Briefs

Did Army project identify Sept. 11 ringleader?

By Anne Broache, CNET News.com

Published on ZDNet News: September 21, 2005, 12:29 PM PT

Politicians on Wednesday blasted the Pentagon for failing to supply clear answers about--or witnesses with intimate knowledge of--a data-mining endeavor believed to have identified a Sept. 11 ringleader before the attacks.

Known as Able Danger, the project was created by the U.S. Army in 1999 and used to compile primarily publicly available information in a computer program and later map out a network of people with ties to known terrorists. But sometime between December 2000 and March 2001, the project was disbanded--for unclear reasons--and up to 2.5 terabytes worth of records, both electronic and hard copy, were ordered destroyed by the Army.

Sen. Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, convened a hearing Wednesday to ask whether Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta's photo was, in fact, part of that data, and, above all, why the data was not shared with law enforcement agencies but deleted instead.

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Zaid said his clients, seated behind him, would have told senators that the Able Danger project did identify four Sept. 11 hijackers, including Atta, in its extensive data-mining process. All the information came from sources such as Lexis-Nexis, Westlaw, other subcontractors and the Internet--not government databases or classified sources, he said. His clients made repeated attempts to set up meetings with the FBI to share their charts and data, Zaid said, but all of those commitments were ultimately cancelled.

But Zaid was quick to note that the people on the charts could have been "nefarious or innocuous," and that "no information obtained at the time would have led anyone to believe criminal activity had taken place or that any specific terrorist activities were being planned."

Erik Kleinsmith, a former Army major who now works for Lockheed Martin, said he was ordered in 2000 by an Army lawyer to destroy all the data used in Able Danger. The reason for the destruction, he said, was an Army regulation that prohibits retention of data about U.S. persons beyond 90 days unless it has been determined to fit into one of 13 categories related to counterterrorism investigations.

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