Gorelick wall

[dgolvach]

August 09, 2005

9/11 Cell Identified In 2000 (Updates)

Today's New York Times reveals that military intelligence had identified the core of the 9/11 cell more than a year before the attacks that killed 3,000 people. Mohammed Atta and three of the other hijackers remained unknown to the FBI, however, thanks to the working policy at the time which forbade intelligence services from sharing information with the FBI and other law-enforcement officials:

More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.

In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military's Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.

The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas. Under American law, United States citizens and green-card holders may not be singled out in intelligence-collection operations by the military or intelligence agencies. That protection does not extend to visa holders, but Mr. Weldon and the former intelligence official said it might have reinforced a sense of discomfort common before Sept. 11 about sharing intelligence information with a law enforcement agency.

A former spokesman for the Sept. 11 commission, Al Felzenberg, confirmed that members of its staff, including Philip Zelikow, the executive director, were told about the program on an overseas trip in October 2003 that included stops in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But Mr. Felzenberg said the briefers did not mention Mr. Atta's name.

The report produced by the commission last year does not mention the episode.

The reason for the inability to share information with the FBI, information that might have led them to "connect the dots", in the parlance of the 9/11 Commission, was the wall between intelligence and law-enforcement operations constructed in large part by the Clinton Administration. While FISA, the legislation governing the use of law-enforcement resources for intelligence work, has existed since the 1970s, the 1990s saw a major reinterpretation of that law within the executive branch, prompted by Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick. As Andrew McCarthy noted last year, that reinterpretation had the practical effect of cutting off all communication between the two groups responsible for American security:

Commissioner Gorelick, as deputy attorney general