 |
SwiftVets.com
Service to Country
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
|
 Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 9:00 pm Post subject: House GOP leaders backed Able Danger plan |
 |
|
http://www.wpherald.com/storyview.php?StoryID=20050822-011832-6872r
| Quote: | House GOP leaders backed Able Danger plan
By Shaun Waterman
UPI Homeland and National Security Editor
Published August 22, 2005
WASHINGTON -- House Republican leaders approved in advance plans by a military intelligence official to go public with details of a top-secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger.
Army reserve Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer says the data-mining project identified Mohammed Atta and three other of the Sept. 11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the attacks.
"I spoke personally to Denny Hastert and to Pete Hoekstra," Shaffer told United Press International. Rep. Hastert, R-Ill., is speaker of the House, and Rep. Hoekstra, R-Mich., is chairman of that chamber's intelligence committee.
"I was given assurances by (them) that this was the right thing to do ... I was given assurances we would not suffer any adverse consequences for bringing this to the attention of the public," Shaffer said, adding that the conversations took place before he and members of the Able Danger team spoke to the media anonymously in the offices of Republican firebrand Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, Aug. 8.
Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean told UPI in an e-mail message Sunday that he had no information about the meeting and had no comment to make. Hoekstra was said by staff to be out of the country.
Shaffer also said he was given what he interpreted as tacit approval from senior Pentagon officials before going on the record to Fox News and the New York Times last week, thus revealing his identity and adding both credibility and a new twist to the story.
Shaffer he said he had met the previous day with Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Steven Cambone and Lt. Gen. Norton Schwartz, the staff director for outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers.
"They knew that this would be the next logical step," Shaffer said, and did not ask him to refrain from going public. Asked whether he interpreted this as tacit approval, Shaffer said, "Well they are not asking me to stop (talking about the project)... I hope that they approve."
A Pentagon spokesman had no immediate comment.
The news is likely to add to the swirl of controversy surrounding Able Danger, an 18 month-long, highly classified project carried out for the Joint Chiefs of Staff by U.S. Special Operations Command, the existence of which was first revealed by Weldon in a recent book.
Shaffer told UPI that the project was tasked with "developing targeting information for al-Qaida on a global scale," and used data-mining techniques to look for "patterns, associations and linkages" in a huge collection of open source databases to which the team had access.
He said the kinds of information available included travel and immigration records, and information about credit card and telephone use.
"The databases weren't classified, but in some cases, even though they weren't classified, the fact we had access to them, or the way we got it, was secret," he said.
He says that he first became aware of the names of the four hijackers "in the mid-2000 time frame."
"The (Able Danger) team came up with information that these four bad guys were in the United States," he said, adding that for this reason, the intelligence was considered to be significant.
But Shaffer says lawyers from Special Operations Command would not allow the military to develop intelligence operations targeting them, because they were legally in the country.
"They said 'These guys are considered off limits for collection purposes,'" Shaffer recalled, adding that the lawyers had cited the ban on U.S. foreign intelligence agencies spying on U.S. persons -- a hazy legal category that many intelligence and other agencies have their own particular definitions of.
The Pentagon says that it is looking into Shaffer's account, but one defense official -- who asked for anonymity because of the ongoing inquiry -- said questions had been raised about the scope and breadth of his direct knowledge of Able Danger.
Shaffer said that he was "an operations guy, not an analyst," and that Able Danger was only one of about a dozen projects his unit in the Defense Intelligence Agency provided with what he called "concierge support."
He freely admits he is unfamiliar with the exact details of how the project culled information like Atta's name from its data.
"I was one of the guys looking at the finished data and trying to work out what was actionable ... is this something we need to act on right away?"
Former senior defense official Mark Jacobson told UPI that "There are a lot of unanswered questions" about the project.
"People should be raising their eyebrows," he said. "Why was this kept at a working level? There are so many points (in the story) where the problems should have been kicked upstairs. Who within (the Department of Defense) knew about this?"
Shaffer says he notified his commanding officer of the Special Operations Command decision, and that there was a debate about whether the U.S. person rules should be drawn so widely.
But he said that the information now appears much more significant than it did then. "At the time it didn't seem that important. I took it in stride with the dozens of issues daily raised by the projects I was working with."
"We only realized after the fact what this meant ... We thought they were bad guys, we just didn't know how bad."
Shaffer said that the Tampa, Fla.-based Special Operations Command owned the project and had the ultimate say in what happened to the data. "It was their responsibility to be the steward of this information."
He said that the issue did go "up the chain of command" in Tampa "to the J-3, the director of operations," but that "he said we'd go with what the lawyers recommended."
Military records show that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Lambert held that post at the time, but no one at Special Operations Command responded to a request for comment over the weekend.
Shaffer says that he himself did not remember the names of Atta and the others immediately after the Sept. 11 attack, until a colleague showed him one of the charts the team had produced in mid-2000.
"I asked her what she was going to do," he recalled, "and she said 'I don't know.'"
Shaffer said she later told him that she had gone with Weldon to the White House, where the congressman gave the chart to deputy national security advisor Steven Hadley.
The White House said it had no comment |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
Anker-Klanker
Admiral
Joined: 04 Sep 2004
Posts: 1033
Location: Richardson, TX
|
| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 10:53 pm Post subject: |
|
|
I'm really having some problems following this Col. Shaffer's story: what he really knew; when he knew it; and when supposedly anyone was told about it. He says:
| Quote: | | He says that he first became aware of the names of the four hijackers "in the mid-2000 time frame." |
OK, so far so good (but of course at that time he didn't know they were going to turn out to be hijackers). But then he says:
| Quote: | | But he said that the information now appears much more significant than it did then. "At the time it didn't seem that important. I took it in stride with the dozens of issues daily raised by the projects I was working with." |
What the....? Sounds at this point that he didn't know how important the information was going to turn out to be, and was letting it slide.
| Quote: | | "We only realized after the fact what this meant ... We thought they were bad guys, we just didn't know how bad." |
Of course he couldn't know until after 911 that Atta and the others were going to do exactly what they did. But I don't see anything in what he said that indicates he knew they were a serious threat, much less have pushed, or even encouraged, anyone to "pass the word" along (to whomever).
I get the very bad feeling that this is kind of like Monday morning quaterbacking, and is motivated by a desire to resestablish funding for an Able Danger-like project in the vein of "See, what we might have been able to do!" I don't see any evidence in what he's saying that Able Danger knew it had really "hot" information that someone should immediately act on, so if that were the case, even if they had told someone it's not likely anyone would have acted on it.
Where am I misinterpreting this? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
|
| Posted: Mon Aug 22, 2005 11:22 pm Post subject: |
|
|
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/22/politics/23cnd-intel.html?hp&ex=1124769600&en=ed47ced9232725eb&ei=5094&partner=homepage
| Quote: | Navy Officer Affirms Assertions About Pre-9/11 Data on Atta
By PHILIP SHENON
Published: August 22, 2005
WASHINGTON, Aug. 22 - An active-duty Navy captain has become the second military officer to come forward publicly to say that a secret defense intelligence program tagged the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks as a possible terrorist more than a year before the attacks.
The officer, Scott J. Phillpott, said in a statement today that he could not discuss details of the military program, which was called Able Danger, but confirmed that its analysts had identified the Sept. 11 ringleader, Mohamed Atta, by name by early 2000. "My story is consistent," said Captain Phillpott, who managed the program for the Pentagon's Special Operations Command. "Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000."
His comments came on the same day that the Pentagon's chief spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, told reporters that the Defense Department had been unable to validate the assertions made by an Army intelligence veteran, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and now backed up by Captain Phillpott, about the early identification of Mr. Atta.
Colonel Shaffer went public with his assertions last week, saying that analysts in the intelligence project had been overruled by military lawyers when they tried to share the program's findings with the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2000 in hope of tracking down terror suspects tied to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Di Rita said in an interview that while the department continued to investigate the assertions, there was no evidence so far that the intelligence unit had come up with such specific information about Mr. Atta and any of the other hijackers.
He said that while Colonel Shaffer and Captain Phillpott were respected military officers whose accounts were taken seriously, "thus far we've not been able to uncover what these people said they saw - memory is a complicated thing."
The statement from Captain Phillpott , a 1983 Naval Academy graduate, who has served in the Navy for 22 years, was provided to The New York Times and Fox News through the office of Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania, who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a longtime proponent of so-called data-mining programs like Able Danger.
Asked if the Defense Department had interviewed Captain Phillpott in its two-week-old investigation of Able Danger, another Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Paul Swiergosz, said he did not know.
Representative Weldon also arranged an interview with a former employee of a defense contractor who said he had helped create a chart in 2000 for the intelligence program that included Mr. Atta's photograph and name.
The former contractor, James D. Smith, said that Mr. Atta's name and photograph were obtained through a private researcher in California who was paid to gather the information from contacts in the Middle East. Mr. Smith said that he had retained a copy of the chart for some time and that it had been posted on his office wall at Andrews Air Force Base. He said it had become stuck to the wall and was impossible to remove when he switched jobs.
In its final report last year, the Sept. 11 commission said that American intelligence agencies were unaware of Mr. Atta until the day of the attacks.
Commission members did acknowledge in a statement on Aug. 12 that their staff met with a Navy officer last July, only 10 days before releasing the panel's final report, who had asserted that Able Danger, a highly classified intelligence operation, had identified "Mohamed Atta to be a member of an Al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn."
But the statement, which did not identify the officer by name, said that the commission's staff had determined that "the officer's account was not sufficiently reliable to warrant revision of the report or further investigation" and that the intelligence operation "did not turn out to be historically significant."
With his comments today, Captain Phillpott acknowledged that he was the officer who had briefed the commission last year. "I will not discuss the issues outside of my chain of command and the Department of Defense," he said. "But my story is consistent. Atta was identified by Able Danger in January-February of 2000. I have nothing else to say." |
|
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Anker-Klanker
Admiral
Joined: 04 Sep 2004
Posts: 1033
Location: Richardson, TX
|
| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 1:44 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Thanks, Rdtf. It does help credibility considerably to have a second, corroborating source. The story still seems a little fuzzy, but then they probably shouldn't relate everything publicly. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
|
| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 3:08 am Post subject: |
|
|
Newsmax
| Quote: | Sunday, Aug. 21, 2005 5:38 p.m. EDT
Lt. Col. Shaffer: Able Danger Docs Disappeared
Documents detailing the work of a top secret military intelligence unit that identified lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta before the 9/11 attacks have disappeared, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency's liaison for the group, code named Able Danger.
"There's some troubling things that have happened both to me and the way the [Able Danger] information [was handled]," Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer told C-Span's "Sunday Morning Journal." "Shortly after I talked to the 9/11 Commission, there was some issues going on about the documentation. Right now as it stands this minute, to my knowledge, the documentation I had . . . we don't know where it is."
"It's not where I left it back in March of 2003," Shaffer said, which was "in a Department intelligence facility in the Northern Virginia area."
Shaffer told C-Span he had "one full set of Able Danger documents in my holdings from the DIA."
The Able Danger whistleblower had said previously that a member of the team had delivered two briefcases full of documents to the 9/11 Commission - but Commission spokesman have said they have found nothing that mentioned Atta by name. |
Hmmm. What does this mean??
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Rdtf
CNO
Joined: 13 May 2004
Posts: 2209
Location: BUSHville
|
| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 3:28 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Did someone have a late night shredding party? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
LimaCharlie
PO2
Joined: 25 Aug 2004
Posts: 386
Location: Oregon
|
| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 3:31 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Sandy Burglar? |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
Frogg
Ensign
Joined: 20 Aug 2004
Posts: 64
|
| Posted: Tue Aug 23, 2005 6:35 am Post subject: |
|
|
| Anker-Klanker wrote: | I'm really having some problems following this Col. Shaffer's story: what he really knew; when he knew it; and when supposedly anyone was told about it. He says:
| Quote: | | He says that he first became aware of the names of the four hijackers "in the mid-2000 time frame." |
OK, so far so good (but of course at that time he didn't know they were going to turn out to be hijackers). But then he says:
| Quote: | | But he said that the information now appears much more significant than it did then. "At the time it didn't seem that important. I took it in stride with the dozens of issues daily raised by the projects I was working with." |
What the....? Sounds at this point that he didn't know how important the information was going to turn out to be, and was letting it slide.
| Quote: | | "We only realized after the fact what this meant ... We thought they were bad guys, we just didn't know how bad." |
Of course he couldn't know until after 911 that Atta and the others were going to do exactly what they did. But I don't see anything in what he said that indicates he knew they were a serious threat, much less have pushed, or even encouraged, anyone to "pass the word" along (to whomever).
I get the very bad feeling that this is kind of like Monday morning quaterbacking, and is motivated by a desire to resestablish funding for an Able Danger-like project in the vein of "See, what we might have been able to do!" I don't see any evidence in what he's saying that Able Danger knew it had really "hot" information that someone should immediately act on, so if that were the case, even if they had told someone it's not likely anyone would have acted on it.
Where am I misinterpreting this? |
Based on interviews and other articles, it seems that Shaffer pushed to turn this info over to the FBI practically to the point of insubordination. NO, they did not know of any plans in the works -- only that they were al Qaeda cells. Would the FBI have checked them out, tapped phones, and found out more? We will never know. But, if this info about Able Danger is true.....then the lesson here is to fund it fully and pay attention. The rest of the lessons (Gorelick's wall, problems within the CIA and FBi, etc) seem to have already been addressed by the 9/11 Commission and recommendations acted on. But, this needs to be investigated fully; otherwise, it leaves a hole in the investigation -- and, unanswered questions.
I'm also interested in the Hamburg Germany arrest of two Iraqi spies in March 2001 -- and the German intel that indicated they were working with al Qaeda against America. I hope they investigate that also. |
|
| Back to top |
|
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
|
Powered by phpBB © 2001, 2005 phpBB Group
|
FAQ
Search
Memberlist
Usergroups
Register
Profile
Log in to check your private messages
Log in
