Able Danger and the 9-11 Commission

By Douglas Farah

When the 9-11 Commission's report first came out, it was viewed as the final word in all things related to the attack. Finally, now, it is losing some of its aura of divine inspiration. It is what it is--an amazing narrative of the events leading up to 9-11, put together in a very short time by very skilled people making choices about what to include and what to exclude. It is clear now that they made some serious mistakes. They chose to omit the information on Operation Able Danger that shows the military, at least, had identified Mohamed Atta and other of the 9-11 hijackers as potential threats a full year before 9-11. News reports said the decision was made because the information from Able Danger was viewed as "unlikely" by the staffers who heard it. In other words, it did not fit with what the rest of the intelligence community was saying. Unfortunately, this is often the case with valid information that does not conform to institutional thinking or conventional wisdom.

It was this type of thinking that led Commission staff to ignore the overwhelming evidence of al Qaeda's involvement in the diamond trade as well. They received information from the prosecutor and investigators for the Special Court for Sierra Leone that they deemed unlikely because it was not fitting with what the Community, either out or ignorance or malice, was telling them. They requested information in writing from me, and said they had read the book. But they did not find me, the Special Court, Belgian police reports or other investigations to fit the conventional wisdom. Worse yet, they specifically declined to interview eye witnesses that the Special Court offered to make available to them, with no conditions or restrictions.

These are serious omissions, as is the omission of the Able Danger information. Not everything could be run down or every lead chased in the time alloted to the Commission for its work. The Bush administation compounded the problem by slowing the release of information and fighting the Commission on many unnecessary issues. But these were not issues where it would have been hard to gather more information and at least weigh in that such information exists.

At the same time, the Commission noted in its Monograph on Terror Financing that "Terrorist financing was not a priority for either domestic or foreign intelligence collection. As a result, intelligence reporting on the issue was episodic, insufficient and often inaccurate" (p. 4). The Monograph added that both the CIA and FBI failed to "comprehend al Qaeda's methods of raising, moving or storing money" (pp. 5-6). Yet the Commission staff chose to use only the information of institutions singled out for failure to understand terror finance in its report.

The lesson should be that there is no infallibility in seeking to understand how al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations operate, structure themselves, adapt, or raise and spend money. The truth is, what is known, even to intelligence officials, is generally out of date and sketchy at best. This does not mean such information is not a good guide to how things will be done or that it should not be gathered. We know far more about al Qaeda and its financial structures than we did pre-9-11. But when we lose the ability to look at things that seem "unlikely" (if the intelligence community and the FBI in particular has ever learned that in the first place), and become enamored of conventional wisdom, mistakes will be made. It should be humbling for everyone involved in these investigations to realize how little we know, how much we get wrong and how much we guess at, rather than know.

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