Former US congressman Curt Weldon has renewed his long-standing claim that a secret Pentagon intelligence programme, Able Danger, identified lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and his associates more than a year before the attacks, but that warnings were blocked from reaching the FBI. Weldon, a ten-term Pennsylvania representative, says the claim cost him his political career and that his daughter's home was raided by the Department of Justice shortly before his 2006 re-election bid in what he calls a "deep state" effort to silence him. He and his daughter were never charged, and he is now going public ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks.

Weldon says Able Danger used supercomputers to mine vast amounts of open-source internet data and had flagged Atta's "Brooklyn cell" well before September 2001, with analysts allegedly attempting at least three times by late 2000 to alert the FBI, only to be blocked by bureaucratic and legal obstacles. He notes the findings did not appear in the 2004 9/11 Commission Report, and that the Pentagon has previously said it could not verify his allegations, with a Defense Department spokesman describing the programme's material as only "general references" to terrorist cells. Weldon's book, Able Danger: What The 9/11 Commission Never Told You, is due for release on 22 September.