Able/Danger was an experiment in a new kind of warfare, known as "information warfare" or "information dominance." One of the program's missions was to see whether al-Qaida cells around the world could be identified by sifting huge quantities of publicly available data, a relatively new technique called "data mining."

The data miners used extremely complex software programs, with names like Spire, Parentage, and Starlight, that mimic the thought patterns in the human brain while parsing countless bits of information from every available source to find relationships and patterns that would otherwise be invisible.

Some information about Able/Danger that I had not heard before. There are many questions here. Did this program ID Atta? What did it know about him? Was Atta a U.S. person? Did Pentagon Lawyers prevent the information from being shared with domestic authorities? If so, why? All of these things are up in the air and will remain so for a while.

Nevertheless, let me offer a bit of blind speculation which is interesting even if it turns out to have little relationship to what actually occured.

Apparently Able/Danger was a primordial Total Information Awareness program. If Atta was merely identified by computer profiling and it was not known whether or not he really was a terrorist, its possible that the lawyers were concerned about prompting FBI investigations into U.S. persons based on the results of a computer profile run in an extremely experimental program that they weren't sure was reliable.

What I'm getting at is that this might not be a question about Posse Comitatus but rather a question about computer profiling, law enforcement use of computer profiling results. The concerns that were raised about TIA would apply here as well. Its possible that they did not know he was a terrorist. They only knew that a neural network said he looked similar to other people who were terrorists, and if they were wrong they were concerned about kicking up the civil liberties storm that TIA eventually DID kick up.

If a computer profile did, in fact, ID a 9/11 terrorist prior to 9/11, does that change the way you feel about programs like Total Information Awareness?

U: It seems as though The Washington Times has raised this same question. I don't know if this link is the most reasonable thing I've ever read in the Washington Times or if I'm starting to go insane.

Able/Danger and Total Information Awareness