TWO MORE WITNESSES, BUT PENTAGON SAYS NO CONFIRMATION SO FAR
TKS
jim geraghty reporting
What’s great about the Able Danger story is that we often get a bit of information to encourage the skeptics, and another bit of information to encourage the believers, often in the same day.
For the skeptics, from AFP:
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A Pentagon review has so far found no evidence that a secret intelligence operation identified Mohammad Atta as a member of a US-based Al-Qaeda cell before the September 11, 2001 attacks, a spokesman said.
Lawrence DiRita, a Pentagon spokesman, said a review of materials related to Able Danger has so far turned up no evidence that it identified Atta, the reputed leader of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
The spokesman said he did not know whether the material reviewed contained the names of any of the other three hijackers.
"What we have found are mostly sort of general reference to terrorist cells that people were generally aware of," DiRita told reporters.
"But nothing that would seem to corroborate specifically what congressman Weldon and Lieutenant Colonel Shaffer recall, although as you know they don't have what they said they saw. That makes it a little more difficult," he said.
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For the believers, from the New York Times:
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An active-duty Navy captain has become the second military officer to come forward publicly to say that a secret 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 on Monday 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." …
Representative Weldon also arranged an interview on Monday 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 until last year and that it had been posted on his office wall at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. He said it had become stuck to the wall and was impossible to remove when he switched jobs.
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Captain Ed takes a swing at sorting all this out. So… maybe this is a good time to play another round of what do we know?
• Able Danger existed. Its mission was to seek out al-Qaeda cells. Tony Shaffer was the program’s liaison with the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington, and that he was not one of the team’s intelligence analysts. Shaffer said there were eleven members of Able Danger; so far, nothing has contradicted this statement.
• Shaffer claims they discovered Atta and three other would-be-hijackers in 2000. Captain Phillpott, who managed the program for the Pentagon's Special Operations Command, makes the same allegation. James Smith claims he, too, was involved in creating this mysterious chart that included Atta that year.
• The Pentagon has yet to confirm any of this with anything on paper.
It’s tough to ignore that Shaffer’s account makes the Pentagon look terrible; not pursuing a lead on an al-Qaeda operative because of the doubts about the legal ramifications of military intelligence collecting data on American citizens. (Of course, the hijackers were not U.S. citizens.) We can wonder about how eager the Pentagon would be to find the paperwork that would verify claims that they made legal errors in 2000 that may have cost nearly 3,000 lives; but right now we have no evidence that there’s some hidden cache of files that would verify these claims.
• The Gorelick “wall” is a bit of a side issue for now. (First let’s figure out exactly what Able Danger knew, when it learned it, and how the process of trying to contact the FBI went.) On the one hand, as a Justice Department official, Gorelick’s directives should not have been seen as the last word at William Cohen’s Department of Defense. On the other hand, as Ed and William Tate noted, her infamous memo was also directed to the DOJ Counsel of Intelligence Policy and Review, which advises the Attorney General, CIA, FBI, the Department of Defense and State on “questions of law, regulation, and guidelines as well as the legality of domestic and overseas intelligence operations.” In other words, both that memo and the attitude from the top made the priorities clear in the Clinton administration: Don’t foul up our prosecutions by using inadmissible intelligence gathered by foreign sources. In many cases, that is wise policy – you don’t want a criminal or terrorist walking free because the prosecutor was relying on inadmissible evidence. But the problem is, that puts a higher priority on a clean prosecution than arresting these guys before they commit their criminal act. If the act is counterfeiting, that’s not such a big deal. But if the act is crashing airliners into skyscrapers, then any court case is moot.
• The 9/11 Commission claims Shaffer never told them about Able Danger spotting Atta and the other hijackers in 2000; he claims he did. Phillpott told them about Able Danger and these findings in July 2004; they consulted the documentation they had received and concluded that there wasn’t much to Phillpott’s claims and that AD was “not historically significant.” In retrospect, the Commission’s dismissal of this after a routine consultation of the files turned over from DOD, instead of talking to someone who was actually involved with the program, appears… what’s the word I’m looking for here…. Um… boneheaded.
One cannot help but wonder about other cases where the Commission dismissed what interviewees were telling them, because it wasn’t supported in the files turned over by various agencies and bureaucracies.
More than one reader has reminded me of my peak moment of skepticism, and taken the opportunity to accuse me of being “all over the map” on this story.
Let’s recall that at that moment of supreme skepticism,
1) None of Weldon’s sources had come forward;
2) Weldon had generated no paperwork to support his allegations;
3) he appeared to be backtracking in the Time magazine article and
4) he was moving on to other shocking, unsupported allegations about Iran planning U.S. troops in Iraq with chemical weapons.
The good news is, three of Weldon’s sources have come forward, and he’s stopped talking about other shocking allegations. He says Time got the story wrong. It would still be nice to see some supporting paperwork about what Able Danger found – that infamous chart, a memo, a summary of findings, data tables, whatever, something from 2000 to indicate this isn’t just a bunch of well-meaning guys misremembering things.
Some days we have been getting new information that indicates Shaffer and Weldon are on the right track; some days we are getting new information that urges skepticism, or Shaffer changes his story a bit and people wonder how reliable his memory (or second-hand information) is. Shaffer and these two new witnesses don't seem crazy, and if they're lying or making this up, they are ruining their careers. On the other hand, the lack of any supporting documentation — and the oddities of this story, like the chart being stuck on the wall, or no one in government saying anything about this until now — should give one pause.
I think it’s safe to say that we still have a long way to go with this story.
UPDATE: Strata-Sphere notes that Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission, was in you-know-who's "No Spin Zone" last night and "basically called Lt. Col. Schaffer a liar, or at least an extreme exaggerator."
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