Ever since I joined RI, I've been meaning to post my old digital collection of articles, etc. about the infamous events of September 11, 2001. They mostly range from pre-2001 up to around 2005, and, as I recall, most of it was collected in 2003, when I was deep down the rabbit hole.
I'm depositing it here because there may be some useful items missed by others, and because many, if not most, of the links are dead and the stories are gone (and some items have no URL attached—sorry). It's somewhat random, though some files comprise several stories related to some aspect of the events. I didn't save everything I saw, of course, and at some point, one morning going down another scrawled list of names to research, I realized, "I can't do this anymore."
I'm not going to attempt to 'curate' or better organize it (the best stuff may be buried somewhere in the middle) — I'm just going to start at the top of the folder and work my way down — but I may annotate some items. Some items doubtlessly come from iffy sources (NYTimes? PrisonPlanet?), some I will omit if today they seem wrong or stupid; I haven't gone through the collection in many years. (History Commons' excellent "Complete 911 Timeline" may contain everything here, maybe not.)
Disclaimer: I do not in any way necessarily endorse or trust all of the information in these pages — there's bound to be many inaccuracies, misinformation and disinformation, but I cannot take time to edit it. I'm dumping at all here to be sorted out as the reader pleases.
Elvis
On edit: Many hyperlinks in the original pieces display here as plain text; in most cases I can extract the URL, so if there's one you really want to pursue, PM me and I'll get it for you if I can.
(It would be an interesting exercise to see how many of the URLs of and within these articles still work; not many, I'm guessing.)
[Abel Danger]
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/17/polit ... r=homepage
Officer Says Military Blocked Sharing of Files on Terrorists
By PHILIP SHENON
Published: August 17, 2005
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16 - A military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly.
The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the bureau.
Colonel Shaffer said in an interview on Monday night that the small, highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share its information.
But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 attacks were still being planned.
"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.
He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Special Operations Command of the Defense Department had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States.
"It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.
The Defense Department did not dispute the account from Colonel Shaffer, a 42-year-old native of Kansas City, Mo., who is the first military officer associated with the program to acknowledge his role publicly.
At the same time, the department said in a statement that it was "working to gain more clarity on this issue" and that "it's too early to comment on findings related to the program identified as Able Danger." The F.B.I. referred calls about Colonel Shaffer to the Pentagon.
The account from Colonel Shaffer, a reservist who is also working part time for the Pentagon, corroborates much of the information that the Sept. 11 commission has acknowledged it received about Able Danger last July from a Navy captain who was also involved with the program but whose name has not been made public. In a statement issued last week, the leaders of the commission said the panel had concluded that the intelligence program "did not turn out to be historically significant."
The statement said that while the commission did learn about Able Danger in 2003 and immediately requested Pentagon files about it, none of the documents turned over by the Defense Department referred to Mr. Atta or any of the other hijackers.
Colonel Shaffer said that his role in Able Danger was as liaison with the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, and that he was not an intelligence analyst. The interview with Colonel Shaffer on Monday was arranged for The New York Times and Fox News by Representative Curt Weldon, the Pennsylvania Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a champion of data-mining programs like Able Danger.
Colonel Shaffer's lawyer, Mark Zaid, said in an interview that he was concerned that Colonel Shaffer was facing retaliation from the Defense Department, first for having talked to the Sept. 11 commission staff in October 2003 and now for talking with news organizations.
Mr. Zaid said that Colonel Shaffer's security clearance was suspended last year because of what the lawyer said were a series of "petty allegations" involving $67 in personal charges on a military cellphone. He said that despite the disciplinary action, Colonel Shaffer had been promoted this year from major.
Colonel Shaffer said he had decided to allow his name to be used in part because of his frustration with the statement issued last week by the commission leaders, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton.
The commission said in its final report last year that American intelligence agencies had not identified Mr. Atta as a terrorist before Sept. 11, 2001, when he flew an American Airlines jet into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York.
A commission spokesman did not return repeated phone calls on Tuesday for comment. A Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor, said in an interview on Tuesday that while he could not judge the credibility of the information from Colonel Shaffer and others, the Pentagon needed to "provide a clear and comprehensive explanation regarding what information it had in its possession regarding Mr. Atta."
"And if these assertions are credible," Mr. Ben-Veniste continued, "the Pentagon would need to explain why it was that the 9/11 commissioners were not provided this information despite requests for all information regarding Able Danger."
Colonel Shaffer said he had provided information about Able Danger and its identification of Mr. Atta in a private meeting in October 2003 with members of the Sept. 11 commission staff when they visited Afghanistan, where he was then serving. Commission members have disputed that, saying that they do not recall hearing Mr. Atta's name during the briefing and that the name did not appear in documents about Able Danger that were later turned over by the Pentagon.
"I would implore the 9/11 commission to support a follow-on investigation to ascertain what the real truth is," Colonel Shaffer said in the interview this week. "I do believe the 9/11 commission should have done that job: figuring out what went wrong with Able Danger."
"This was a good news story because, before 9/11, you had an element of the military - our unit - which was actually out looking for Al Qaeda," he continued. "I can't believe the 9/11 commission would somehow believe that the historical value was not relevant."
Colonel Shaffer said that because he was not an intelligence analyst, he was not involved in the details of the procedures used in Able Danger to glean information from terrorist databases, nor was he aware of which databases had supplied the information that might have led to the name of Mr. Atta or other terrorists so long before the Sept. 11 attacks.
But he said he did know that Able Danger had made use of publicly available information from government immigration agencies, from Internet sites and from paid search engines like LexisNexis
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/23/polit ... nted=print
August 23, 2005
Second Officer Says 9/11 Leader Was Named Before Attacks
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 - An active-duty Navy captain has become the second military officer to come forward publicly to say that a secret intelligence program tagged the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks as a possible terrorist more than a year before the attacks.
The officer, Scott J. Phillpott, said in a statement on Monday that he could not discuss details of the military program, which was called Able Danger, but confirmed that its analysts had identified the Sept. 11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, by name by early 2000. "My story is consistent," said Captain Phillpott, who managed the program for the Pentagon's Special Operations Command. "Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000."
His comments came on the same day that the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, told reporters that the Defense Department had been unable to validate the assertions made by an Army intelligence veteran, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and now backed up by Captain Phillpott, about the early identification of Mr. Atta.
Colonel Shaffer went public with his assertions last week, saying that analysts in the intelligence project were overruled by military lawyers when they tried to share the program's findings with the F.B.I. in 2000 in hopes of tracking down terrorist suspects tied to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Di Rita said in an interview that while the department continued to investigate the assertions, there was no evidence so far that the intelligence unit came up with such specific information about Mr. Atta and any of the other hijackers.
He said that while Colonel Shaffer and Captain Phillpott were respected military officers whose accounts were taken seriously, "thus far we've not been able to uncover what these people said they saw - memory is a complicated thing."
The statement from Captain Phillpott , a 1983 Naval Academy graduate who has served in the Navy for 22 years, was provided to The New York Times and Fox News through the office of Representative Curt Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a longtime proponent of so-called data-mining programs like Able Danger.
Asked if the Defense Department had questioned Captain Phillpott in its two-week-old investigation of Able Danger, another Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Paul Swiergosz, said he did not know.
Representative Weldon also arranged an interview on Monday with a former employee of a defense contractor who said he had helped create a chart in 2000 for the intelligence program that included Mr. Atta's photograph and name.
The former contractor, James D. Smith, said that Mr. Atta's name and photograph were obtained through a private researcher in California who was paid to gather the information from contacts in the Middle East. Mr. Smith said that he had retained a copy of the chart until last year and that it had been posted on his office wall at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. He said it had become stuck to the wall and was impossible to remove when he switched jobs.
In its final report last year, the Sept. 11 commission said that American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks.
The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission acknowledged on Aug. 12 that their staff had met with a Navy officer last July, 10 days before releasing the panel's final report, who asserted that a highly classified intelligence operation, Able Danger, had identified "Mohamed Atta to be a member of an Al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn."
But the statement, which did not identify the officer, said the staff determined that "the officer's account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation" and that the intelligence operation "did not turn out to be historically significant."
With his comments on Monday, Captain Phillpott acknowledged that he was the officer who had briefed the commission last year. "I will not discuss the issues outside of my chain of command and the Department of Defense," he said. "But my story is consistent. Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000. I have nothing else to say."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050902/ap_ ... HNlYwM3MTg
Pentagon Finds More Who Recall Atta Intel
By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer
Fri Sep 2, 7:00 AM ET
WASHINGTON - Pentagon officials said Thursday they have found three more people who recall an intelligence chart that identified Sept. 11 mastermind Mohamed Atta as a terrorist one year before the attacks on New York and Washington. But they have been unable to find the chart or other evidence that it existed.
Last month, two military officers, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Navy Capt. Scott Philpott, went public with claims that a secret unit code-named Able Danger used data mining — searching large amounts of data for patterns — to identify Atta in 2000. Shaffer has said three other Sept. 11 hijackers also were identified.
In recent days Pentagon officials have said they could not yet verify or disprove the assertions by Shaffer and Philpott. On Thursday, four intelligence officials provided the first extensive briefing for reporters on the outcome of their interviews with people associated with Able Danger and their review of documents.
They said they interviewed at least 80 people over a three-week period and found three, besides Philpott and Shaffer, who said they remember seeing a chart that either mentioned Atta by name as an al-Qaida operative or showed his photograph. Four of the five recalled a chart with a pre-9/11 photo of Atta; the other person recalled only a reference to his name.
The intelligence officials said they consider the five people to be credible but their recollections are still unverified.
"To date, we have not identified the chart," said Pat Downs, a senior policy analyst in the office of the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. "We have identified a similar chart but it does not contain the photo of Mohamed Atta or a reference to him or a reference to the other (9/11) hijackers."
She said more interviews would be conducted, but the search of official documents is finished.
Downs and the other officials said they could not rule out that the chart recalled by Shaffer, Philpott and three others had been destroyed in compliance with regulations pertaining to intelligence information about people inside the United States. They also did not rule out that the five simply had faulty recollections.
Navy Cmdr. Christopher Chope, of the Center for Special Operations at U.S. Special Operations Command, said there were "negative indications" that anyone ever ordered the destruction of Able Danger documents, other than the materials that were routinely required to be destroyed under existing regulations.
Shaffer, who is now a civilian employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency, also has publicly asserted that military lawyers stopped the Able Danger staff from sharing the information on Atta with the FBI out of concern about gathering and sharing information on people in the United States legally.
Chope said there is no evidence that military lawyers blocked the sharing of Able Danger information with the FBI.
Chope also said the nature of Able Danger has been misrepresented in some news stories. He said it was created as a result of a directive in early October 1999 by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to U.S. Special Operations Command to develop a campaign plan against transnational terrorism, "specifically al-Qaida."
He called it an internal working group with a core of 10 staffers at Special Operations Command. Philpott was the "team leader," he said. "Able Danger was never a military unit," and it never targeted individual terrorists, he said. It went out of existence when the planning effort was finished in January 2001, he said.
Able Danger's purpose was to "characterize the al-Qaida network," Chope said, and determine the terror network's vulnerabilities and linkages at a time when U.S. officials were unaware that al-Qaida members were operating inside the United States.
"The effort was never: Determine which individuals we ought to roll up," he said. "Did Osama bin Laden's name come up? Of course it did." But it was not primarily aimed at identifying individual terrorists, he added.
Of the five people who told Pentagon interviewers they recalled a pre-9/11 chart that either named Atta or showed his photograph, two were on the staff of U.S. Special Operations Command: Philpott and an unidentified civilian analyst. Besides Shaffer, the others were an unidentified private contractor and an analyst with the Army's Land Information Warfare Activity, Downs said
Must Read! The Neo-Con Able Danger Scandal -- Atta Coverup! UPDATE 4
by Sherlock Google
Wed Aug 24th, 2005 at 09:48:33 PDT
DIA Agents were ordered to put yellow Post-its over Atta's face and the face's of 3 other 9/11 terrorists
"We were directed to take those 3M yellow stickers and place them over the faces of Atta and the other terrorists and pretend they didn't exist," the intelligence officer told GSN."
Intel agents Michael Shaffer and Scott Philpott have confirmed Rep. Weldon's claims that a chart with Atta's face, soon the photos of 3 other members of the 9-11 terror team, were known to DIA team Able Danger by early 2000.
This diary will show that Pete Schoomaker and Philip Zelikow are two of the main Perpetraitors in this scandal, that they deliberately withheld information from the President of the United States that would have prevented 9/11, that they and their neo-con rulers Let It Happen On Purpose.
Of this there can no longer be any doubt.
Sherlock Google's diary :: ::
Update [2005-8-24 15:35:46 by Sherlock Google]: From the Aug. 10 NY Times on Shaffer trying to include Able Danger in the final 9-11 Commission Report:
The Sept. 11 commission was warned by a uniformed military officer 10 days before issuing its final report that the account would be incomplete without reference to what he described as a secret military operation that by the summer of 2000 had identified as a potential threat the member of Al Qaeda who would lead the attacks more than a year later, commission officials said on Wednesday.
Aug 10 NY Times
Update [2005-8-24 15:35:46 by Sherlock Google]: From the Commission Statement on Able Danger:
The records discuss a set of plans, beginning in 1999, for ABLE DANGER, which involved expanding knowledge about the al Qaeda network. Some documents include diagrams of terrorist networks. None of the documents turned over to the Commission mention Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers. Nor do any of the staff notes on documents reviewed in the DOD reading room indicate that Mohamed Atta or any of the other future hijackers were mentioned in any of those documents.
A senior staff member also made verbal inquiries to the HPSCI and CIA staff for any information regarding the ABLE DANGER operation. Neither organization produced any documents about the operation, or displayed any knowledge of it.
Update [2005-8-24 15:43:9 by Sherlock Google]: The 9-11 Families respond to the Able Danger news:
A group of Sept. 11 widows called the September 11th Advocates issued a statement Wednesday saying they were "horrified" to learn that further possible evidence exists, and they are disappointed the Sept. 11 commission report is "incomplete and illusory."
"The revelation of this information demands answers that are forthcoming, clear and concise," the statement said. "The Sept. 11 attacks could have and should have been prevented."
Fox News
Zelikow, as Executive Director, managed to keep the Commission from seeing the truth.
Update [2005-8-24 16:49:54 by Sherlock Google]: Here is the Gorelick Memo on The Wall. Read it for yourself and you will see that in no way does it prevent the DIA folks from telling the FBI about Atta getting ready to spring a possible attack:
The Gorelick Wall Memo
We have to learn a whole lot of ACRONYMS here but it's clear that information about a crime that "may be committed" is supposed to be "disseminated" to criminal investigators! Read it yourself.
From JusticeWatch.org:
The "Wall." The "wall" metaphor is shorthand for the recognition that separate authorities govern law enforcement and foreign intelligence investigations targeted against Americans. These authorities, designed to prevent a recurrence of domestic spying by the FBI and CIA, always recognized that international terrorism was both a law enforcement and intelligence matter. Contrary to the repeated mischaracterization by the Attorney General and others, the law never prohibited sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence communities; to the contrary, it expressly provided for such sharing. While the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was interpreted to mean that prosecutors could not direct foreign intelligence wiretaps, as opposed to criminal wiretaps, the 9/11 failures had nothing whatsoever to do with the inability of prosecutors to direct such surveillance.
Justice Watch
----------------------------------
From the Government Security News mag which broke the story:
Did DoD lawyers blow the chance to nab Atta?
By Jacob Goodwin
In September 2000, one year before the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11, a U.S. Army military intelligence program, known as "Able Danger," identified a terrorist cell based in Brooklyn, NY, one of whose members was 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta, and recommended to their military superiors that the FBI be called in to "take out that cell," according to Rep. Curt Weldon, a longtime Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who is currently vice chairman of both the House Homeland Security and House Armed Services Committees.
The recommendation to bring down that New York City cell -- in which two other Al Qaeda terrorists were also active -- was not pursued during the weeks leading up to the 2000 presidential election, said Weldon. That's because Mohammed Atta possessed a "green card" at the time and Defense Department lawyers did not want to recommend that the FBI go after someone holding a green card, Weldon told his House colleagues last June 27 during a little-noticed speech, known as a "special order," which he delivered on the House floor.
Details of the origins and efforts of Able Danger were corroborated in a telephone interview by GSN with a former defense intelligence officer who said he worked closely with that program. That intelligence officer, who spoke to GSN while sitting in Rep. Weldon's Capitol Hill office, requested anonymity for fear that his current efforts to help re-start a similar intelligence-gathering operation might be hampered if his identity becomes known.
The intelligence officer recalled carrying documents to the offices of Able Danger, which was being run by the Special Operations Command, headquartered in Tampa, FL. The documents included a photo of Mohammed Atta supplied by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and described Atta's relationship with Osama bin Laden. The officer was very disappointed when lawyers working for Special Ops decided that anyone holding a green card had to be granted essentially the same legal protections as any U.S. citizen. Thus, the information Able Danger had amassed about the only terrorist cell they had located inside the United States could not be shared with the FBI, the lawyers concluded.
"We were directed to take those 3M yellow stickers and place them over the faces of Atta and the other terrorists and pretend they didn't exist," the intelligence officer told GSN.
DoD lawyers may also have been reluctant to suggest a bold action by FBI agents after the bureau's disastrous 1993 strike against the Branch Davidian religious cult in Waco, TX, said Weldon and the intelligence officer.
Government Security News
So the responsibility for stopping DIA program Able Danger, which had Identified Atta and 3 other hijackers and linked them to 56 other al-Queda terrorists overseas, has been laid at the feet of Bill Clinton--except he and Richard Clarke were never told about it at all.
That's right. Bill Clinton was never told about Able Danger and the ID of Atta because Richard Clarke was never told about AD. How do I know? He never wrote about it in his book, nor did he testify about it's existence before the 9-11 Commission!
You see Richard Clarke was known for being obsesses with Osama Bin Laden and HE was the guy the neo-con moles did not want to know about Atta and the gang. Schoomaker and the neo-cons knew telling the FBI would inform Clarke and then Mr. Laser Beam himself, President of the United State William Jefferson Clinton, would have gotten involved--and the Pearl Harbor-type attack would never take place (the neo-cons talked about the need for a Pearl Harbor-type attack before the PNAC Plan would be accepted by the American people--so when one presented itself, they let it happen).
General Pete Schoomaker, who were later heavily rewarded by the neo-cons in the Bush Administration, blocked the upward motion of the DIA information by having Shaffer and Philpott meet with Pentagon lawyers opinions--lawyers who were rubberstamping ridiculous legal opinions to carry out the neo-con plan. These certain people were neo-cons in the Clinton Administration, covertly carrying out the PNAC plan to let a Pearl Harbor-type attack occur so Iraq and 6 other countries could be invaded.
HOW DARE WELDON AND THE RIGHT WING TRY TO LAY ABLE DANGER AT THE FEET OF BILL CLINTON, WHEN HE WAS DELIBERATELY PREVENTED FROM KNOWING ABOUT IT BY SCHOOMAKER AND THE OTHERS! THEN THE NEO-CONS ENDED THE PROGRAM IN FEB. 2001 ALTOGETHER!
The heroic intel agents of Able Danger repeatedly tried to get the FBI to roll up the cell but were stopped by the secret neo-con cell within the Clinton Administration, especially General Pete Schoomaker, in command of Able Danger--and who was later asked by Rumsfeld to come out of retirement and replace Shinseki in 2003 as Army Chief of Staff!
Pete Schoomaker, Perpetraitor
Schoomaker, who worked under neo-con Tommy Franks in Tampa, retired in December of 2000. The indicted Larry Franklin was another neo-con in the Clinton Administration.
Schoomaker repeatedly told Philpott and Shaffer that they could not inform the FBI as DoD lawyers had opined that Atta's Green Card made him a "US Person", that the so-called "Gorelick Wall" prevented talking to the FBI--even though Atta was part of al-Queda. Shaffer and Philpott were actually ordered to put yellow sticky pads over the faces of the 4 terrorists on their Analyst Notebook chart and act as thought they don't exist. (Analyst Notebook is software).
"The former defense intelligence official, who was interviewed twice this week, has repeatedly said that Mr. Atta and four others were identified on a chart presented to the Special Operations Command. The former official said the chart identified about 60 probable members of Al Qaeda." [NY Times Archive 8/13/05]
Here is Captain Scott Philpott as blogger Anon on Intel Dump talking about meeting the DoD lawyers, who had no doubt been ordered by higher-ups to ignore the clear exception to the Gorelick Wall that a terrorist presented:
I was there and I lived through the ABLE DANGER nightmare.
First - yes - The lawyers involved in this (and similar projects) did interpret the 9-11 terrorists as "US persons" - so while you can second guess them all you want - but that was their "legal" call as wrong as it was and is. Unfortunately, the chain of command at SOCOM went along with them (and this, I expect, will be a topic that will become more clear in the near future).
And lawyers of the era also felt that any intelligence officer viewing open internet information for the purpose of intelligence collection automatically required that any "open source" information obtained be treated as if it was "intelligence information" ...does this sound like idiocy to you? It did to me - and we fought it - and I was in meetings at the OSD level, with OSD laywers, that debated this - and I even briefed the DCI George Tenet on this issue relating to an internet project.
And yes, Virgina - we tried to tell the lawyers that since the data identified Atta and the others as linked to Al Qaeda, we should be able to collect on them based on SecState Albright's declaration of Al Qaeda as transnational terrorist threat to the US...well the lawyers did not agree...go figure...so we could not collect on them - and for political reasons - could not pass them to the FBI...I know because I brokered three meetings between the FBI and SOCOM to allow SOCOM to pass the informaton to the FBI. And, sadly, SOCOM cancelled them every time...
Intel Dump Blogger Anon
So Schoomaker and the Pentagon lawyers blocked the Atta Chart and request for arrest of the "Brooklyn Cell" from going to the FBI, Clarke and Clinton--who would have acted on it--and 9-11 would likely have never happened, with 3 of the 4 pilots and the leader of the gang arrested.
But then the neo-cons stole the election and came into power proper with Bush, Rice and Cheney. Rice, in charge of the transition, demoted Richard Clarke on Jan. 5, 2001, with the assistance of Philip Zelikow, who later became Executive Director of the 9-11 Commission! Like Schoomaker, Zelikow has now been rewarded with a plum job, directly under Rice at State.
Able Danger was then "unceremoniously axed" by the DoD in February 2001 when the neo-cons officially took over the Pentagon, no doubt on the orders of Cheney and Rice.
From the Norristown Times-Herald in Weldon's district:
A small group of Defense Intelligence Agency employees ran the Able Danger operation from fall 1999 to February 2001 - just seven months before the terrorist attacks - when the operation was unceremoniously axed, according to a former defense intelligence official familiar with the program. The former official asked not to be identified.
Norristown paper
August 17 article Shaffer confirms this end date:
The objective of "Able Danger" was to identify and target al-Qaeda and other terrorists. The DIA team used data mining, parallel processing and other cutting-edge computer technology from 1999 through early 2001, Shaffer said.
Times Herald again
Many other counter-terror programs were ended or stalled at the same time, including the use of the armed Predator Drone, which had spotted Osama and could have killed him, as well as new off-shore banking regs that Clinton had passed and FBI investigations of the Saudis and the Bin Ladens. Even though on Jan 31, 2001, the Congress approved the Hart Rudman counter-terror recommendations, including cockpit door hardening, Bush fought implementation by stalling, handing it to Cheney in May and saying he would issue a counter-terror plan--in October 2001, the month AFTER the 9-11 attack.
Rep. Weldon, a proponent of data-mining, had been following the Able Danger program for years and had talked to Stephen Hadley--he of 16-word fame--soon after 9-11, that Able Danger had identified the same terrorists early in the game. Hadley, second at NSC under Rice, sat on the information on Able Danger--which of course he knew about anyway--and then NEVER TOLD THE 9-11 COMMISSION.
Another major part of the treason is the Perpetraitor Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9-11 Commission, and the man who helped Rice and Cheney establish the neo-con agenda and demote Richard. Appointed by Bush to the 9-11 Commission to investigate himself essentially--and Bob Kerrey objected strenuously to Zelikow as a conflict (then gave up)--the Executive Director has tremendous power over staff and direction of the Commission and its report.
Philip Zelikow committed treason, when as Executive Director, he was directly told about Able Danger, then he and his direct staff covered up the information from the rest of the 9-11 Commission as they have said they were never told about it. When the Able Danger agents called up the Commission 10 days before the publication of the Report, they were blown off for the umpteenth time. Here is the 9-11 Commission's own statement on Able Danger:
On October 21, 2003, Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, two senior Commission staff members, and a representative of the executive branch, met at Bagram Base, Afghanistan, with three individuals doing intelligence work for the Department of Defense. One of the men, in recounting information about al Qaeda's activities in Afghanistan before 9/11, referred to a DOD program known as ABLE DANGER. He said this program was now closed, but urged Commission staff to get the files on this program and review them, as he thought the Commission would find information about al Qaeda and Bin Ladin that had been developed before the 9/11 attack.
Then Zelikow sat on the Able Danger info. Shaffer on CNN said:
The other thing is Mr. Zelicow (ph) himself gave me his card and asked me to contact him upon my return from the deployment. And I did contact him in January of '04. That's where I was essentially blown off.
I called him. They said they wanted to talk to me. I waited a week, called him back. And they said, "No, we don't need to talk to you now."
Now, Soledad, I'm sorry. I forgot your first part of the question you asked before.
S. O'BRIEN: You know, we're actually kind of running out of time.
SHAFFER: OK.
S. O'BRIEN: But I was essentially asking you if they were lying, which is sort of a yes or no answer there.
SHAFFER: I can't -- I'm just letting you know what I -- what I said. I said, specifically, that we, as through the Able Danger process, discovered two of the three cells which conducted 9/11, to include Atta. Now -- and I -- that was, to me, significant, in that they actually pulled me aside after the meeting and said, "Please come talk to us and give us more details."
Then Zelikow NEVER calls Shaffer or Philpott back!
The flimsy excuses for that are covered in TopDog's recommended diary, and are all lies anyhow:
Rice aide hid disbandment of Atta's trackers from 9/11 report
Finally, here is Lee Hamilton of the 9-11 Commission:
"The Sept. 11th commission did not learn of any U.S. government knowledge prior to 9/11 of the surveillance of Mohamed Atta or his cell," Hamilton said. "Had we learned of it obviously it would have been a major focus of our investigation."
So there you have it.
If this is e-mailed to 100 people and all the blogs and media by each person here on KOS and we pick this apart endlessly, all the evidence is there.
The greatest scandal in the history of the United States of America.
This has to be the end of the Republican Party as the majority party for some time to come. And only we bloggers can blow this thing wide open.
There is much, much more to this but I will post them on updates. And anybody who now doubts Shaffer AND Philpott is carrying skepticism too far and is likely a RW troll absolutely HORRIFIED at the turn the Able Danger story has now taken.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/di ... id=4447706
[Quashed FBI investigatiions]
Vol. 20, No. 21
October 18, 2004
New American
Agents Challenge 9/11 Commission
by William F. Jasper
Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, the FBI went on a hiring binge for language translators. Special Agent John M. Cole, who was working in the FBI’s Washington, D.C., headquarters, was assigned to do risk assessments on applicants for the translator positions.
Something in the first applicant file he picked up set off alarm bells. “One of the first things I noticed is that her father was a retired military general from a foreign power,” Special Agent Cole told The New American. “He also lived six months of the year in the U.S. and the other six months in this foreign country. I ran his name through the FBI computer and found that he had been stationed as a military attaché in the U.S. during the 1970s. One of the things I knew from my years in counterintelligence was that every military attaché from that country had proven to be an intelligence agent for that government. This was a red flag.”
Special Agent Cole says he did exactly what he was supposed to do: He took the applicant file to his supervisor, recommended against hiring the applicant and suggested a further risk assessment by the counterterrorism unit. The supervisor was glad that Cole had caught the potential security problem and agreed with his evaluation. Shortly thereafter, says Cole, he asked the supervisor if the risk assessment had been done on the applicant. He was dumbfounded at the response he received. He recounts: “I was told, ‘Not that it matters now, she’s already been hired and has just started to work in the Washington, D.C., field office.’” What’s more, she had been given Top Secret clearance.
“I was shocked,” he says. “I couldn’t believe that this obvious security risk was being rushed through without proper risk assessments and put in such a sensitive position.” John Cole is no rookie; he is an 18-year FBI veteran with much of that time spent in counterintelligence, as well as undercover operations and counterterrorism.
But he was in for more shocks, because it got much worse. According to Cole, there were as many as 12 additional applicants hired as language specialists, whose files he had personally inspected, that showed red flags for various reasons. These also were not properly vetted, he says. “Now remember, this was during the time period right after the Robert Hannsen case broke,” he points out, “and the Bureau is insisting that it’s doing everything possible to tighten security in the wake of this scandal. We saw the incredible damage that one Hannsen could cause, and yet, here we were setting ourselves up for several Hannsen-type disasters in the future.” Robert Hannsen, an FBI special agent with a long career in counterintelligence, was arrested in February 2001 for spying for Russia and the former Soviet Union. The total damage he caused to U.S. security may never be known, but his case is regarded as the worst known case of foreign penetration of the FBI.
Cole says he became more and more alarmed at what he saw and repeatedly filed reports through channels warning that the Bureau was facing very serious potential security breaches. Instead of tightening security on questionable applicants, he says, “the Security Programs people started coming down on me” for continuing to bring these matters up.
He had been covering Afghanistan, Pakistan and India for the Bureau, which had become an especially important region in the terror war. Suddenly, he was transferred to the Sub-Saharan Africa desk, which was tantamount to being exiled to Siberia. Yet, even here, he discovered he could put his experience to good use. Perusing a file of a former FBI language specialist for this region, he discovered that the individual had been providing FBI information to a foreign intelligence service. This was both a crime and an enormous security breach. “I asked why a full investigation had not been initiated against this individual and why he had not been arrested, since he was still in the U.S.,” Cole recounts. “Again, instead of doing the obvious right thing of opening this case, they took the Sub--Sahara desk away from me.”
It was obvious, says Cole, that he was suffering retaliation for “rocking the boat,” which, in this case, meant simply doing his job. “For 18 years, I had gotten nothing but exceptional ratings,” he notes, but now, all of a sudden, he was getting negative write-ups. This is precisely what FBI Director Robert Mueller pledged would not happen in the new, post-9/11 FBI.
“I will not tolerate reprisals or intimidation by any bureau employee against those who make protected disclosures, nor will I tolerate attempts to prevent the employees from making such disclosures,” Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 6, 2002. “I want people in the field to tell me what is happening,” he continued. “And I encourage, welcome the criticism, the insight, the suggestions, whether it be from the organization or from without the organization.”
However, the Bureau’s practices seem to contradict Director Mueller’s rhetoric. The cases of Special Agents John Roberts, Jane Turner, Robert Wright and Barry Carmody provide recent examples of FBI retaliation against whistleblowers. So do the cases of FBI language specialists Sibel Edmonds and Behrooz Sarshar. Edmonds, a Turkic and Arabic translator, insists that federal officials had specific information about the impending 9/11 attacks. In an August 2, 2004 open letter to the 9/11 Commission, Edmonds charged:
More than four months prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, in April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990, provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack.... Through his contacts in Afghanistan, he received information that: 1) Osama bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four or five major cities; 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes; 3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States; 4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months.
Although Mrs. Edmonds’ charges have been public for more than two years, the Justice Department and FBI have asserted the rarely invoked State Secret Privilege to block the release of the Inspector General’s investigation into her allegations.
“Director Mueller tells Congress that he is waiting for the Inspector General’s report on the [John] Roberts case,” John Cole notes. “Well, the IG report confirms that the FBI has been retaliating against Roberts for exposing serious FBI misconduct. Mueller knows that but has done nothing. And he has been blocking all documents related to Sibel Edmonds’ case.”
Then there is Mueller’s testimony before the 9/11 Commission. “It was amazing,” says Cole. “Mueller made it appear that everything is rosy at the Bureau and that all its problems have been fixed or are being fixed. He stated that the FBI’s top priorities are: 1) counterterrorism; 2) counterintelligence; and 3) training. However, what I was witnessing personally at headquarters completely contradicted that. Counterintelligence and counterterrorism had become a total sham. The claim that training is now a top priority is also false. Training has actually decreased 75 percent since 9/11. Much of the training that is being done is worthless stuff put together by retired Bureau officials who have gotten fat contracts without competitive bidding.”
What about Mueller’s claim that he wanted to hear from agents? Empty public relations, says Cole. After repeatedly failing to get a response to his security concerns on the language translators, Cole went directly to Mueller. He says he hand-carried four letters to Mueller’s office — two in 2002 and two in 2003 — and delivered them to Mueller’s secretary. “I never got a response from him,” he told The New American. “Zero. Nothing.”
Well, not exactly nothing. John Cole did finally get a response from his superiors, but that response was not the one he had hoped for. In January 2004, he was notified that he was being suspended. In March he resigned from the FBI. Like all FBI special agents, John Cole solemnly swore “to support, uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” It’s an oath he takes seriously. “When you take an oath to defend this country and do the right thing, you had better mean it,” he told The New American. “And people should be held accountable when — whether through negligence or malfeasance — they violate that oath. Otherwise, what’s the point of having it.”
The FBI has changed since he first became a special agent, says Cole, who now works as a security analyst for the U.S. Air Force. “It used to be a great place to work,” he says. “You really felt that you were part of a team that was doing important, rewarding work. Now it has become so corrupt and there is no accountability; the most conscientious, professional employees are often penalized, while some of the worst are promoted. The Bureau is in worse shape than ever and morale is very low. This is very dangerous for America’s security.”
This conviction that our country was being left wide open to terrorist attack led John Cole to join Sibel Edmonds, former U.S. Customs Agent Diane Kleiman, FAA/TSA Special Agent Bogdan Dzakovic and other federal law enforcement and intelligence agents at the September 13, 2004 Whistleblowers press conference in Washington, D.C. These officers on the front lines of the terror war warn that, far from fixing the failures that led to 9/11, many of the 9/11 Report recommendations would do more harm than good. “Director Mueller and the commission both talk a lot about accountability,” says Cole, “ but both have refused to hold anyone accountable. They simply want to reshuffle the bureaucracy, spend more money, hire more people, increase their authority — and leave the same people in charge. That’s a prescription for more — and even bigger — disasters.”
FBI Heroes in the Terror War
Veteran FBI Special Agent Robert Wright (below) and his partner John Vincent tried for years before 9/11 to get authorization for a criminal investigation of an al-Qaeda terror cell in Chicago and suspected al-Qaeda financier Yassin Al-Kadi. Their efforts were repeatedly blocked by FBI officials. In a memo written three months before 9/11, Special Agent Wright warned that Americans would die as a result of the FBI’s failure to investigate terrorists living in this country. Too late for the victims of 9/11, the U.S. Government has indicted Yassin Al-Kadi. Agent Wright has been demoted, subjected to harassment and repeated investigations by his superiors and assigned to menial work.
FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley and members of her Minneapolis FBI office were blocked repeatedly by FBI headquarters in their efforts to investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th hijacker.” Thankfully, the Minneapolis office, which had arrested Moussaoui several weeks before 9/11, did not release him. Rowley is shown above testifying before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in July 2002.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/tna/2004/ ... 04/911.htm
[Named hijackers 'still alive']
Revealed: the men with stolen identities
TELEGRAPH UK
By David Harrison
(Filed: 23/09/2001)
THEIR names were flashed around the world as suicide hijackers who carried out the attacks on America. But yesterday four innocent men told how their identities had been stolen by Osama bin Laden's teams to cover their tracks.
The men - all from Saudi Arabia - spoke of their shock at being mistakenly named by the FBI as suicide terrorists. None of the four was in the United States on September 11 and all are alive in their home country.
The Telegraph obtained the first interviews with the men since they learnt that they were on the FBI's list of hijackers who died in the crashes in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
All four said that they were "outraged" to be identified as terrorists. One has never been to America and another is a Saudi Airlines pilot who was on a training course in Tunisia at the time of the attacks.
Saudi Airlines said it was considering legal action against the FBI for seriously damaging its reputation and that of its pilots. The FBI released the list of 19 suicide terrorists three days after the attacks.
The statement said that the 19 "have been identified as hijackers aboard the four airliners". Photographs and personal details were published around the world with an appeal for "information about these individuals, even though they are presumed dead".
The Saudi Airlines pilot, Saeed Al-Ghamdi, 25, and Abdulaziz Al-Omari, an engineer from Riyadh, are furious that the hijackers' "personal details" - including name, place, date of birth and occupation - matched their own.
Mr Al-Ghamdi was named as a terrorist on the United Airlines flight that crashed in Pennsylvania - a plane said by some experts to have been heading for the White House.
He first knew that he was on the FBI's list when he was told by a colleague. Speaking from Tunisia, he said: "I was completely shocked. For the past 10 months I have been based in Tunis with 22 other pilots learning to fly an Airbus 320. The FBI provided no evidence of my presumed involvement in the attacks.
"You cannot imagine what it is like to be described as a terrorist - and a dead man - when you are innocent and alive." The airline was angry too. Officials brought Mr Al-Ghamdi back to Saudi Arabia last week for a 10-day holiday to avoid arrest or interrogation.
An official said: "We are consulting lawyers about what action to take to protect the reputation of our pilots." Mr Al-Ghamdi faced further embarrassment when CNN, the American television network, flashed a photograph of him around the world, naming him as a hijack suspect.
The FBI had published his personal details but with a photograph of somebody else, presumably a hijacker who had "stolen" his identity. CNN, however, showed a picture of the real Mr Al-Ghamdi.
He said that CNN had probably got the picture from the Flight Safety flying school he attended in Florida. CNN has since broadcast a clarification saying that the photograph may not be that of the accused.
Mr Al-Omari, who was accused of hijacking the American Airlines plane that smashed into the the World Trade Centre's north tower, said that he was at his desk at the Saudi telecommunications authority in Riyadh when the attacks took place.
He said: "I couldn't believe it when the FBI put me on their list. They gave my name and my date of birth, but I am not a suicide bomber. I am here. I am alive. I have no idea how to fly a plane. I had nothing to do with this."
Mr Al-Omari said his passport was stolen when his apartment in Denver, Colorado, was burgled in 1995. He had been studying engineering at Denver University since 1993. He was given a new passport in Riyadh on December 31, 1995 and returned to America to resume his studies in January 1996. After graduating last year he returned to Riyadh to join the electricity authority and later moved to the telecommunications authority.
The other two men accused of being terrorists are Salem Al-Hamzi and Ahmed Al-Nami. Mr Al-Hamzi is 26 and had just returned to work at a petrochemical complex in the industrial eastern city of Yanbou after a holiday in Saudi Arabia when the hijackers struck. He was accused of hijacking the American Airlines Flight 77 that hit the Pentagon.
He said: "I have never been to the United States and have not been out of Saudi Arabia in the past two years." The FBI described him as 21 and said that his possible residences were Fort Lee or Wayne, both in New Jersey.
Mr Al-Nami, 33, from Riyadh, an administrative supervisor with Saudi Arabian Airlines, said that he was in Riyadh when the terrorists struck.
He said: "I'm still alive, as you can see. I was shocked to see my name mentioned by the American Justice Department. I had never even heard of Pennsylvania where the plane I was supposed to have hijacked."
He had never lost his passport and found it "very worrying" that his identity appeared to have been "stolen" and published by the FBI without any checks. The FBI had said his "possible residence" was Delray Beach in Florida.
Last night the FBI admitted that there was some doubt about the identities of some of the suspects. A spokesman said: "The identification process has been complicated by the fact that many Arabic family names are similar. It is also possible that the hijackers used false identities."
The spokesman declined to say whether the FBI would apologise but added: "If we have made mistakes then obviously that would be regrettable but this is a big and complicated investigation."
When the list was published Robert Mueller, the FBI director, said that it was "fairly confident" that the names were not aliases.
20 September 2001: Piecing together the shadowy lives of the hijackers
15 September 2001: Seven pilots were among 19 hijackers
13 September 2001: Suicide hijackers taught to fly in America, says FBI
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.h ... 94D9404482
New York Times
September 16, 2001, Sunday
NATIONAL DESK
AFTER THE ATTACKS: MISSED CUES; Saudi May Have Been Suspected in Error, Officials Say
By KEVIN SACK (NYT) 703 words
VERO BEACH, Fla., Sept. 15 -- The authorities said today that it appeared a case of mistaken identity had led the Federal Bureau of Investigation to search the former home and to interview the friends of a Saudi Arabian pilot whose name is similar to one used by one of the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the World Trade Center.
The search here on Wednesday was widely reported in the news media, including The New York Times, with several accounts reporting that the pilot was a suspected hijacker.
A lawyer with knowledge of the investigation said today that the man, Abdul Rahman Alomari, had returned to Saudi Arabia this month, and that both American and Saudi officials appear to be reasonably convinced that he is not the Abdulaziz al-Omari who was listed by the F.B.I. on Friday as one of the 19 hijackers.
The lawyer, as well as American and Saudi officials, all of whom spoke on the condition that they not be named, said Abdul Rahman Alomari had been interviewed by Saudi and United States authorities in Saudi Arabia in the last two days.
Federal law enforcement officials had little to say today. ''I just can't talk about the investigation,'' said Judy Orihuela, a spokeswoman for the bureau's Miami office.
But another law enforcement official said investigators had concluded that the Alomari who had lived here -- an employee of Saudi Arabian Airlines who was attending flight school in Vero Beach -- was not the Alomari listed on the manifest of Flight 11.
If that is the case, Abdul Rahman Alomari fell victim to a remarkable set of circumstances. Apart from the similarity in names, the interest of investigators was clearly aroused by the fact that he had studied at a Florida flight school, as had several of the suspected hijackers. Both investigators and reporters became further intrigued when Mr. Alomari's landlord and neighbors told them he had sent his wife and four children back to Saudi Arabia less than two weeks before the attack.
A Saudi official said that the authorities in Saudi Arabia believed Mr. Alomari was who said he was. But the official said he could not definitively clear up the question of Mr. Alomari's identity and that Saudi authorities were investigating whether identity theft might have been involved.
At 5:30 a.m. on Wednesday, some 60 F.B.I agents and local law enforcement officers swept into Mr. Alomari's former neighborhood here. They then searched the house for hours, as well as a neighboring house that had been rented by Adnan Bukhari, another pilot trainee from Saudi Arabia and a friend of Mr. Alomari's.
Mr. Bukhari agreed to be flown to Miami for an interview at the F.B.I.'s office there, his lawyer said. Mr. Bukhari was allowed to return home Thursday night, the lawyer said.
During the interview, Mr. Bukhari's cellphone rang, said the lawyer, who was present. Mr. Bukhari found Mr. Alomari on the line, calling from Saudi Arabia after hearing news reports that the two of them were considered suspects, the lawyer said. He asked the F.B.I. agent whether he wished to speak to Mr. Alomari and handed him the phone.
--------------------
Shared Names for Hijackers
(By The New York Times)
WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 -- Three of the men identified as the hijackers in the attacks on Tuesday have the same names as alumni of American military schools, the authorities said today. The men were identified as Mohamed Atta, Abdulaziz al-Omari and Saeed al-Ghamdi.
The Defense Department said Mr. Atta had gone to the International Officers School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama; Mr. al-Omari to the Aerospace Medical School at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas; and Mr. al-Ghamdi to the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio in Monterey, Calif.
STILL ALIVE? FBI Mixed Up on True Identities of Perpetrators
Some of the men the FBI claims hijacked planes on Sept. 11 and crashed them into hubs of U.S. finance and defense are still alive.
Exclusive to American Free Press
By Christopher J. Petherick
At least six men the FBI says were part of the ring of 19 hijackers who seized passenger jets with box cutters on Sept. 11 and crashed them into the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon are "alive and well," report Mideast officials.
Information Times, an on-line publication, reported that Saudi Arabia's Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal told the Arabic Press after meeting with President George W. Bush on Sept. 20: "It was proved that five of the names included in the FBI list had nothing to do with what happened."
According to The Orlando Sentinel, the Saudi Arabian embassy confirmed that four of the five mentioned by Al-Faisal -Saeed Alghamdi, Mohand Alshehri, Abdul aziz Alo mari and Salem Alhazmi-are not dead and had nothing to do with the heinous terror attacks in New York and Washington.
Saudi officials at the embassy were un able to verify the whereabouts of the fifth accused hijacker, Khalid Al-Mihdhar. However, Arab newspapers say Al-Mihd har is still alive.
NUMBER SIX
A sixth person on the FBI's list, Saudi national Waleed Alshehri, is living in Casablanca, according to an official with the Royal Air Moroc, the Moroccan commercial airline.
According to the unnamed official, Alshehri lived in Dayton Beach, Fla., where he took flight training at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Now he works for a Moroccan airline.
On Sept. 22, Associated Press reported that Alshehri had spoken to the U.S. embassy in Morocco.
The FBI acknowledges that the identities of some of the purported hijackers are still in question because some of the suspects' names on flight rosters had been reported stolen months before the attacks took place.
Why the FBI still lists these men as suspected hijackers who were killed during the terrorist assault remains a mystery.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/s ... 50,00.html
False identities mislead FBI
Special report: terrorism in the US
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usterrorism
Nick Hopkins in New York
Friday September 21, 2001
The Guardian
The FBI acknowledged yesterday that some of the terrorists involved in the attacks last week were using false identities, as it emerged that at least two men had been wrongly implicated.
After analysis of the passenger lists of the four hijacked flights and other immigration documents, investigators identified Salem Al-Hazmi and Abdulaziz Al-Omari as two of the terrorists.
The real Salem Al-Hazmi, however, is alive and indignant in Saudi Arabia, and not one of the people who perished in the American Airlines flight that crashed on the Pentagon. He works at a government-owned petroleum and chemical plant in the city of Yanbu.
He said yesterday he had not left Saudi Arabia for two years, but that his passport had been stolen by a pickpocket in Cairo three years ago.
Abdulaziz Al-Omari has also come forward to say he was not on the flight from Boston that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre.
An electrical engineer who works in Saudi Arabia, Mr Al-Omari said he was a student in Denver during the mid-1990s, and that his passport and other papers were stolen in a burglary in the US five years ago.
He was given a special pass by the Saudi embassy so he could return home.
"The name is my name and the birth date is the same as mine," he told Asharq al-Aswat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. "But I am not the one who bombed the World Trade Centre in New York."
Both men have offered to fly to the US to prove their innocence.
A Saudi embassy official in Washington warned yesterday that many more terror suspects might have been using false identities.
"The Salem Al-Hamzi we have is 26 years old and has never been to the United States," Gaafar Allagany told the Washington Post. "He has said he is willing to come to the United States if anyone wants to see him."
The FBI said it was reviewing the information about those on board the flights and that "the possibility that some of the identities are in question is being actively pursued".
The confusion has added to the problems of investigators. They have discovered that one of the men arrested, Badr Mohammed Hamzi, a radiologist from San Antonio, Texas, regularly used the name Khalid Al-Midhar, who has been named as another of the hijackers.
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/1559151.stm]
Sunday, 23 September, 2001, 12:30 GMT 13:30 UK
Hijack 'suspects' alive and well
A man called Waleed Al Shehri says he left the US a year ago
Another of the men named by the FBI as a hijacker in the suicide attacks on Washington and New York has turned up alive and well.
The identities of four of the 19 suspects accused of having carried out the attacks are now in doubt.
Saudi Arabian pilot Waleed Al Shehri was one of five men that the FBI said had deliberately crashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Centre on 11 September.
His photograph was released, and has since appeared in newspapers and on television around the world.
Now he is protesting his innocence from Casablanca, Morocco.
He told journalists there that he had nothing to do with the attacks on New York and Washington, and had been in Morocco when they happened. He has contacted both the Saudi and American authorities, according to Saudi press reports.
He acknowledges that he attended flight training school at Daytona Beach in the United States, and is indeed the same Waleed Al Shehri to whom the FBI has been referring.
But, he says, he left the United States in September last year, became a pilot with Saudi Arabian airlines and is currently on a further training course in Morocco.
Mistaken identity
Abdulaziz Al Omari, another of the Flight 11 hijack suspects, has also been quoted in Arab news reports.
He says he is an engineer with Saudi Telecoms, and that he lost his passport while studying in Denver.
Another man with exactly the same name surfaced on the pages of the English-language Arab News.
The second Abdulaziz Al Omari is a pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines, the report says.
Meanwhile, Asharq Al Awsat newspaper, a London-based Arabic daily, says it has interviewed Saeed Alghamdi.
He was listed by the FBI as a hijacker in the United flight that crashed in Pennsylvania.
And there are suggestions that another suspect, Khalid Al Midhar, may also be alive.
FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged on Thursday that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers is in doubt.