They're scheduling hearings, so it's time to pay attention.
Able Danger was a Special Ops program targeting al Qaeda. A 9/11 Commission Staff Statement says "General Pete Schoomaker, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army and former Commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, said that if the Special Operations Command had been a supported command before 9/11, he would have had the al Qaeda mission rather than deferring to CENTCOM's lead." Franks took over CENTCOM July 6, 2000. Both Shaffer and an anonymous source say the project was axed in early 2001.
The 9/11 commission's response to the Able Danger story says Shaffer "complained that Congress, particularly the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), had effectively ended a human intelligence network he considered valuable." The CIA says Goss "was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 until his nomination as DCI in August 2004.... the committee, which oversees the intelligence community and authorizes its annual budget."
If the hearings are cancelled, this is why. More details below.
This from Goss's biography get my attention, too:
During the 107th Congress, Mr. Goss co-chaired the joint congressional inquiry into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
But it's a quote from this story in the Bergen Record that leads me to believe there might not really be any hearings after all:
We may never know. The commission says it may be a victim of the very same problem it sought to expose - that there is not enough sharing of information among federal counterterror officials.
Perhaps just as alarming, even the Able Danger team understood its limits. When lawyers blocked Able Danger's request to approach the FBI, the team simply went back to its work and kept quiet - even after the 9/11 attacks occurred.
Why? If the Able Danger team was so concerned about U.S. security, why didn't it approach Congress or even the press to sound an alarm?
When I posed that question in my interview with the Able Danger team member, he fell silent. Listening on a speaker phone, a congressional staffer interrupted: "Have you ever seen what happens to whistleblowers?"
Now, is it just me or has Clinton been out of office for five years? If they're afraid of retaliation from the Pentagon, it's Rumsfeld's Pentagon they're talking about, not Cohen's.
Why would they be so afraid of retaliation? All the debate so far has focused on blocked information sharing before 9/11. No one has asked a few simple questions: Who killed the Able Danger program, when, and why?
Update: Looks like Tony Snow hasn't been briefed:
SNOW: Why did they shut down "Able Danger?"
SHAFFER: Good question. And I don't know if I could give you a really clear answer on that because it kind of mystified me at the time, too.
Any time you have a global terrorist target, such as Al Qaeda, which has hit you several times, we're talking about the Cole, the embassy bombings in Africa, I would think that a project where you're trying to target them globally, offensively, looking at offensive options, would be the best thing you could do try to go after and prevent and attack.
Again, we had no inkling about 9/11. And I don't want to give that impression. But as a soldier and the soldiers and sailors and air men who worked with me on this project, we knew there was an issue here that needed to be looked at. And that was -- I can't tell you what the thinking was at the leadership level to turn it off.
SNOW: All right. But that happened in the spring of 2001?
SHAFFER: Right. And I was specifically told to back out of it by an Army two-star general, where I think it's been reported. And I confirm, I was nearly insubordinate with this general by the fact that I said we need to do this. This is important.
And it came to the point where he had to remind me, formally that he is a two-star general, and I am not, and I am to do what he told me to do.
SNOW: Well, you're still a lieutenant colonel. Colonel Shaffer, thanks for joining us.
SHAFFER: Thank you, sir.
Update two: I'm wondering
who this "two star general" is, too:
Shaffer also claims that Able Danger members were basically dissuaded from further investigating Atta because he was here as a foreign visitor. He said a two-star general above him was "very adament" about not looking further at Atta.
"I was directed several times [to ignore Atta], to the point where he had to remind me he was a general and I was not ... [and] I would essentially be fired," Shaffer told FOX News.
If you want your conspiracy theory fix for the day,
check this out:
Weldon alleges that Pentagon lawyers rejected the military intelligence unit’s recommendation to apprehend Atta because he was in the country legally, and therefore information on him could not be shared with law enforcement.
But the “terrible lapses” cited by Weldon do not stem from the nonsensical assertion that Atta had a green card (he did not) which rendered him immune from military investigation but were the result of an officially-protected heroin trafficking operation being conducted on planes like those of Wally Hilliard, whose Lear jet flew "milk runs" down and back to Venezuela every week for 39 weeks in a row before finally running afoul of local DEA agents not been clued-in on the 'joke.'
...A two-year investigation in Venice, Fl. into the flight school attended by Atta and his bodyguard Marwan Al-Shehhi and which provided them with their “cover” while in the U.S. unearthed the amazing fact that during the same month the two men began flying lessons at Huffman Aviation, July of 2000, the flight school’s owner’s Lear jet was seized on the runway of Orlando Executive Airport by Federal Agents who found 43-pounds of heroin onboard.
43 pounds of heroin is known in the drug trade as “heavy weight.”
In a story in the August 2, 2000 Orlando Sentinel authorities called the bust “the biggest drug seizure in central Florida history.”