlisted by the U.S. intelligence community and information targeteers was data mining, a capability to discover new patterns of indicators that identify events of interest when they cannot be directly observed. Data mining techniques applied to large "transaction" databases (travel or credit card records or telephone logs) could be used to uncover clandestine relationships or activities.
Another method being developed was social network analysis. This analyzes the types and frequencies of interactions among people to determine formal and informal leadership hierarchies.
In the intelligence community, most of the early data mining and link analysis efforts involved monitoring terrorist financial transactions. For example, after Somalia disintegrated in 1991 and many Somalis migrated to the U.S. and Europe, they began to send money home via the "al-Barakaat" network of money remitters. In October 1996, the FBI began to track connections between the al-Barakaat system and terrorist groups, and in the late 1990's, the intelligence community, using similar analysis to track money transfers, began to draw links between al-Barakaat and Osama bin Laden.
Inside the intelligence community, at LIWA and other organizations, data mining and link analysis was being conducted on elite and so-called “crony” networks in Bosnia (and later in Serbia during Kosovo operations), on international drug cartels, on corruption and contract killings in Russia, on weapons proliferation and sensitive trade with China, and on terrorist linkages in the Far East.
In December 1999, LIWA was approached by SOCOM to support Able Danger by conducting data mining and link analysis of the al Qaeda network. The project was initially focused on unclassified data mining using U.S. and foreign news databases, commercially available records of financial transactions, court records, licenses, travel records and phone books. The goal was to find links between potential or known terrorists. Analysts used "spiders" -- automated robots -- to go out on the Internet and collect whatever they could. "Anything we could get our hands on," says Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, the Army reserve whistle blower who was assigned to the LIWA effort.
Using the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and associated lists of suspect individuals as a starting point, LIWA began to compile databases of "associated" individuals, and then they began to "data mine" their mountains of collected records to find links between them. What they ended up with—and what is still being hidden today—is the questionable (read: potentially illegal) collection and acquisition of information on American citizens before and after 9/11.