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Tanya
Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 13 Aug 2004
Posts: 570
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 Posted: Tue Aug 16, 2005 9:11 pm Post subject: Able Danger official identified |
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"Delco Times columnist Gil Spencer, who has long covered Curt Weldon's Pennsylvania district, has just interviewed the Able Danger official who is going public tonight on Fox News. Spencer is the first journalist I am aware of to reveal the identity of the Able Danger official who originally briefed the 9/11 commission staff about Able Danger's findings back in October 2003 at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. That official is DIA Ltn. Col. Tony Shaffer."
http://www.warandpiece.com/blogdirs/002382.html |
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GM Strong
Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy
Joined: 18 Sep 2004
Posts: 1579
Location: Penna
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| Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 12:55 am Post subject: Rush's Take today. |
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Weldon is my Congressman, I am proud to say, and the next time I see him I will thank him profusely. Thanks, Mr. Weldon. 
This is how El Rushbo summarized it today. 8/16
RUSH: Now, let me tell you what I think about this Able Danger business after trying to explain it to Sean why some conservatives are backtracking on their original enthusiasm. If you go back to this Washington Times story there's something fascinating here. It just kind of glides by you if you're just reading it. It's this paragraph: "Pentagon officials have said that they have uncovered no specific intelligence data from the Able Danger unit concerning an Atta-led terrorist cell other than a few intelligence analyses that mention his name." Well, that's one of those sentences that doesn't flow. It doesn't work. The sentence to be read correctly would be this: "Pentagon officials have said they've uncovered no specific intelligence data from the Able Danger unit concerning an Atta-led terrorist cell," but when you add to that "other than a few intelligence analyses that mention his name," well, I mean, you have uncovered something about Atta! Too many people are changing their stories too often here. At first the 9/11 Commission says, "Oh, never even heard about Able Danger." Oh yes they had heard about Able Danger, and then there was another reference and then there was a second reference to Able Danger. Then we learned they took a lot of notes and decided to leave it out because they were conflicted about the data and the times that Atta was supposedly here. I mean, when this story first hit, when the first barrage of details hit, the people on this commission got very defensive. I mean, they started running for the tall grass themselves. If there was nothing to it, that would have been the time to say, "Yeah, we heard about this. Yeah, we talked about it. Yeah, there wasn't anything. There wasn't enough to go on," but they acted all "Uh Oh."
The commissioners and the chairman went out there, the co-chairs went out there to try to mend some fences and so forth. I don't think we're near the end of the story. I have no clue what it is, but I can tell you that there's too many blowbacks, if you will, here. Too many fallbacks, too many runbacks, too many retreats on both sides, but yet the Washington Times today apparently, this is a new, a new source that they have found. This is not one of Weldon's as I read this, and this Pentagon source is a lawyer. Well, he's not. He's a defense department intelligence official, and he's saying that it was the lawyers in the Pentagon who say this. Well, of course that makes sense. That makes sense to me because it was the lawyers who essentially, the justice department who created all these walls that prevented the exchange of information, and there's no denying the wall existed, and there's no denying that this Able Danger unit knew of Atta in the country, and there's no denying they couldn't tell anybody. Now, what other facts emerge from that will be very interesting, but I don't think we've heard the last of this story. There are too many people acting like they could be harmed by the release of this information to make me think there's nothing to it. I mean, if something comes out and you've looked at it, and you've examined it, and you rejected it then you're not going to act frightened when somebody brings it up, after your report's over, and that's what's happened here. So patience, my friends. Patience.
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Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
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| Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2005 1:32 am Post subject: |
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http://corner.nationalreview.com/
| Quote: | Tuesday, August 16, 2005
OKAY, HERE IT IS [John Podhoretz]
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. |
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