Clinton is not the Able Danger story. It's the Rumsfeld coverup! Summary in extended text.
You won't believe this exchange on O'Reilly last night about events after October '03. Shaffer's attorney, Zaid:
ZAID: There are up to a dozen people, who, if they are contacted, who will support what Tony has asserted. His members of his team.
[Fade out music starts playing in the background.]
The Army ordered the documents destroyed. That's why they didn't get the right documents.
O'REILLY: I got it. Thank you gentlemen. We appreciate it. Plenty more ahead as The Factor moves along this evening.
If you still doubt Shaffer's story, go watch this video of C-SPAN Sunday Morning, 8/21. Shaffer's interview is 34:25 into the 3 hour show.
If neither link works, paste this into real player:
rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/wj082105.rm
Excerpts from the C-SPAN clip below, where he goes into detail about the documents that went missing after his interview with the 9/11 commission, at which "a attorney from the administration" was present.
Update: Guess who's Army Chief of Staff.
Also try:
rtsp://video.c-span.org/15days/wj082105_shaffer.rm
New: SUMMARY (Also see my previous diaries, here and here).
In 1999, Hugh Shelton ordered Special Operations commander Pete Schoomaker to start a project called "Able Danger" to track likely al Qaeda operatives worldwide. Using advanced data mining techniques, by sometime in 2000, they had actually identified al Qaeda cells.
They were prevented from sharing this information with the FBI, despite going up the Chain of Command to at least General Schoomaker. The reason given for the denial involved the fact that the intelligence operation might target individuals who could be in the US legally. However, the program was kept operational until sometime early in the Bush administration, four or five months before 9/11 when the program was terminated!
In October 2003, Executive Director (now Rice aide) Philip Zelikow of the 9/11 commission, two of his staffers, and a "attorney from the administration" were briefed in Afghanistan by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer (DIA liason for Able Danger) on what the program had accomplished and why he felt it should be reestablished. Zelikow urged Shaffer to contact him personally upon his return to the US after his time in Afghanistan.
When Shaffer tried to contact Zelikow, he says that he was blown off. He also discovered that the top secret documents he had stored in an authorized DIA facility had now gone missing. The 9/11 commission requested documents from DoD on Able Danger but claims it did not receive anything from DoD that specifically corroborated Shaffers' story so it stopped looking into it.
In July, ten days before the 9/11 Report was printed, the Navy captain who managed Able Danger itself for Special Operations Command was finally able to meet with 9/11 commission staffers after repeated attempts on his part. The staffer's notes specifically state that he, Captain Phillpott said Able Danger had identified Mohamed Atta over a year before 9/11. The 9/11 commission says it determined that this information was not credible, deemed Able Danger "not historically significant" and decided not to edit their report to mention it.
Now, due to wacko Congressman Weldon, members of the Able Danger team have gone public. Wingers at first all trumpeted it as "Clinton's fault" and said it proves the "Gorelick memo" allowed 9/11 to happen. The GOP is beginning to realize however that the real story is who terminated Able Danger in the spring of 2001 and why? The more attention that question gets, and the less the Pentagon has to say, the quiter our friends on the right will get about this story. Watch.
Anyway, back to General Schoomaker:
General Schoomaker became the 35th Chief of Staff, United States Army, on August 1, 2003....
General Schoomaker served as the Commanding General of the Joint Special Operations Command from July 1994 to August 1996, followed by command of the United States Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina through October 1997. His most recent assignment prior to assuming duties as the Army Chief of Staff was as Commander in Chief, United States Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, from November 1997 to November 2000.
Here is the rest of the exchange from The Factor:
O'REILLY: Is there a villain here, counselor? Is there a villain?
ZAID: Right now, that's really hard to identify. The question here, Bill, is that the commission most likely dropped this investigation because the documents that the DOD gave to it following their meeting with Lt. Col. Shaffer, said nothing that supported what he had found out with Able Danger. So the commission dropped the ball because they didn't go talk to any of the other Able Danger teammates.
O'REILLY: Okay. That's valid criticism.
ZAID: There are up to a dozen people, who, if they are contacted, who will support what Tony has asserted. His members of his team.
[Fade out music starts playing in the background.]
The Army ordered the documents destroyed. That's why they didn't get the right documents.
O'REILLY: I got it. Thank you gentlemen. We appreciate it. Plenty more ahead as the factor moves along this evening.
For once, on C-SPAN last Sunday, someone let Shaffer lay it all out:
21 October of 2003, Doctor Philip Zelikow and two staffers and a attorney from the administration were there. During that meeting, and there were several folks in the room, I laid out the able danger story, and I've gone through it several times both with other members of the Congress, with DOD, and with the press to a certain extent - not as extensively as the other folks - but I did lay out to them the basic facts of the Able Danger operation, it's mission, focus, purpose, who was involved, the short comings, and I do mean short comings.
I laid out the short comings to include the FBI problem, the problems regarding the internal coordination within DOD and CIA, the problem, and don't get me wrong, I have some CIA friends who've come forward to help stick up for me in this but CIA had a massive role in not helping on it, so all these ambitions were discussed and given to Doctor Zelikow.
Further, he asked me to recontact him at the end of that meeting. At the end of that meeting in Bagram, he gave me his card and said "Please this is important, contact me upon your return to United States so that we can continue this dialogue.
I did, upon my return from Afghanistan in January of '04, attempt to call his office not once but twice. The first time they said "Yes, we remember you, we'd like to have you come in and continue the dialogue." They didn't contact me again after that.
I called them back a week later and they said, "Ah, we don't need you now, we've got all the information we need." Which I was suprised about, but I figured - in my own defense here - that they must have found someone else with the same information that I had....
Shortly after I talked to the 9/11 commission, there was some issues going on about the documenation. Right now, as it stands this minute, to my knowledge the documentation I had, and I had one full set of Able Danger documents in my holdings in DIA. We don't know where it's at, it's not where I left it back in March of '03....
I left it in a, in a skif, a compartmented intelligence facility in the Northern Virginia area. And right now we don't know where that's at, and that, its important because I both told the 9/11 Commission about the fact that this existed, I recommended they look at it, and then also because the fact is I had pretty much one of everything of Able Danger, in the way of authority, operation support, I can't get into, there's classifeid aspects of this still I can't get into, um, the whole set of army - socom interaction documents, which is key to how thing kind of fell apart there in the middle, and who terminated the operation.
Those were all in that set of documentation, becaseu I was the forward operating location for Able Danger. You have to uderstand, they were based out of Tampa, Florida, therefore they didn't have to bring all this classified information and other things back and forth on airplanes between here and Washington, er, between Tampa and Washington - therefore I became, became their forward base of operations.
I pretty much kept a copy of everything. Right now, we're looking for that.
Update two:
From WTOP Federal News Radio:
"Some folks in DoD I don't think are too happy with this information coming forward for whatever reason, and lot of folks who have this information are considering very carefully how they bring themselves forward," Shaffer tells federalnewsradio.com and WFED, which are part of the WTOP Radio Network.
Shaffer says the problem is not coming from military brass.
"Every time I've talked to the Army they've said tell the truth. There have been other conversations that I have had with other elements of DoD, and I think you all have seen some of this in the press where there was a whisper campaign and some other not so subtle means of dissuasion -- kind of put out there to wave people off this."
Schaffer says he's bothered by the continuing relationship between Pentagon and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the Sept. 11 Commission.
"Why would the Pentagon be providing information to a commission that no longer exists? The 9-11 commission does not exist."
U.S. Sen. Slade Gordon, R-Wash., came out and said the Pentagon was leaking information to him and others on the commission, Shaffer said, raising the question of whether the defense department is trying to cover up something.
The Commission was shut down September 20, 2004 and replaced with a
Public Discourse Project, which issued a
statement on 8/12 - verifying much of what Shaffer has said, while arguing key details.