Curt Weldon: The Troublemaker

Able danger
of images on the re-created diagram, it's easy to overlook the photograph nestled near the center. But there he is, striking a now iconic gaze: the sleepy eyes, the thin lips. Underneath his photo is this simple caption: "ATTA, Mohamed." The commander of the 9/11 hijackers. One man in a cosmos of faces, yet, fittingly, at the center of them all.

The chart could be called a smoking gun, proof that the government knew about Atta and other terrorists inside the United States, and that Weldon had backed the right horse. Except, it's not at all clear that the original showed Atta's name, or his face.

When the 9/11 commission was investigating the root causes of the attacks, staff members interviewed two men from a team at the Information Dominance Center who said that the chart was made for a secret Army project called "Able Danger." Both have said they told the commission that the chart mentioned Atta but that no one in the military hierarchy followed up on the information. Other team members also claim to have seen Atta on the chart, but still others say they didn't. In the more than 500 pages of the final 9/11 commission report, released in 2004, Able Danger isn't mentioned once.

A year later, some of the team members broke their public silence. Weldon, who had been unaware of Able Danger, was so concerned that the 9/11 report didn't include it that he orchestrated interviews for the whistle-blowers with major media organizations. Weldon had long since soured on the 9/11 commission. He tried at least four times, he said, to meet with the staff about data mining and his firsthand knowledge that intelligence agencies didn't cooperate in the hunt for terrorists. Weldon said that the discussions "would have led [the commissioners] to the story I found out about [Able Danger], because I would have put them in touch with all the people."

"I tried. I got nowhere with them," Weldon said. He drew up questions for the commissioners to pose to witnesses. They never did. When the panel finished its work in mid-2004, Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairmen, held a preview meeting for lawmakers. "I was the first one there, because I wanted to be the first questioner," Weldon said. "I said, 'Lee and Tom, I supported the commission and many of your recommendations. Even though a lot of them were in the Gilmore Commission, which I created. It was my initiative that created that. My frustration with you is, I tried to meet with you and share information, and you refused to meet with me.'"

According to Weldon, Hamilton replied, "Well, you know, Curt, we had a lot of people who wanted to meet with us. We couldn't meet with every member of Congress that was working in these areas." Recalling the story, Weldon became exasperated. "I was chairman of the defense research committee," he said. "Nobody was more identified with data mining and data collaboration than I was.... I had been involved in it up to my eyeballs!"

Weldon demanded to know why investigators hadn't pursued Able Danger's claims. Hamilton and Kean said that none of their staff remembers the Information Dominance Center team members using Mohamed Atta's name. Requests to the Pentagon for Able Danger documents yielded nothing mentioning him or any of the 18 other hijackers. And Hadley cannot recall ever receiving a chart from Weldon, nor has the original been found. In Without Precedent, their book about the commission's work, Hamilton and Kean wrote, "The absence of any documents supporting the charge, the manifold contradictions in the statements about Able Danger by Weldon and others, the improbability -- if not impossibility -- of the program's ability to identify Atta, and the simple fact that people can have faulty memories about what took place years in the past, led us to the conclusion that Able Danger just did not do what Weldon said it did."

"For [them] to say that they fully investigated Able Danger is pure horseshit," Weldon said. "I mean, it is absolute garbage. I know all of the Able Danger principals. None of them were talked to. None of them were interviewed, except the two people who, on their own, went to the commission and were rebuffed.... It's a gross lie!" Weldon is unmoved by Hamilton and Kean's evidence to the contrary. He says that the commission has deliberately covered up what it knew about Able Danger -- probably to avoid embarrassment. It is a scandal on par with the greatest of the 20th century, he said. "It's worse than Watergate."

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