Able Danger: More Mysteries

As

questions continue to swirl around claims that the Pentagon failed to act on pre-September 11 intelligence about the hijackers, a Senate panel is trying to clear up a key mysteries surrounding the data-mining intel program known as "Able Danger." The Senate Intelligence Committee is asking the Pentagon to let it interview anyone who worked on Able Danger, and last week drafted a letter asking the White House for a copy of a chart that Congressman Curt Weldon claimed in a recent book he gave then-deputy national security adviser Steve Hadley just after the 9/11 attacks.

Weldon says in the book, Countdown to Terror, that the chart was produced by Able Danger before the attacks and pegged lead hijacker Mohammad Atta as a threat to the U.S. Hadley—since promoted to be President Bush's national security adviser—has refused to confirm or deny the claim. Whether such a chart existed and was given to Hadley could prove or greatly undermine claims by Weldon and a handful of members of the Able Danger team.

Though another Defense Department contractor last week backed up Weldon's story, former 9/11 commission chairman Tom Kean said in a statement earlier this month that all three commission aides who attended a 2003 interview at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan with Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer, an intelligence liason to Able Danger, do not remember Mohammad Atta's name coming up.

The panel also said that a Bush Administration lawyer—who, sources told TIME, was a National Security Council attorney present as a "minder" on behalf of the White House—agreed that Shaffer did not mention Atta's name. But Shaffer told TIME that he remembers specifically saying that the staff on the secret project had "found through the effort two of the three cells which conducted the 9/11 attack, to include Atta."

The Pentagon has yet to find any documents to support this claim. Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said on Fox news Friday they are still reviewing the matter but "thus far have not found what it is those handful of individuals seem to remember."