Able Danger - Re-Mark Your Calendars

Arlen Specter's Senate hearing into Able Danger has been re-scheduled for Wed., Sept 21.  A witness list has not yet been announced, but Able Danger skeptics will be keen to hear from Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who promises to be an exciting witness.

Let's recap - Congressman Weldon, (R, PA) brought "Able Danger" to national attention about a month ago.  Able Danger was a secret Pentagon data-mining project attempting to identify links between Al Qaeda members worldwide. 

With Weldon's appearance in the Times, two bombshells went off.  One was that the Pentagon group had allegedly identified four of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, including leader Mohamed Atta, in the spring of 2000.  However, legal eagles in the Defense Dept. advised against sharing this info with the FBI.

Second, two representatives of Able Danger had met with the 9/11 Commission, but no mention of the Able Danger success and suppression appeared in the Commission's final report, which prompted questions about the credibility of the Commission.

Although his sources were anonymous at the time, it was eventually revealed that Weldon was relying on Lt. Col. Shaffer and Capt. Phillpott for much of his information.  Shaffer had met with staffers from the 9/11 Commission in October 2003 while in Afghanistan, and claims that he told them that the Able Danger team had identified Atta in 2000; the staffers dispute this, but did follow up with document requests to the Pentagon.

Phillpott then met with 9/11 Commission staffers in July 2004.  Both sides agree that Atta was discussed in that meeting, but Phillpott had no documentation to support the claim that Atta had been ID'ed, and none had surfaced in the Able Danger documents reviewed by the 9/11 Commission.  (The statement of the 9/11 Commission is here.)

Well.  Arlen Specter will be holding hearings, but UPI had a recent chat with Lt. Col. Shaffer.  Let's get his latest on what he told the 9/111 staffers in their Oct 2003 meeting:

Shaffer told UPI that he told three staff members of the Sept. 11 commission about the Able Danger project, and the fact that it had developed information on al-Qaida before the attacks, at a meeting at Bagram airbase outside of Kabul on Oct. 21, 2003.
   
No one disputes that.
   
But he also says that he told them the project had linked some of the hijackers to al-Qaida before the attacks -- and that he told them Atta's name had been on a list of people linked to al-Qaida.

... "I told them that we, Able Danger, had identified two of the three cells that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks," Shaffer said. "At the end (of the presentation) I mentioned Atta."

Shaffer says he "sort of dropped (the name) in" at the end of the meeting, and his account of the difference in recollections is conciliatory, "If they want to say they didn't hear it, fair enough. But I know what I said. I said we had two of the three cells."

Shaffer too has a contemporaneous note of the meeting -- talking points he says he prepared for his presentation, and which he has provided to several committees on Capitol Hill.

He declined to provide UPI with a copy, but he did say that Atta was not named in them.

What?!?  Shaffer took the trouble to arrange a meeting in Afghanistan (where he was serving at the time) and then buried the lead, only mentioning Atta at the end of the meeting and failing to include that tidbit in his written talking points?   

My goodness.  Here is how Weldon described his star witness last Aug 12:

On Thursday, Weldon told FOX News that the military official, who was under cover when he was in Afghanistan for the October 2003 briefing, is certain he told the staffers about Atta at that time.

The military intelligence officer who attended that meeting with staffers "kept notes of that meeting and will testify under oath that he not only told" the staffers about Able Danger's mission, but about Atta.

That jibes with an early report in the Times:

Colonel Shaffer said that he had provided information about Able Danger and its identification of Mr. Atta in a private meeting in October 2003 with members of the Sept. 11 commission staff when they visited Afghanistan, where he was then serving.

And here is a Shaffer from Aug 17:

Shaffer, however, claims he mentioned Atta by name to the 9/11 Commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, when the two met in Afghanistan in October 2003.

"I kept my talking points (from the meeting)," Shaffer said. "And I'm confident about what I said."

On the other hand, Shaffer left observers baffled when he spoke with Hannity and Colmes - per the Fox reporter, "Shaffer conceded that during his own personal briefing of Sept. 11 commission staffers in Afghanistan in Oct. 2003, he didn't specifically name the terrorists".  However, the transcript left open the possibility that Shaffer meant to say, he didn't name any terrorists other than Atta. 

His latest story may not represent a tremendous factual change, since Shaffer still says he mentioned Atta.  But where is the credibility?  He left Atta out of his own notes, none of the staffers admit to hearing him say it, he admits the mention was late in the meeting, almost as an afterthought - who is going to buy this?

[Who will buy it?  The Captain has a plausible defense of Shaffer - "That sounds more to me like someone who gets very careful about calling people liars in public than a climb-down."]

MORE:  Let's excerpt Shaffer's chat with GSN from Aug 23 after the break.  He is describing his Oct 2003 meeting with the 9/11 Commission staffers:

SHAFFER:  These are my talking points. [Shaffer showed GSN a typed, one-page memo, with a series of bulleted points, but would not allow GSN to publish the memo.]

I went through this whole thing with [Zelikow and other staff members.] I talked about the background, what Stratus Ivy was.  I went through the integrated human collection planning effort.  I talked about how we planned to do that, the application of U.S. technology. You notice how much time we’re taking now to talk about it.

GSN:  Right.

SHAFFER:  Same thing [in Afghanistan.] It took time to go through these points. The bottomline was, and the way I phrased it was, “We found two of the three cells which conducted 9/11, to include Atta.”

That’s the way I phrased it to them. I don’t know if they didn’t recognize the Atta part, but I did specifically mention two of the three cells which conducted 9/11, and at the end of that I threw in Atta.

Because my focus, honestly, was that we found two of the three cells. That was to me the most important factor, rather than focusing on Atta, as an individual. And that was what I told them.

I basically gave them background on each one of these three agencies and how it worked. The fact was several DoD seniors saw what I was doing [as similar to] the movie “Kelly’s Heroes” with Clint Eastwood?  In “Kelly’s Heroes,” Clint Eastwood takes a bunch of guys and goes off for gold behind enemy lines during World War II. [Some DoD officials] compared us to being some renegade element totally out of control, doing something which made no sense to them. So, the “crazy factor” was a big issue that I was dealing with at that time. I’m showing you exactly what I put in my notes and said to the 9/11 Commission.

GSN:  So, as far as you’re concerned, you not only gave a thorough briefing on everything that had happened, but also identified -- maybe as a throwaway line -- that you found these cells and Mohammed Atta?

SHAFFER:  Correct.

GSN:  That would seem to be the “money” line. How does somebody [working for the 9/11 Commission] not have his eyes pop open when you say, “Oh, by the way sir, we also identified Mohammed Atta a year before the attacks.”

SHAFFER:  As I recall, at the end of the meeting, there was silence. People were just silent at what I’d said.

Now, I don’t know how to interpret that, but I do know that two things came out of that meeting, some of which are admitted by the 9/11 Commission now.

First, Zelikow approached me at the end of the meeting and said, “This is important. We need to continue this dialogue when we get back to the states. Here’s my card.”

Now a senior executive handing an [Army] major his card, I would consider that a fairly big indication that “Hey, there’s something to this.”

Second thing, by the 9/11 Commission’s own statement of 12 August, it talks about Dr. Zelikow calling back [to the U.S.] immediately. My understanding from talking to another member of the press is that [Zelikow’s] call came into America at four o clock in the morning. He got people out of bed over this.

So, I don’t know what they heard. I can only tell you that I was told by Zelikow to re-contact him and we have their own statement here. So, it seems to me that what they’re saying about [Able Danger] not being important is contradicted by the fact that he did tell me to contact him.

The lead was buried.  And here is another buried lead - in the GSN interview, Shaffer mentions several companies that provided contractors, including Orion International, which becomes a part of SRA International.                

And SRA International has a James Smith working there.  Developing...
                                                                                               

Comments

[Thomas J. Jackson]

Where is the credibility? A man who puts his entire career at risk is considered by you not to be credible? I wonder what sort of sacrifice it might take for it to be considered credible.

[kim]

Mohammed Atta was a Rove plant so the world would be distracted from Plamegate, and Bush ordered up Katrina to shift focus from Iraq. Make your burnt offerings at your usual spiritual place.
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[cathyf]

Don't discount too quickly the possibility that Shaffer is simply a poor communicator. As anyone who regularly attends 2-hour meetings can attest, sometimes you're in there, and even if you know for sure that the speaker is going to divulge next week's winning mega-millions numbers, look, there is no way you're going to be able to pay attention to that droning voice...

And not to mention that Shaffer wouldn't be the first military man to have this problem. The military is reputed to have a serious problem with "power point rangers" who mangle important tactical information so badly that it is causing serious concerns about combat effectiveness.

cathy :-)

[TM]

Good point by cathy - reading through Shaffer's interview with GSN, it seemed as if he couln't separate wheat from chaff, or cut to the headline. EVERYTHING was important...

[Cecil Turner]

If I were trying to draft "talking points" on Able Danger, it'd look something like:

• a program that developed little if any actionable intelligence;
• based on data manipulation of dubious legality (especially pre-Patriot Act); and
• because of the legal concerns, that information wasn't passed on to the FBI;
• who, had they received it, would almost certainly have ignored it anyway.

I can't imagine why anyone who received such a presentation (from a weekend warrior who apparently has a tendency to ramble) wouldn't have just been riveted.

BTW, in my experience, the term "power point ranger" is generally reserved for staff weenies with good presentation skills but little or no operational knowledge. It's not that they can't communicate, but that they don't know what they're talking about.

[kim]

I note something odd, which may be meaningful, but just as well, may not.

Both the Able Dangerousness and the Berglury have powerful members of both sides of the political divide attempting to make de minimus of them.

Do Sandy Berger, Jamie Gorelick, Richard Clarke, and Bolton and Zelikow all have no clothes on? Wait a minute, none of them were Emperor at the relevant times.
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[kim]

It's almost like both sides realized that bin Laden caught both sides with their pants down and their fingers NOT in the dyke, and it seems wiser to learn the lessons from the disaster rather than tear each other up politically.

A Naderite might say the two parties have abruptly stopped what they were doing and have their clothes back on. But they're still all over each other.
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[kim]

Only a week to go. Whattya bet they get postponed again? Too many players want these lessons learned quietly.
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[Crew v1.0]

From (AP): "A Pentagon employee was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday. The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to name the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa.

Weldon declined to name the employee, citing confidentiality matters. Weldon described the documents as "2.5 terabytes" — as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials in the Library of Congress, he added.

A Senate Judiciary Committee aide said the witnesses for Wednesday's hearing had not been finalized and could not confirm Weldon's comments...."

[vch]

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