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EXCLUSIVE: Witnesses in Defense Dept. Report Suggest Cover-Up of 9/11 Findings

Fox News
October 04, 2010

A document obtained and witnesses interviewed by Fox News raise new questions over whether there was an effort by the Defense Department to cover up a pre-9/11 military intelligence program known as "Able Danger."

At least five witnesses questioned by the Defense Department's Inspector General told Fox News that their statements were distorted by investigators in the final IG's report -- or it left out key information, backing up assertions that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta was identified a year before 9/11.

Atta is believed to have been the ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the World Trade Center. Claims about how early Atta first tripped the radar of the Department of Defense date back to 2005, but those claims never made it into the Inspector General's report. The report was completed in 2006 and, until now, has been available only in a version with the names of virtually all of the witnesses blacked out.

Fox News, as part of an ongoing investigation, exclusively obtained a clean copy of the report and spoke to several principal witnesses, including an intelligence and data collector who asked that she not be named.

The witness told Fox News she was interviewed twice by a Defense Department investigator. She said she told the investigator that it was highly likely a department database included the picture of Atta, whom she knew under an alias, Mohammed el-Sayed.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has blocked a book about the tipping point in Afghanistan and a controversial pre-9/11 data mining project called "Able Danger."

"When it came to the picture, (the investigator) he was fairly hostile," the witness told Fox News. She said it seemed the investigator just didn't want to hear it. "Meaning that he'd ask the same question over and over again, and, you know, you get to the point you go, well, you know... it's the same question, it's the same answer."

The IG report didn't accurately reflect her statements to investigators, she said, adding that she doesn't think the investigator simply misunderstood her.

Lt. Col Tony Shaffer, an operative involved with Able Danger, said he was interviewed three times by Defense investigators. He claims it was an effort to wear down the witnesses and intimidate them. Two other witnesses, one a military contractor and the other a retired military officer, said they had the same experience. The two witnesses spoke to Fox News on the condition of anonymity because they said they feared retaliation. A fifth witness told Fox that statements to investigators were ignored.

"My last interview was very, very hostile," Shaffer told Fox News last month before he was ordered by the department not to discuss portions of his book, "Operation Dark Heart," which included a chapter on the Able Danger data mining project.

When asked why the IG's report was so aggressive in its denials of his claims and those of other witnesses -- that the data mining project had identified Atta as a threat to the U.S. before 9/11 -- Shaffer said Defense Department was worried about taking some of the blame for 9/11.

However, It still isn't clear how -- or whether -- the information on Atta could have been used to the disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks.

"The big picture was not Atta, not so much the chart," Shaffer said. "The fact is this: That we had a pre-9/11 Department of Defense operation focused on taking action against Al Qaeda globally."

Specifically, the Defense Intelligence Agency or DIA wanted the removal of references to a meeting between Shaffer and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, removed. Shaffer alleges that in that meeting, which took place in Afghanistan, the commission was told about Able Danger and the identification of Atta before the attacks. Shaffer, who was undercover at the time, said there was "stunned silence" at the meeting.

No mention of this was made in the final 9/11 Commission report.

"Dr. Philip Zelikow approached me in the corner of the room. 'What you said today is very important. I need you to get in touch with me as soon as you return from your deployment here in Afghanistan,'" Shaffer said.

Once back in the U.S., Shaffer says he contacted the commission, but without explanation, the commission was no longer interested.

Last month, the Defense Department took the highly unusual step of buying and destroying 9,500 copies of Shaffer's book "Operation Dark Heart" at a cost of $47,000 to U.S. taxpayers.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/10/04/exclusive-witnesses-defense
-department-report-suggest-cover-findings

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Immediately prior to Bush appointing him to head the 9/11 Commission, Zelikow was the executive director of the little known Aspen Strategy Group whose members include Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rica, and Paul Wolfowitz.

Zelikow's record gets really interesting when we consider that he went on to write the 9/11 Commission Report.

While at Harvard he actually wrote about the use, and misuse, of history in policymaking. As he noted in his own words, "contemporary" history is "defined functionally by those critical people and events that go into forming the public's presumptions about its immediate past. The idea of 'public presumption'," he explained, "is akin to [the] notion of 'public myth' but without the negative implication sometimes invoked by the word 'myth.' Such presumptions are beliefs (1) thought to be true (although not necessarily known to be true with certainty), and (2) shared in common within the relevant political community."

So Zelikow, the guy who wrote The 9/11 Commission Report, was an expert in how to misuse public trust and create PUBLIC MYTHS.

In 1998, Zelikow actually wrote Catastrophic Terrorism about imagining "the transformative event" three years before 9/11. Here are Zelikow's 1998 words:

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Readers should imagine the possibilities for themselves, because the most serious constraint on current policy [nonaggression] is lack of imagination. An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America's history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans' fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great "success" or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a "before" and "after." The effort and resources we devote to averting or containing this threat now, in the "before" period, will seem woeful, even pathetic, when compared to what will happen "after." Our leaders will be judged negligent for not addressing catastrophic terrorism more urgently.

http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/visions/publication/terrorism.htm

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