US Officer Says Pentagon Prevented Al-qaida Reports Reaching the Fbi

A US army intelligence officer went public yesterday with claims that a secret military unit had identified Mohammed Atta and three other al-Qaida members as a potential threat a year before they carried out the September 11 attacks in 2001.

Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer said the secret intelligence unit, codenamed Able Danger, had been prevented from passing on its information to the FBI by Pentagon lawyers concerned that the military should not be involved in surveillance of suspects inside the US.

The claim has focused new light on the Pentagon's part in intelligence failings before the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington and called into question last year's official report on the debacle.

Col Shaffer, a reservist now working part-time at the Pentagon, said he was risking his career by giving on-the-record interviews to the New York Times and television networks, but he said he had been frustrated by the dismissal of his account by the official inquiry into the September 11 attacks. He said information he provided to the investigative staff "never got to the commissioners".

The commission's final report last year did not mention Able Danger, despite being briefed on its work by Col Shaffer in October 2003 and by an unnamed navy captain in 2004. The two top commissioners, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, defended that decision last week, arguing its role "did not turn out to be historically significant".

The commissioners issued a statement last week saying the claim that Mohammed Atta and other plotters had been identified before 2001 was not supported by official documents the commission had requested.

They said Atta had not been mentioned in the 2003 briefing on Able Danger in Afghanistan, and the allegation made by the naval officer in 2004, that Atta was attached to an al-Qaida cell in Brooklyn, was incompatible with official records of his movements.

Col Shaffer countered that the commission was never given all the relevant documentation by the Pentagon.

"I'm told confidently by the person who moved the material over, that the 9/11 commission received two briefcase-sized containers of documents. I can tell you for a fact that would not be one-twentieth of the information that Able Danger consisted of during the time we spent investigating," the intelligence officer told Fox News.

The Able Danger unit was created in 1999 under the Special Operations Command to carry out computer analysis of huge amounts of data on possible terrorist suspects.

Col Shaffer, who served as a liaison officer between Able Danger and the Defence Intelligence Agency, said that by mid-2000 the unit came up with a chart linking Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian lead hijacker, and three others, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Marwan al-Shehhi, complete with photographs of the plotters. "I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Col Shaffer told the New York Times.