August 17, 2005

From the Gray Lady, no less (Can we believe them this time, now that they're actually reporting the real news?):
Officer Says Military Blocked Sharing of Files on Terrorists - New York Times

A military intelligence team repeatedly contacted the F.B.I. in 2000 to warn about the existence of an American-based terrorist cell that included the ringleader of the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a veteran Army intelligence officer who said he had now decided to risk his career by discussing the information publicly.

The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the bureau.

Colonel Shaffer said in an interview on Monday night that the small, highly classified intelligence program, known as Able Danger, had identified the terrorist ringleader, Mohamed Atta, and three other future hijackers by name by mid-2000, and tried to arrange a meeting that summer with agents of the Washington field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share its 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 attacks were 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 Special Operations Command of the Defense Department 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.
[We need to find out the names of these lawyers and hold them completely accountable!
And I was not aware that aliens visiting our country were afforded such rights and privacy, even if they did have visas.
If it's been shown that these visitors came here for the express purpose of killing us, would they still enjoy such protections?--Jen]

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.
[Well, let's blame them now, howzaboutit?]

The Defense Department did not dispute the account from Colonel Shaffer, a 42-year-old native of Kansas City, Mo., who is the first military officer associated with the program to acknowledge his role publicly.

At the same time, the department said in a statement that it was "working to gain more clarity on this issue" and that "it's too early to comment on findings related to the program identified as Able Danger." The F.B.I. referred calls about Colonel Shaffer to the Pentagon.
[Sounds like posterior-covering, Clinton-style "what the meaning of 'is' is" is, goobledygook when the fit's really hit the shan!]

The account from Colonel Shaffer, a reservist who is also working part time for the Pentagon, corroborates much of the information that the Sept. 11 commission has acknowledged it received about Able Danger last July from a Navy captain who was also involved with the program but whose name has not been made public. In a statement issued last week, the leaders of the commission said the panel had concluded that the intelligence program "did not turn out to be historically significant."
[Oh, no. Not significant at all.
It only would have saved 3,000 American lives and prevented the 9/11 attacks from ever happening.]

The statement said that while the commission did learn about Able Danger in 2003 and immediately requested Pentagon files about it, none of the documents turned over by the Defense Department referred to Mr. Atta or any of the other hijackers.
[Bullsh*t! More lying and CYAing.--Jen]

Colonel Shaffer said that his role in Able Danger was as liaison with the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, and that he was not an intelligence analyst. The interview with Colonel Shaffer on Monday was arranged for The New York Times and Fox News by Representative Curt Weldon,
[What an unholy marriage! LOL
You know Rep. Weldon thinks this is important if he arranged this!]
the Pennsylvania Republican who is vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and a champion of data-mining programs like Able Danger.

Colonel Shaffer's lawyer, Mark Zaid, said in an interview that he was concerned that Colonel Shaffer was facing retaliation from the Defense Department, first for having talked to the Sept. 11 commission staff in October 2003 and now for talking with news organizations.

Mr. Zaid said that Colonel Shaffer's security clearance was suspended last year because of what the lawyer said were a series of "petty allegations" involving $67 in personal charges on a military cellphone. He said that despite the disciplinary action, Colonel Shaffer had been promoted this year from major.

Colonel Shaffer said he had decided to allow his name to be used in part because of his frustration with the statement issued last week by the commission leaders, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton.

The commission said in its final report last year that American intelligence agencies had not identified Mr. Atta as a terrorist before Sept. 11, 2001, when he flew an American Airlines jet into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York.

A commission spokesman did not return repeated phone calls on Tuesday for comment. A Democratic member of the commission, Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor, said in an interview on Tuesday 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."
[Yeah, like he doesn't know what that is already!
When in doubt, play dumb and ask for more paperwork--typical lawyer.
"The buck never got here..."--Sure, it didn't, Ben-Veniste!]

"And if these assertions are credible," Mr. Ben-Veniste continued, "the Pentagon would need to explain why it was that the 9/11 commissioners were not provided this information despite requests for all information regarding Able Danger."

Colonel Shaffer said 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. Commission members have disputed that, saying that they do not recall hearing Mr. Atta's name during the briefing and that the name did not appear in documents about Able Danger that were later turned over by the Pentagon.

"I would implore the 9/11 commission to support a follow-on investigation to ascertain what the real truth is," Colonel Shaffer said in the interview this week. "I do believe the 9/11 commission should have done that job: figuring out what went wrong with Able Danger."

"This was a good news story because, before 9/11, you had an element of the military - our unit - which was actually out looking for Al Qaeda," he continued. "I can't believe the 9/11 commission would somehow believe that the historical value was not relevant."

Colonel Shaffer said that because he was not an intelligence analyst, he was not involved in the details of the procedures used in Able Danger to glean information from terrorist databases, nor was he aware of which databases had supplied the information that might have led to the name of Mr. Atta or other terrorists so long before the Sept. 11 attacks.

But he said he did know that Able Danger had made use of publicly available information from government immigration agencies, from Internet sites and from paid search engines like LexisNexis.

Oooh, I love it!
Despite the MSM's attempts to hog the front pages of their rags with the spectacle of Leftist Clytemnestra Cindy Sheehan's anti-war protest, Able Danger is the real story these days.

One of the problems the "government" faces with this story is admitting the working of the "data mining" Col. Shaffer mentiions.
If I understand correctly, it is the use of computers to pick up certain key words from the phone calls and emails of every one of us, searching for a certain "cluster" or recurrent incidents of certain words as a presupposition of criminal activity.
Our government, in full cognizance of how much we all cherish our supposed privacy, will not want to admit that they've been doing this for awhile.
And under Clinton, no less! (Lib Dems are such proponents of civil liberties, aren't they?)
They may also not want to alert any terrorists now under surveillance as to how our systems operate.
So the data mining issue is one thing at work here; if the Left hates the Patriot Act, they'll howl about data mining.
For my money (tax money, that is), the good news is that their program works!
And it must be very sensitive, because you know cold killers like Atta would have been careful.
So whatever the DoD used to find these AQ cell members, let's hope it's still in place and working to find any others!
(It wouldn't surprise me if this program was, in part, at least, Richard Clarke's baby, as his primary focus was cyber terrorism.
Therefore, this starring role on the 9/11 Commission has even more interest.)
The second thing to notice is that Able Danger pinpointed Atta's cell as centered in Brooklyn.
To me, this says, "Blind sheik, First WTC bombing, tied to Saddam's Iraq."
We need to explore this link at lot more closely.
As long as Shaffer is out there, let's find out why the "software put them [the 4 uncovered 9/11 hijackers] all together in Brooklyn."
It's pretty obvious that the Able Danger team was kept from reporting what they found to the FBI by the infamous Gorelick "Chinese" wall, designed to keep away any inquiries into illegal Chinese campaign contributions to Clinton's '96 re-election drive, but which worked to keep our top agencies from protecting us by preventing them from sharing intelligence.
The 9/11 Commission promised us that this wall had been dismantled--Has it been?
Of course, we can also look to the placement of Ms. Gorelick and Ben-Veniste on the wrong side of the microphones during the 9/11 Comm. hearings, so that they could be gatekeepers on this damning information.
Some have speculated that it was documents about Able Danger that Sandy Berger stuffed in his pants at the National Archives...works for me!
Let's put it like this: Berger must have stolen these or something like them that strongly implicated the Clinton Administration's negligence and poor judgement in handling the AQ terrorism threat, because Sandy was investigated and then indicted for bergling a mere 2 months after he made his appearance in front of the committee.
Whatever docs he took and destroyed were BIG, because he risked getting caught, facing criminal charges--for which he was convicted-- and the destruction of his professional reputation as a security specialist.
Dr. Sanity's been doing some great blogging on Able Danger and has a time line.
She quotes a Fox News piece dated August 10th:

According to Weldon, Able Danger identified Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi as members of a cell Able Danger code-named "Brooklyn" because of some loose connections to New York City. [FYI: Atta was the leader of the whole 9/11 cell and was the "pilot" who flew AA Flight #11 into the North Tower on 9/11. Marwan al-Shehhi was the suicide pilot on United Flight #175 that flew into the South Tower on 9/11. Khalid al-Mihdhar helped hijack and crash AA Flight #77 into the Pentagon on 9/11, as did Nawaf al-Hazmi, and probably participated in the bombing of the USS Cole. You can believe that if we rounded up these 4, we would have had no 9/11/01. I think we could have prevented 9/11 if we'd only gotten Mohammed Atta, the ringleader. Without his "leadership," the others were nowhere.]

Weldon said that in September 2000, the unit recommended on three separate occasions that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI "so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists." However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation, arguing that Atta and the others were in the country legally so information on them could not be shared with law enforcement.

"Lawyers within the administration — and we're talking about the Clinton administration, not the Bush administration — said 'you can't do it,'" and put post-its over Atta's face, Weldon said. "They said they were concerned about the political fallout that occurred after Waco ... and the Branch Davidians."

What in the world the 9/11 jihadi killers had to do with Bubba and Janet Reno attacking peaceful American Christians at Mount Carmel is anyone's guess!
This is BS and of the highest grade, too.
Someone's peeing on our shoes and telling us it's raining.
Some of the Commission members are now saying that if they were given a report on Able Danger before their findings last summer, that they weren't given any names...
Did they put post-its over everyone's picture on the DoD/FBI terror watch list?

For our own safety and security, we need to get to answers to every question we have that this disclosure reveals:
What top secret, classified documents exactly did Sandy Berger remove from the National Archives?
Is the data mining software still in place and functioning and what has it picked up in the 4 years since 9/11?
Did the Gorelick wall really come down after the Commission's recommendations were implemented and is John Negroponte the point man for intra-agency communications?
Finally, did this go all the way up to Clinton's Oval Office?
Why couldn't it even be mentioned to the incoming Bush Team as a potential threat to this country and all of us when the Clinton people left Washington?
When Hillary Clinton went on the Senate floor just weeks after the 9/11 attacks and accused the President of not protecting the American people by holding up a NYPost that said "Bush knew," was it because she knew?
If the Clintons (both of them, they're a matched set) and their minions like Berger, Clarke and Gorelick were willing to sacrifice 3,000 American lives to play their little partisan Beltway games, that needs to be exposed and brought to the cold light of day.
Don't let this story die, America--We can and should expect a lot more from our government when it comes to serving, protecting and defending us.

August 14, 2005

Mohammed at IRAQ THE MODEL
has something to say to anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan;
he reminds her that Iraqi mothers had many dead sons to cry over for 35 years, until American soldiers like Mrs. Sheehan's boy Casey came and liberated them from evil.
Now, there's much to celebrate in Iraq because men and women like Casey gave the ultimate sacrifice for Freedom.
Read it all.