Inquiry Fails to Find Data on Hijackers

An internal Pentagon investigation has found no proof that a classified military intelligence program identified Mohamed Atta or any of the other Sept. 11 hijackers before the attacks or found that they were living in the United States, officials said Thursday.

Several senior Pentagon officials said their investigation found five members of the intelligence program codenamed Able Danger who recalled the existence of a large chart of suspected Al Qaeda operatives as far back as 2000 that they said included Atta’s name or photograph. But the Pentagon found no evidence that such a chart existed.

The findings of the investigation contradict allegations that the military intelligence program may have had information in 2000 that could have led to Atta’s arrest and prevented the terrorist attacks.

In recent weeks, three members of the team, which was disbanded in the spring of 2001, have publicly stated that Able Danger identified Atta and as many as three other hijackers at least a year before the attacks on New York and the Pentagon. One of them, Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, said he tried to warn the FBI about the presence of Atta and the other terrorists in the United States.

But Shaffer said he was blocked by Pentagon lawyers concerned about the repercussions of admitting that the team was gathering intelligence on Atta because he was in the country on a U.S. visa.

Many current and former U.S. officials have expressed skepticism about whether the military intelligence operation actually identified Atta and the other conspirators as part of Al Qaeda before Sept. 11.

This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that it would hold a Sept. 14 hearing to sift through conflicting claims about Able Danger, which was set up in 1999 to gather information about Al Qaeda cells worldwide. Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said Shaffer and other team members “have made some pretty serious statements and that ought to be investigated.”

At a news briefing Thursday, Pentagon officials conceded that their investigation had answered most, but not all, of those questions about the military intelligence unit, which analyzed vast amounts of computerized information to detect links and patterns in global terrorism.

Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Defense Department spokesman, said Pentagon investigators reviewed 9.5 million documents, e-mails and other military records, and interviewed more than 80 individuals, including Shaffer and Able Danger’s team leader, Navy Capt. Scott Philpott.

Swiergosz said four team members told investigators that they recalled a chart with a pre-Sept. 11 photo of Atta, while the fifth member recalled only a reference to Atta’s name.

Swiergosz and other Pentagon officials said they believed that all five of the team members were credible, but that investigators could not find a single piece of evidence proving that such a chart existed.

“The facts are very simple,” Swiergosz said. “They specifically searched for the name Mohamed Atta and it never came up. We couldn’t even find data that someone could use to create such a chart.”

Pat Downs, a senior policy analyst in the office of the undersecretary of Defense for intelligence, said investigators did find evidence of a “similar” chart that found links to a “Brooklyn cell,” but said it did not contain a reference to Atta or any of the other 18 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Shaffer could not be reached for comment Thursday, and Philpott has not spoken publicly about the controversy, except to issue a brief statement several weeks ago saying the group had produced a chart with Atta’s name on it long before Sept. 11.

Downs told reporters that the Pentagon team investigating Shaffer’s claims would continue to conduct interviews, but that it had completed its search of official documents. Another Pentagon official said that all leads have been pursued and that the Defense Department is confident that the allegations appear to be baseless.

“They are going to keep on looking, but the expenditure of time and effort will diminish significantly,” said the Pentagon official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the case. “When you’ve uncovered the last rock, where else can you look?

“You can’t disprove a negative,” he added. “If someone says, ‘I had a purple elephant in my backyard last night,’ you can’t prove that they didn’t see it.”

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who has been outspoken in support of Shaffer and his claims, denounced the Pentagon investigation Thursday, saying through a spokesman that it was inconclusive and that the military and Congress needed to continue pursuing leads in the case.

Weldon was the first to publicly mention Able Danger, saying in a brief passage in his recent book, “Countdown to Terror,” that the chart was produced before the attacks and that the Pentagon failed to act on it. Weldon also said he gave the chart to Stephen J. Hadley, an advisor to President Bush, just after the attacks. Hadley was deputy White House national security advisor at the time and has since been promoted to national security advisor. The White House has refused to comment on whether Hadley received such a chart.

Current and former U.S. officials, even those critical of the U.S. counter-terrorism effort before Sept. 11, have been skeptical of claims that Able Danger was able to identify Atta before the attacks.

Richard A. Clarke, White House counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush, told the Los Angeles Times that he had no knowledge of Able Danger’s existence before Sept. 11. He also said that, to his knowledge, no one at the White House, CIA, FBI, Pentagon or any other U.S. agency had information linking Atta to Al Qaeda at the time.

“The obvious question is, what information did they have that led them to believe these people were Al Qaeda, and what led them to possess this information uniquely?” Clarke said. “Or if they did not possess it uniquely, who else possessed this information?”

When Shaffer went public last month and alleged that team members briefed the Sept. 11 commission about their identification of Atta, commission members denied that assertion.

The Pentagon officials discounted Shaffer’s speculation that documents proving the existence of the chart with Atta’s name on it could have been destroyed in an effort to spare the military from embarrassment due to potential privacy violations.

The existence of such a chart could also be embarrassing to the Pentagon since it would suggest that the military had information about Atta and others that could have been used to thwart the attacks.

Navy Cmdr. Christopher Chope, of the U.S. Special Operations Command, said any shredding of the Able Danger paper trail was done under regulations requiring the routine destruction of such documents.