Post by cameron on Aug 23, 2005 12:07:51 GMT -8
What we know so far courtesy of Jim Geraghty
TKS on National Review Online
• 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.
TKS on National Review Online
• 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.
