What the hell are they hiding!?! Able Danger was a data mining operation in
the late 90's that supposedly ID'd Atta as a threat 1 1/2 years before 9/11.
The programs data (2.4 terabytes of it) was ordered destroyed in 2000. The
man who will testify that he was ordered to destroy it is now a civilian,
and will testify before the Senate today as to who told him to destroy it
and when.

Unfortunately, the DoD (possible Rumsfeld himself) has ordered the 4 other
witnesses *NOT* to testify before the Senate today.

Why is Rumsfeld protecting the details from a program that was destroyed
before Bush even took office? The Bush's and Clinton's sure spend a lot of
time covering for one another. Is it because of the amount of blackmail
dirt they have on each other?
------------------------------------------------------------------------

September 20, 2005
Pentagon Blocks Testimony at Senate Hearing on Terrorist
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Sept. 20 - The Pentagon said today that it had blocked a group
of military officers and intelligence analysts from testifying at an open
Congressional hearing about a highly classified military intelligence
program that, the officers have said, identified a ringleader of the Sept.
11 attacks as a potential terrorist more than a year before the attacks.

The announcement came a day before the officers and intelligence analysts
had been scheduled to testify about the program, known as Able Danger, at a
hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Bryan Whitman, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement that open
testimony about the program "would not be appropriate - we have expressed
our security concerns and believe it is simply not possible to discuss Able
Danger in any great detail in an open public forum." He offered no other
detail on the Pentagon's reasoning in blocking the testimony.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the
committee, said he was surprised by the Pentagon's decision because "so much
of this has already been in the public domain, and I think that the American
people need to know what happened here."

Mr. Specter said in a telephone interview that he intended to go ahead with
the hearing on Wednesday and hoped that it "may produce a change of heart by
the Department of Defense in answering some very basic questions."

Two military officers - an active-duty Navy captain and a reservist Army
lieutenant colonel - have said publicly in recent weeks that they were
involved with Able Danger and that the program's analysts identified Mohamed
Atta, the Egyptian-born ringleader of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, by name
as a potential terrorist by early 2000.

They said they attempted to share the information with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation in the summer of 2000, more than a year before the terrorist
attacks, but were blocked by Defense Department lawyers. F.B.I. officials,
who answer to the jurisdiction of Senator Specter's committee, have
confirmed that Defense Department abruptly canceled meetings in 2000 between
the bureau's Washington field office and representatives of the Able Danger
team.

The Pentagon has said that it has interviewed three other people who were
involved with Able Danger and who said that they, too, recalled the
identification of Mr. Atta as a terrorist suspect. But Defense Department
investigators said they could find no documentary evidence to back up the
assertion; they acknowledged that much of the information might have been
routinely destroyed.

Mr. Specter said his staff had talked to all five of the potential witnesses
and found that "credibility has been established" for all of them.

"There are quite a few credible people who are prepared to testify that
Mohamed Atta was identified long before 9/11," he said. "Now maybe there's
more than one Mohamed Atta. Or maybe there's some mistake. But that's what
we're trying to find out."

Mr. Whitman, the Pentagon spokesman, said that in place of members of the
Able Danger team, a senior defense official would be sent to the Wednesday
hearing to discuss "what the law and policies are on domestic surveillance
and to provide some insights about information-sharing between agencies."