Able Danger's Intelligence Unit Findings Rejected

The much hyped Able Danger Intelligence unit which has supposedly collected and identified information on the 9/11 terrorist attacks claim was officially rejected :

The report found that the recollections of most of the witnesses appeared to focus on a “single chart depicting Al Qaeda cells responsible for pre-9/11 terrorist attacks” that was produced in 1999 by a defense contractor, the Orion Scientific Corporation.

While witnesses remembered having seen Mr. Atta’s photograph or name on such a chart, the inspector general said its investigation showed that the Orion chart did not list Mr. Atta or any of the other Sept. 11 terrorists, and that “testimony by witnesses who claimed to have seen such a chart varied significantly from each other.” The report says that a central witness in the investigation, an active-duty Navy captain who directed the Able Danger program, had changed his account over time, initially telling the inspector general’s office last December that he was “100 percent” certain that he had seen “Mohamed Atta’s image on the chart.”

Issues to keep in mind:
- the chaotic departamental information sharing or the lack of such, budget-deficit arms race, thus departments wanting to get credited for anything ground breaking
- prioritizing is sometimes tricky, wanting to expand a node, thus gather more intelligence and more participants might have resulted in missing the key ones, marginal thinking fully applies
- OSINT as this Social Network Analysis of the 9-11 Terror Network shows, is an invaluable asset and so is the momentum and actual use of the data

Despite that if you don't have a past, you're not going to have a future, true leaders never look into the past, they shape the future and don't mind-tease what they could have done. Necessary evil moves the world in its own orbit now more than ever, and if you really don't have a clue what I'm trying to imply here, then you're still not ready for that mode of thinking.

So, the man who knew, but no one reacted upon his findings in a timely manner, or a case-study of how terrabytes of mixed OSINT and Intelligence data weren't successfully data mined? I go for the first point.

Able Danger chart courtesy of the Center for Cooperative Research.