Curt Weldon Claims Able Danger ID'd Mohammad Atta

He's been saying this for a while, but he seems to have new sources and new details:

Pre-Sept. 11 intelligence conducted by a secret military unit identified terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta 13 different times, a congressman said Tuesday.

During a Capitol Hill news conference, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., said the unit - code-named "Able Danger" - also identified "a problem" in Yemen two weeks before the attack on the USS Cole. It knew the problem was tied into the port of Aden and involved a U.S. platform, but the ship commander was not made aware of it, Weldon said.

The suicide bombing of the Cole killed 17 sailors on Oct. 12, 2000.

If anyone had told the Cole's commander that there was any indication of a problem in Aden, "he would not have gone there," Weldon told reporters. "He had no clue."

In my interview with Julian Sanchez yesterday, he was bothered that the amount of useful information was so greatly outweighed by useless information collected. All that useless information collected and analyzed by the government, and for nothing much, except a small degredation in our civil liberties.

But what sort of signal-to-noise ratio would one expect in such a wideranging inquiry?

And, just as the terrorists only need to get lucky once to kill thousands of people, we only need to get lucky once -- to identify that smoking-gun needle in the informational haystack -- to shut down an entire cell of terrorists and possibly save dozens or even hundreds of innocent human lives.

posted by Ace at 10:33 AM

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