Able Danger: Explosive Allegations Continue Surfacing

If pulling the names of Atta and three cohorts out of a hat weren't enough of a headache for the 9/11 Commission to try and explain away, members of the Able Danger team are going to testify to the fact that their data mining efforts actually picked up the threat that manifested itself as the USS Cole attack, which killed 17 sailors.

In the latest explosive revelation in the Able Danger saga, two former members of the data-mining team are expected to testify to the Senate Judiciary Committee next week that they uncovered alarming terrorist activity and associations in Aden weeks before the Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombing of the U.S. warship that killed 17 sailors.

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, the Defense Intelligence Agency's former liaison to Able Danger, told The Post that Capt. Scott Phillpott, Able Danger's leader, briefed Gen. Peter Schoomaker, former head of Special Operations Command and now Army chief of staff, about the findings on Yemen "two or three weeks" before the Cole attack.

"Yemen was elevated by Able Danger to be one of the top three hot spots for al Qaeda in the entire world," Shaffer recalled.

Shaffer and two other officials familiar with Able Danger said contractors uncovered al Qaeda activities in Yemen through a search of Osama bin Laden's business ties.

This borders on the surreal. How come this information was not passed along the chain of command to the US Navy in the theater of operations so that the ships could be placed on higher alert?

If these assertions are correct, then the US military's intel operations need to be more closely examined to determine where and how that information gathered is disseminated to units in the regions affected.

One other thing to keep in mind is that Able Danger is just one part of a larger intel infrastructure and Shaffer and other people affiliated with Able Danger only see one part of the intel community. People higher up in the intel community have to take all the data and pare it down to items that are useable and actionable. However, one has to wonder why the Atta information was not passed on when the earlier information about the Aden/Cole data was pretty accurate about a heightened threat.

A possible explanation could come during the hearings which may shed light on just how many predictions and the percentage of data passed on.

UPDATE:
Strata-Sphere has more on the possibility that the Pentagon may be pressuring the Senate Judiciary Committee into holding closed door hearings. I think that's a real bad idea, though the possibility that information discussed in the hearing could be classified and sensitive would be the ostensible reason for holding closed door hearings. The more we learn about Able Danger, the more we see a program that might have caught threats in advance of becoming operational. Perhaps this is because of the way we hear about Able Danger - only the successful hits, and nothing about the misses. In any event, Congressional hearings are needed to figure out why Able Danger never made it into the 9/11 Commission report.

Also, Captain Ed weights in.

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