The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
Able Danger: A story that is about to blow -- into a MONSTER
The so called "anonymous sources" in the military intelligence operation known as Able Danger, which were prevented from sharing information it had obtained about Mohammed Atta's operational Al Qaeda cell (in mid-2000) with the FBI and other national intelligence agencies -- by directives enforced by the Clinton Administration; and which could possibly have led to the arrest of the 9/11 conspirators before they ever set foot into an airline and killed over 3000 people -- are no longer anonymous. At least one of them isn't. For today, Colonel Tony Shaffer went public. From the full-spead ahead bridge of Captain's Quarters, we get snippets from one of Rep. Curt Weldon, via the New York Times:
Colonel Shaffer said in an interview that the small, highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger had identified by name the terrorist ringleader, Mohammed Atta, as well three of the other future hijackers by mid-2000, and had tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the F.B.I.'s Washington field office to share the information.
But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 plot was still being planned.
"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.
He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Defense Department's Special Operations Command had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States. "It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.
But that isn't the half of it. As we have been reporting over the last week, these sources were not just stonewalled by officials of the Clinton Administration, they were also stonewalled by the "non-partisan" 9/11 Commission:
(Also from Captain Ed)
Not only did Shaffer get stiffed on informing the FBI, it appears that the 9/11 Commission had less than a fully enthusiastic response to his information. He insists that he told Commission staffers about the identification of Atta when he briefed them in October 2003, despite the counterclaims of the Commission staff. In fact, Shaffer says he risked his current security clearance to go public after Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean released their last statement on Friday in order to counter the frustration their latest story change caused him.
At least we know that Rep. Curt Weldon didn't make up the whole story. The DoD has not responded to Shaffer's revelations, preferring to wait until it performs an internal investigation into Able Danger. The Times also reports that Shaffer is not the same officer who attempted to brief the Commission in July 2004, which establishes two separate sources for the Atta identification prior to 9/11.
Now we need to hear what the 9/11 Commission has to say next. The Times quotes Commissioner Richard Ben Veniste, easily one of the most partisan of the players, as blaming the Pentagon for not giving them the information:
A Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor, said in an interview today that while he could not judge the credibility of the information from Colonel Shaffer and others, the Pentagon needed to "provide a clear and comprehensive explanation regarding what information it had in its possession regarding Mr. Atta."
"And if these assertions are credible," he continued, "the Pentagon would need to explain why it was that the 9/11 commissioners were not provided this information despite request for all information regarding to Able Danger."
No, Mr. Ben Veniste, the Commission owes us an explanation for why two different sources with the same information about Mohammed Atta's identification got ignored by the panel. Why didn't the Commission follow up on this? Were they so married to the Atta timeline that they could not bear to rethink it? If so, why? Blaming the Pentagon for ignoring Colonel Shaffer and the Navy captain sounds a lot like the blame-shifting for which the Commission piously blasted the Bush administration during the ridiculously political public hearings in 2004.
The Commission has a big problem now. As long as Weldon's sources remained anonymous, they could easily dismiss them as a figment of Weldon's imagination or worse, phantoms created to help him sell a book. Now we have at least one American officer risking his career to tell the public what we should have already known about 9/11, and what the Commission failed to tell us.
No kidding they have a problem. This appears to be nothing short of a Watergate-sized cover up, with the willing cooperation of 9/11 Commissioners. Only this wasn't a cover-up of a botched break-in of a campaign headquarters; this was the enforcement of a politically-motivated institutional prohibition against information sharing, when there was hard evidence that terrorist might be planning a major attack in the United States. And the cover-up of this information, which clearly was shared with the 9/11 commission, is nothing short of criminally outrageous. If this information is anything near what it appears to be, we have a systematic cover-up of information that would have possibly laid the blame for 9/11 squarely at the feet of, say, Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, Jamie Gorelick...do these names sound familiar?
There are so many enormous stories that have come forth in the last two years; but this one could turn into the granddaddy of them all.
UPDATE: With a hat-tip to Glenn Reynolds, John Podheretz (writing in The Corner) appears to have this story exactly in its proper perspective:
If he's telling the truth, then the entire history of the last five years needs to be rewritten. His name is Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and he's one of the two military intelligence officers alleging that the Defense Department had located Mohammed Atta and other hijackers in America in 2000.
He's now gone public on cable television and in this interview with the New York Times.
What's perfectly credible about what Shaffer says is that his unit, Able Danger, developed information about an Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn and that Pentagon lawyers thrice blocked meetings between his unit and the FBI because they feared being accused of spying illicitly inside the United States. (He was not an intelligence analyst, but rather Able Danger's liaison with the Defense Intelligence Agency.)
But Shaffer does not have proof that Atta and three others were among those named. To be fair, he should NOT have proof because any such documentation would be classified material that should not be in his possession.
So now we have some manifest contradictions:
He says he told 9/11 commission staffers about this in Afghanistan in 2003. They dispute it.
So somebody isn't telling the truth.The Able Danger papers shown to the 9/11 Commission at the Pentagon after the Afghanistan meeting did not feature anything mentioning Atta. So the 9/11 Commission says. So either the Commission staff is lying. Or no paper mentioned Atta and Shaffer is just wrong. Or the Defense Department misplaced the paperwork mentioning Atta. Or somebody at the Defense Department deliberately didn't give the Commission the material.
In the first case, if the 9/11 commission staff is lying, the hell to be paid is going to be colossal. Among other things, it could shake the current State Department to its foundations, since the 9/11 commission staff director, Philip Zelicow, is one of Condi Rice's most trusted aides.
In the second case, if the Defense Department withheld critical information on this matter, it's almost impossible to imagine the intensity of the bloodletting that will follow.
With nothing more to go on than Shaffer's name and his statement, I think it's appropriate to remain skeptical. Since we have heard that the list Shaffer tried to forward to the FBI contained 60 names, it is legitimate to question whether his memory and the memory perhaps of other Able Danger folks has been enhanced by knowledge learned later on -- whether the otherwise obscure name of "Mohammed Atta" might have become part of their recollections after the fact because it became so famous.
Which is to say, Shaffer isn't lying, and he isn't a scoundrel. He's someone who ran afoul of the hyperlegal mindset that kept the intelligence "wall" growing ever higher until it became a hiding place for Al Qaeda.
And that, once again, brings us back to...Jamie Gorelick. 9/11 Commissioner. And the architect of the growing "wall" -- the same "wall" that the 9/11 Commission all but ignored, surely in deference to its walking-conflict-of-interest commissioner Gorelick.
Colonel Shaffer said in an interview that the small, highly classified intelligence program known as Able Danger had identified by name the terrorist ringleader, Mohammed Atta, as well three of the other future hijackers by mid-2000, and had tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the F.B.I.'s Washington field office to share the information.
But he said military lawyers forced members of the intelligence program to cancel three scheduled meetings with the F.B.I. at the last minute, which left the bureau without information that Colonel Shaffer said might have led to Mr. Atta and the other terrorists while the Sept. 11 plot was still being planned.
"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001.
He said he learned later that lawyers associated with the Defense Department's Special Operations Command had canceled the F.B.I. meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States. "It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.
But that isn't the half of it. As we have been reporting over the last week, these sources were not just stonewalled by officials of the Clinton Administration, they were also stonewalled by the "non-partisan" 9/11 Commission:
(Also from Captain Ed)
Not only did Shaffer get stiffed on informing the FBI, it appears that the 9/11 Commission had less than a fully enthusiastic response to his information. He insists that he told Commission staffers about the identification of Atta when he briefed them in October 2003, despite the counterclaims of the Commission staff. In fact, Shaffer says he risked his current security clearance to go public after Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean released their last statement on Friday in order to counter the frustration their latest story change caused him.
At least we know that Rep. Curt Weldon didn't make up the whole story. The DoD has not responded to Shaffer's revelations, preferring to wait until it performs an internal investigation into Able Danger. The Times also reports that Shaffer is not the same officer who attempted to brief the Commission in July 2004, which establishes two separate sources for the Atta identification prior to 9/11.
Now we need to hear what the 9/11 Commission has to say next. The Times quotes Commissioner Richard Ben Veniste, easily one of the most partisan of the players, as blaming the Pentagon for not giving them the information:
A Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor, said in an interview today that while he could not judge the credibility of the information from Colonel Shaffer and others, the Pentagon needed to "provide a clear and comprehensive explanation regarding what information it had in its possession regarding Mr. Atta."
"And if these assertions are credible," he continued, "the Pentagon would need to explain why it was that the 9/11 commissioners were not provided this information despite request for all information regarding to Able Danger."
No, Mr. Ben Veniste, the Commission owes us an explanation for why two different sources with the same information about Mohammed Atta's identification got ignored by the panel. Why didn't the Commission follow up on this? Were they so married to the Atta timeline that they could not bear to rethink it? If so, why? Blaming the Pentagon for ignoring Colonel Shaffer and the Navy captain sounds a lot like the blame-shifting for which the Commission piously blasted the Bush administration during the ridiculously political public hearings in 2004.
The Commission has a big problem now. As long as Weldon's sources remained anonymous, they could easily dismiss them as a figment of Weldon's imagination or worse, phantoms created to help him sell a book. Now we have at least one American officer risking his career to tell the public what we should have already known about 9/11, and what the Commission failed to tell us.
No kidding they have a problem. This appears to be nothing short of a Watergate-sized cover up, with the willing cooperation of 9/11 Commissioners. Only this wasn't a cover-up of a botched break-in of a campaign headquarters; this was the enforcement of a politically-motivated institutional prohibition against information sharing, when there was hard evidence that terrorist might be planning a major attack in the United States. And the cover-up of this information, which clearly was shared with the 9/11 commission, is nothing short of criminally outrageous. If this information is anything near what it appears to be, we have a systematic cover-up of information that would have possibly laid the blame for 9/11 squarely at the feet of, say, Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger, Jamie Gorelick...do these names sound familiar?
There are so many enormous stories that have come forth in the last two years; but this one could turn into the granddaddy of them all.
UPDATE: With a hat-tip to Glenn Reynolds, John Podheretz (writing in The Corner) appears to have this story exactly in its proper perspective:
If he's telling the truth, then the entire history of the last five years needs to be rewritten. His name is Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and he's one of the two military intelligence officers alleging that the Defense Department had located Mohammed Atta and other hijackers in America in 2000.
He's now gone public on cable television and in this interview with the New York Times.
What's perfectly credible about what Shaffer says is that his unit, Able Danger, developed information about an Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn and that Pentagon lawyers thrice blocked meetings between his unit and the FBI because they feared being accused of spying illicitly inside the United States. (He was not an intelligence analyst, but rather Able Danger's liaison with the Defense Intelligence Agency.)
But Shaffer does not have proof that Atta and three others were among those named. To be fair, he should NOT have proof because any such documentation would be classified material that should not be in his possession.
So now we have some manifest contradictions:
He says he told 9/11 commission staffers about this in Afghanistan in 2003. They dispute it.
So somebody isn't telling the truth.The Able Danger papers shown to the 9/11 Commission at the Pentagon after the Afghanistan meeting did not feature anything mentioning Atta. So the 9/11 Commission says. So either the Commission staff is lying. Or no paper mentioned Atta and Shaffer is just wrong. Or the Defense Department misplaced the paperwork mentioning Atta. Or somebody at the Defense Department deliberately didn't give the Commission the material.
In the first case, if the 9/11 commission staff is lying, the hell to be paid is going to be colossal. Among other things, it could shake the current State Department to its foundations, since the 9/11 commission staff director, Philip Zelicow, is one of Condi Rice's most trusted aides.
In the second case, if the Defense Department withheld critical information on this matter, it's almost impossible to imagine the intensity of the bloodletting that will follow.
With nothing more to go on than Shaffer's name and his statement, I think it's appropriate to remain skeptical. Since we have heard that the list Shaffer tried to forward to the FBI contained 60 names, it is legitimate to question whether his memory and the memory perhaps of other Able Danger folks has been enhanced by knowledge learned later on -- whether the otherwise obscure name of "Mohammed Atta" might have become part of their recollections after the fact because it became so famous.
Which is to say, Shaffer isn't lying, and he isn't a scoundrel. He's someone who ran afoul of the hyperlegal mindset that kept the intelligence "wall" growing ever higher until it became a hiding place for Al Qaeda.
And that, once again, brings us back to...Jamie Gorelick. 9/11 Commissioner. And the architect of the growing "wall" -- the same "wall" that the 9/11 Commission all but ignored, surely in deference to its walking-conflict-of-interest commissioner Gorelick.
