Able Danger: Morning Roundup

Jim Geraghty comments on the latest overnight news, namely that the Commission blames the Pentagon for not knowing or being aware of the Able Danger information.

However, the howler of the day must come from Commissioner Thomas Keane, who stated:

Kean said the 9/11 Commission would have welcomed confirmation of Shaffer's charge because it bolsters one of the commission's key findings: that various elements of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement failed to share information that might have led to the breakup of the 9/11 plot.

Yes, it's nice to know that the Commission welcomes the findings, except that they should have done this while they were actually investigating and researching the issues before issuing the report. They now want to revise the history and make it sound like Able Danger isn't a major issue because it is further evidence of intelligence failures.

Captain Ed finds Keane's shifting blame to be something unseemly. He also posits the following:

It's nice to see Kean acknowledge that any data that identified Atta prior to the attacks is self-evidently an important line of investigation to follow. Why didn't anyone believe that before all of this became public?

The Pentagon, meanwhile, has not yet issued any definitive statement on Able Danger. Media outlets and anonymous sources have expected one since last weekend, always speculating that the statement would come out the next day. It appears that the Pentagon also has been taken by surprise and may need more time to unravel Able Danger, or it may just need more time to establish the authorization and funding for such an extensive data-mining program. My guess is that Congress never authorized such a program, and probably neither did the Clinton White House. That will make Able Danger somewhat embarrassing to top brass and may also explain their reluctance to coordinate information between Able Danger and law-enforcement agencies.

No matter. The time for sheepishness and squeamishness has long passed. The Pentagon needs to get the records together and provide them to Congress along with a public statement that confirms or denies Col. Shaffer's account. The Commission, meanwhile, needs to quit issuing statements and let Congress and the White House get to the bottom of their failure, to determine whether it came from incompetence or corruption.

It is possible that the data mining program came from the black budget, which means that Congress did pay and knew about the program, but it wasn't meant for public consumption, despite the fact that it used public sources as its information base. However, Ed is correct to demand transparency on this issue, if only to clear the air.

UPDATE:
Deborah Orin has much more, including the potential naming of the naval officer who tried informing the Commission of the Able Danger program and its findings:

[Shaffer] said the unit tried three times to alert the FBI that it had identified al Qaeda cells in the United States — but military lawyers nixed it. Shaffer also says he alerted the 9/11 commission in October 2003 about how Able Danger identified Atta — but commission staffers blew him off and failed to properly follow up.

His stunning remarks have sparked a storm of questions about whether the Sept. 11 atrocities could have been prevented and why the 9/11 commission ignored claims that Clinton administration lawyers blocked Able Danger from alerting the FBI to al Qaeda cells on U.S. soil.

A naval officer has also told reporters that he alerted the 9/11 commission about Able Danger but was ignored.

He hasn't gone public, but The Associated Press yesterday identified him as Capt. Scott Philpott, an expert in futuristic naval warfare.

Shaffer told The Post that at least two other members of the Able Danger team plan on going public "as soon as they get basically some guarantees from their own organizations that they can talk without being retaliated against."

Both still work for the U.S. government, he said, adding that he also hopes the person who "ran the technology" for the program — whom he identified only as a Ph.D. and a woman — will go public.

Shaffer said he showed Able Danger files to other intelligence experts in the past and they agreed that "we really did have the goods on these guys before 9/11."

That means we now have the names of two military officers who relayed information to the Commission and were rebuffed. Am I sensing a pattern of behavior here? Why did the Commission not include this information in its report, if it did not contain any relevant data?

There is no mention of Able Danger anywhere in the entire report. Not a single mention. Not a footnote. Nothing. Why? If this program had pulled the names of Atta and his associates months before the attacks, that would be highly relevant. Were those the only names pulled? What motivated the Commission to exclude this information?

We do not have satisfactory answers to any of these questions.

And go figure that 9/11 Families are pissed off at these new revelations about Able Danger and the Commission's failure to investigate the issue fully. Some are calling for a new Commission to figure out what happened. I'd be pissed too if I knew that the Commission that was supposed to investigate the issues presented before us refused to fully investigate the one intel group that may have had their finger on the terrorists before the attacks, but did nothing because of a bunch of screwed up policies.

UPDATE II:
Andy McCarthy wonders why the DoD is taking so long to respond and provide the information.

What does the Pentagon have to say about all this? I repeat: it has been four years and there have been a zillion investigations during which the Defense Department (and other organs of government that may be relevant here) have been directed, re-directed, and re-re-directed to probe every scrap of paper, every databyte and every source in their possession in order that the country could understand what the state of our intelligence was prior to 9/11 and why we were unable to thwart the attacks. Why does it take more than 10 seconds at this point, August 2005, for DoD to say: “yes, we have documentation showing an identification of Atta and/or other hijackers prior to 9/11,” or “no, we don’t.”

I don’t know whether to be more baffled or outraged by the seeming inability or unwillingness to answer that very simple question.

Excellent point. Why are we still learning about various aspects of the intel and law enforcement efforts after the 9/11 Commission supposedly obtained every bit of information relating to the attacks and intel process when every agency was directed to provide all information. Who was asking the questions? Why weren't all the files provided, and if they weren't, at whose direction were they not provided. Sec. Def. Rumsfeld, that means you've got to provide some answers too.

UPDATE II:
The invaluable Captain Ed asks the question of whether Able Danger is still an ongoing program, and highlights that in the next few days a PhD who worked on Able Danger may come forward. We look forward to hearing directly from those who worked on the program as that could shed some light on what they did, what they found, and whether it is germane to the ongoing and growing controversy surrounding the Commission's reporting.