Captain's Quarters -

Unable Danger?

Note: This post originally ran during the Christmas holiday, and is being repeated for those who may have missed it.

The Able Danger story has come to an end, at least for the moment, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has dismissed claims made by former Rep. Curt Weldon and members of the AD team about their data before 9/11. The SSIC says that the claim that the AD effort had identified Mohammed Atta resulted from a confusion of names and that the effort actually identified none of the 9/11 attackers not already known to intelligence agencies (h/t CQ reader LEJ):

The Senate Intelligence Committee has rejected as untrue one of the most disturbing claims about the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes — a congressman's contention that a team of military analysts identified Mohamed Atta or other hijackers before the attacks — according to a summary of the panel's investigation obtained by The Times.

The conclusion contradicts assertions by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and a few military officers that U.S. national security officials ignored startling intelligence available in early 2001 that might have helped to prevent the attacks.

In particular, Weldon and other officials have repeatedly claimed that the military analysts' effort, known as Able Danger, produced a chart that included a picture of Atta and identified him as being tied to an Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, N.Y. Weldon has also said that the chart was shared with White House officials, including Stephen J. Hadley, then deputy national security advisor.

But after a 16-month investigation, the Intelligence Committee has concluded that those assertions are unfounded.

"Able Danger did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker at any time prior to Sept. 11, 2001," the committee determined, according to an eight-page letter sent last week to panel members by the top Republican and Democrat on the committee.

I and many others have documented the efforts of Weldon and AD team members Tony Shaffer and Scott Philpott. The latter two men put their military careers on the line with their statements that positively asserted Atta had been identified prior to 9/11. It is difficult to see how they would have benefitted from becoming whistleblowers by insisting on this point even after Shaffer essentially got fired from his job by losing his security clearance. Philpott and Shaffer both insisted that they had discussed this with the 9/11 Commission, which the panel at first denied and then retracted, claiming that the program had little significance to their efforts.

So what does the SSIC say happened? The AD unit made charts of known AQ members, one of which bore a superficial resemblance to Atta. The profusion of names and aliases, along with the usual confusion of transliterating Arabic names, led to even more confusion on the point. Essentially, the SSIC says that Able Danger did not produce anything not already known to the intelligence community, and that Weldon is wrong about Hadley seeing Atta's name on the chart after 9/11.

This still leaves plenty of questions. Why did the House Intelligence Committee meet with Able Danger lead analyst Dr. Eileen Preisser a month after the 9/11 attacks, a meeting that apparently is still classified? What happened to Shaffer's materials between his initial contact with Philip Zelikow and his subsequent attempt to inform the 9/11 Commission? None of these issues get adequately addressed by the "confusion" answer. Either Shaffer is a fool or a liar, and that makes Philpott one of the two as well -- and no one has ever come up with a convincing argument for the latter choice.

Hopefully, the full report will be declassified to determine how the SSIC reached its conclusions.

Unable Danger?

The Able Danger story has come to an end, at least for the moment, as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has dismissed claims made by former Rep. Curt Weldon and members of the AD team about their data before 9/11. The SSIC says that the claim that the AD effort had identified Mohammed Atta resulted from a confusion of names and that the effort actually identified none of the 9/11 attackers not already known to intelligence agencies (h/t CQ reader LEJ):

The Senate Intelligence Committee has rejected as untrue one of the most disturbing claims about the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes — a congressman's contention that a team of military analysts identified Mohamed Atta or other hijackers before the attacks — according to a summary of the panel's investigation obtained by The Times.

The conclusion contradicts assertions by Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) and a few military officers that U.S. national security officials ignored startling intelligence available in early 2001 that might have helped to prevent the attacks.

In particular, Weldon and other officials have repeatedly claimed that the military analysts' effort, known as Able Danger, produced a chart that included a picture of Atta and identified him as being tied to an Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn, N.Y. Weldon has also said that the chart was shared with White House officials, including Stephen J. Hadley, then deputy national security advisor.

But after a 16-month investigation, the Intelligence Committee has concluded that those assertions are unfounded.

"Able Danger did not identify Mohammed Atta or any other 9/11 hijacker at any time prior to Sept. 11, 2001," the committee determined, according to an eight-page letter sent last week to panel members by the top Republican and Democrat on the committee.

I and many others have documented the efforts of Weldon and AD team members Tony Shaffer and Scott Philpott. The latter two men put their military careers on the line with their statements that positively asserted Atta had been identified prior to 9/11. It is difficult to see how they would have benefitted from becoming whistleblowers by insisting on this point even after Shaffer essentially got fired from his job by losing his security clearance. Philpott and Shaffer both insisted that they had discussed this with the 9/11 Commission, which the panel at first denied and then retracted, claiming that the program had little significance to their efforts.

So what does the SSIC say happened? The AD unit made charts of known AQ members, one of which bore a superficial resemblance to Atta. The profusion of names and aliases, along with the usual confusion of transliterating Arabic names, led to even more confusion on the point. Essentially, the SSIC says that Able Danger did not produce anything not already known to the intelligence community, and that Weldon is wrong about Hadley seeing Atta's name on the chart after 9/11.

This still leaves plenty of questions. Why did the House Intelligence Committee meet with Able Danger lead analyst Dr. Eileen Preisser a month after the 9/11 attacks, a meeting that apparently is still classified? What happened to Shaffer's materials between his initial contact with Philip Zelikow and his subsequent attempt to inform the 9/11 Commission? None of these issues get adequately addressed by the "confusion" answer. Either Shaffer is a fool or a liar, and that makes Philpott one of the two as well -- and no one has ever come up with a convincing argument for the latter choice.

Hopefully, the full report will be declassified to determine how the SSIC reached its conclusions.

IG: DoD Did Not Lie To 9/11 Commission

Despite complaints made public by 9/11 Commission members and staff this week, the Department of Defense did not knowingly lie in testimony to the panel, according to the Inspector General. The New York Times reports this morning that the IG's report blames the inaccuracies on poor record-keeping:

The Defense Department’s watchdog agency said Friday that it had no evidence that senior Pentagon commanders intentionally provided false testimony to the Sept. 11 commission about the military’s actions on the morning of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The agency, the Pentagon’s office of inspector general, said the Defense Department’s initial inaccurate accounts could be attributed largely to poor record-keeping.

The Pentagon initially suggested that the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the military’s domestic air-defense operation, had reacted quickly to reports of the hijackings and had been prepared to intercept and possibly shoot down one of the hijacked planes.

The Sept. 11 commission, which uncovered the inconsistencies in the Pentagon’s account, made a formal request in July 2004 for the inspector general to investigate why senior military officials who testified to the commission had made so many inaccurate statements.

This investigation lasted two years, and yet suddenly it made news this week when the 9/11 Commission members went public with their accusations of perjury. The media jumped all over this, playing up the frustration of the truth-seekers of the panel with the dastardly witnesses determined to keep the truth from them. Now we find out that no one did anything of the sort, but that they had poor record-keeping -- another scandal, but not a conspiracy -- and didn't do enough to correct their assumptions based on those records.

Does anyone else smell a plan to get ahead of the IG's report? Why would the Commission suddenly make this a big issue just before the release of the investigation they themselves requested? It certainly looks like a pre-emptive attack on the DoD by panel members hoping to get the public's blood boiling regardless of what the report would finally indicate. It certainly gave them yet another opportunity to burnish their own image as truth-seekers, when the ABLE DANGER fiasco showed otherwise.

The DoD has problems it needs to fix, and hopefully the report will expedite that effort. However, this cynical ploy by the 9/11 Commission should remind everyone yet again how the members exploited their positions for their own aggrandizement and to shelter the bureaucrats from blame.

UPDATE: A Newer World says that I am misleading readers, in a post titled "More Inattention To Detail". He (?) says that the report got released Friday and so the 9/11 Commission had nothing to do with this story. I know that -- this story exonerates the DoD based on the IG's report. Had ANW bothered checking my links, he would have found that the Washington Post reported on this on Wednesday with the accusations of perjury -- and Dan Eggen based his story on "several commission sources". Readers can judge the motives behind those "commission sources" and attention to detail for themselves.

UPDATE II: ANW has updated again, but still misses the point. Two days before the report was released, "several commission sources" went to Dan Eggen to get their allegations of perjury in print -- without waiting to see what the IG found. They got their headlines and pre-empted the weekend release of the actual report, which found no evidence of perjury. Which version of this story got the most play, and who got to define it first? That was the point of this post. No one disputes that the DoD gave the commission incorrect information. The point is that "commission sources" set out to spin this story ahead of the IG report, a continuation of their efforts to cover a mediocre performance on their own part.

Omission Commission Furious At Lack Of Truth

Today's Washington Post reports that the 9/11 Commission got so frustrated with inaccurate testimony from military and aviation officials regarding the immediate response on 9/11 that they considered referrals to the Department of Justice for perjury:

Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog of events on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, according to several commission sources. Staff members and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable cause to believe that military and aviation officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning over the allegations to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, who can make criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted, officials said.

The commission complained early about the spin coming from the Department of Defense and from aviation officials in reconstructing the events of the day. DoD officials blamed sketchy records of the day's events for the confusion on timing. For instance, testimony indicated that the Air Force had tracked United 93 and would have shot the plane down had it approached Washington, but tapes subpoenaed by the Commission later revealed that the military had no idea about United 93 until it had crashed.

The tapes told a much different story than the witnesses, and the Commission was understandably upset that these witnesses gave them demonstrably false information two years or more after the events in question. The DoD could have reviewed the tapes themselves and figured out the facts. Commissioners felt that it approached perjury and wanted to have them prosecuted after they finallly got the tapes through the hostile manuever of subpoenas.

In the end, they allowed the DoD and DoT inspectors general to review the matter. Reports from both are expected shortly as to whether the testimony given was knowingly false. If so, the DoJ should consider prosecution.

However, we should also keep in mind the balls-up that the Commission became. While their recreation of the day's events was excellent work, the rest of their effort produced nothing but the bureaucratic spin of which they accuse the DoD. The inclusion on Jamie Gorelick even after her role promoting the extralegal separation of law enforcement and intelligence units became clear skewed the panel's point of view. She should have been a witness, not a panel member, as she was too much of a participant in the activities that led to the intelligence failures of 9/11.

The Commission also failed to follow up on important information in their haste to blame 9/11 on intelligence operations. They completely missed the ABLE DANGER program that had identified Mohammed Atta and his core of operatives as potential terrorists, and that was not because of DoD intransigence. Multiple members of that team tried to get their interest, and the panel refused to follow up on the leads. Even after these people went public with the information, panel members like Thomas Kean -- quoted heavily in this story -- mocked them and discounted their honor.

The panel of bureaucrats had too much at stake to allow bureaucracy to get the blame for 9/11, and so they concluded that the operations end of intelligence had to get it instead. They proposed a massive increase in intelligence bureaucracy, supposedly to make intelligence gathering and analysis more efficient. Instead, they created a behemoth of a bureaucracy in the Directorate of National Intelligence, so much so that Congress threatened to cut off its funding to keep its empire-building to a dull roar. It now employs almost a thousand people, almost none of whom develop or gather intel in the field, but instead look at it and push the paper up another level.

If anyone knowingly provided false information to a Congressional panel, then that person should face trial for perjury. However, the Omission Commission is the last group of people whose complaints about fair play and honesty interest me.

Able Danger: Shaffer Fights Dismissal

Mark Zaid, attorney for central Able Danger figure Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer, has filed a new supplemental declaration supporting the opposition of the government's motion for dismissal of his lawsuit. The Defense Intelligence Agency has moved to dismiss due to its insistence on refusing access to his attorney to classified material. Two weeks ago, Zaid filed a motion opposing the dismissal, and this new declaration contains some interesting revelations.

Here is the text of Zaid's latest filing:

3. Shaffer and the undersigned counsel participated in interview sessions with the defendant Department of Defense’s Office of Inspector General (“DoD OIG”) on May 16, 2006, and May 24, 2006. The DoD OIG is conducting an investigation into, among other issues, the factual circumstances surrounding ABLE DANGER and also whether the defendant Defense Intelligence Agency retaliated against Shaffer. These two meetings, as well as two others that occurred in November 2005, have all been conducted at the unclassified level, particularly - apparently - in order to allow the undersigned to participate.

4. During both meetings (and even during the November 2005 sessions), but especially the interview held on May 16, 2006, there were numerous instances where the conversation began to encroach upon “out of bounds” classified areas. For all I know, the conversations actually extended at times into the classified arena. In any event, it is clear to me that the primary focus and core issues at the heart of ABLE DANGER remain classified. This is of concern to me, and I believe should concern this Court for purposes of this litigation and present Motion, on at least two levels.

5. First, I, as Shaffer’s counsel, cannot adequately or effectively provide him sound legal advice since I do not know all the facts of the operation, nor the full scope of Shaffer’s role within the operation. This was more than clear when the conversation involved specific questions and seemingly vague discussions surrounding the legality of operations that Shaffer, and/or ABLE DANGER, might or might not have engaged in. The investigator asking the questions, and Shaffer in providing answers, continually danced around the issue while at the same time ensuring it was abundantly obvious they both knew what they were addressing. The conversation became so alarming to me that I was forced to specifically note on the record that I was concerned for Shaffer’s legal well-being and could not provide either adequate or effective representation, and I advised that both this line of questioning and his answers cease. I cannot judge at this time whether Shaffer is in legal liability or not because of the veil that the Government has purposefully placed over my face while at the same time continuing to pursue matters that potentially expose Shaffer to either administrative, civil or even criminal penalties. This scenario is completely unfair and inappropriate of the defendants to place Shaffer, or anyone, in.

6. Second, it is also clear that specific individuals and organizations, due to their classified or protected nature, are not being discussed or addressed in the investigation (again being danced around during interviews), at least not with Shaffer, who obviously was a key player in most of the relevant events. On multiple occasions I have witnessed first-hand Mr. Shaffer being stopped from providing testimony or sworn information by investigators (and I know of instances involving congressional staff) based on “security classification”. I also know that Shaffer has not been asked, nor has he provided, classified inputs to the DoD OIG investigations on ABLE DANGER. This issue is of grave concern to me as it directly impacts the scope and accuracy of the DoD OIG investigation. It is one thing to protect classified capabilities and avoid discussion due to the presence of uncleared counsel, but it is entirely another to avoid specific relevant areas of inquiry simply because of alleged classification concerns. While I personally presently perceive the conduct of those handling the investigation to be fair and professional, I cannot imagine the investigation can be completed, and more importantly any accurate conclusions reached, without addressing the gaping holes Shaffer can apparently fill and desires to address. Due to the potential administrative and legal liability that Shaffer faces as a result of his participation in ABLE DANGER, it is imperative that the testimony he provides (unless perhaps under some grant of immunity) to the DoD OIG occur in the presence of counsel.

Interesting. While Zaid offers praise for the conduct of the investigators, he clearly senses that the depositions have aimed at making any court action impossible by tying too many classified threads into it. Not only does this confound any prosecution of the lawsuit, but Zaid cannot even be sure that it is deliberate, since he has little frame of reference about the issues at hand. As Zaid says, in this position he can do nothing to protect his client's interests.

Able Danger Documents Discovered?

The Able Danger blog has news from a FOIA request filed by Scott Malone of NavySeals.com and Christopher Law of PublicEdCenter.org that has produced an interesting response from the Pentagon. When they demanded the release of all information regarding the Able Danger project, the DoD rejected the request after a bit of bureaucratic misdirection. However, they acknowledged the existence of over 9500 pages of documentation -- apparently the same paperwork that they told Congress no longer existed:

In two possibly related developments in the past week, the Pentagon denied access to almost 10,000 pages of classified documents relating to a top-secret intelligence program senior officials have three times previously testified were destroyed or unable to be located. And the attorneys for the secret team members who disclosed the existence of the data-mining counter-terrorism program, called ABLE DANGER, have argued in a new court filing that they be “cleared” to review such files.

The Defense Department’s Inspector General’s office (DoD-OIG) and the joint Special Operations Command (SOCOM) have amassed some 9,500 pages of documents on a program that senior DoD and 9/11 Commission officials have stated repeatedly were destroyed or can no longer be located.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request, “The Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, has determined that approximately 9,500 pages of these collected documents are potentially responsive to your FOIA request.”

That news should stun those who have been following the Able Danger story for the past year. The official story has had all documentation being destroyed in a particularly aggressive form of housekeeping that took place after Col. Tony Shaffer revealed the existence of the program to the 9/11 Commission. The missing documentation proves, according to Shaffer, that the intelligence community identified Mohammed Atta and the other members of the core 9/11 cell prior to the attacks as potential al-Qaeda agents.

The assertion that 9500 pages of evidence still exists at the Pentagon will no doubt surprise members of Congress that received little from their investigations into the program. Hopefully this will pique their curiosity once more. Be sure to read all of the links at the Able Danger blog.

Son Of Able Danger

One of the frustrations surrounding the revelation of the Able Danger program is the knowledge of what might have been -- how we could have potentially stopped the 9/11 attacks and saved thousands of American lives. Had the American intelligence community been allowed to coordinate with each other and with law enforcement properly to constitute an effective defense against terrorism, the data that Able Danger produced would have captured Mohammed Atta and his core pilot cell in plenty of time to stop al-Qaeda's biggest victory.

Even afterwards, the willful disregard of the successes of Able Danger has led many to question in growing frustration why the Pentagon has not put another program in its place. With the threat still high for retaliatory strikes from AQ sleeper cells, a data-mining program like Able Danger seems more necessary than ever. In a new program, however, the Pentagon would need to integrate it into an overall counterterrorism strategy that links all of the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies in the American armada.

CQ has learned that such an effort has already been launched at the Pentagon. Titled "Able Providence", the effort seeks to use the Able Danger "engine" to generate hot leads for counterterrorism and law enforcement agents to pursue. Located in the Office of National Intelligence, AP will serve all agencies, as this unclassified graphic shows:

The Able Providence project, estimated at an initial cost of around $27 million, will report jointly to the Director of National Intelligence (John Negroponte) and the Joint Chiefs. The datamining component of the project, named KIMBERLITE MAGIC, will follow and update the SOCOM and NOAH efforts of the pre-9/11 period. After an initial burn-in phase, the Able Providence team will then coordinate with the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), SOCOM, Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS (Customs/TSA, etc) and partner with Army 1st Info Ops Command (IDC), Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (ASW), Navy DEEP BLUE, Air Force CHECKMATE to produce actionable "Decision Support" Option Packets. AP would then act as a conduit for these efforts to law enforcement agencies for immediate domestic action when required.

I will have more on this as the day goes along, including more graphics to explain the program in full.

Don't Say We Didn't Warn You

When the 9/11 Commission's final report came out in the middle of the presidential election, the reaction was predictable. Both sides used the conclusions and recommendations for political point-scoring, but none more than the John Kerry campaign. Kerry and his allies, and even some Republicans, pressed the White House and Congress to immediately adopt all of the board's recommendations for revamping the American intelligence community. The Democrats accused George Bush of ignoring the commission's efforts when he suggested that the government consider the recommendations before immediately writing them into law, and the political momentum forced Congress and the administration into precipitous action instead of rational debate.

As the second part of CQ's review on the Los Angeles Times article on action in the House Intelligence Committee hearing yesterday, our biggest effort is to keep from saying "I told you so" in every paragraph. A bipartisan vote yesterday finally showed that Washington now realizes that adding two layers of bureaucracy to intelligence agencies has damaged our capabilities instead of enhancing them:

The House Intelligence Committee voted Thursday to withhold funding from the nation's intelligence director over concerns that his office, which was created to streamline operations in the nation's spy community, is instead becoming bloated and bureaucratic. ...

The move to withhold funding still must be approved by the full House as well as the Senate. But it reflects rising frustration among House lawmakers with an office that was created less than two years ago to solve communication breakdowns and other problems that plagued the intelligence community leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq.

The bill would require the nation's intelligence director, John D. Negroponte, to present a detailed rationale for any additional increases to his staff or risk losing a portion of his budget. The measure was endorsed by Republicans and Democrats.

"We're concerned about some of the steps that are going on" at Negroponte's office, said Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. Hoekstra said Negroponte needed to demonstrate that any further expansion would improve coordination among intelligence agencies, and would not amount to "putting in more lawyers and slowing down the process."

Rep. Jane Harman (DVenice), the ranking Democrat on the committee, cited similar concerns.

"We don't want more billets, more bureaucracy, more buildings," Harman said. "We want more leadership."

More leadership may be what Congress wants, but what they implemented was more billets, more buildings, and lots of additional bureaucracy. The 9/11 Commission took the demonstrated problems in coordination that existed pre-9/11 among the alphabet soup of intelligence agencies and developed the one solution guaranteed to make it worse. Instead of eliminating the needless duplication and artificial divisions between the different groups by merging them into two agencies, one for domestic intelligence and the other for foreign/military intelligence, the panel decided to create two extra layers of bureaucracy as a means of providing better communication. Congress and the White House agreed to create the office of the Director of National Intelligence, who by law would have the president's ear on all intelligence matters.

Of course, the results were utterly predictable. The expanded bureaucracy did not result in better communication, but instead has guaranteed that two more levels of bureaucrats will tie up any operational intelligence before it gets to the decision-makers. Instead of streamlining the progression of intelligence to the President, it creates extra hurdles for any information to reach his desk.

Now, comically, Congress has realized almost two years later that the collection of bureaucrats on the 9/11 Commission prescribed the hair of the dog that bit us to the bone in the years leading up to 9/11. The ONI has expanded far faster than anyone (in DC) imagined, and now boasts 700 people -- hundreds of extra bureaucrats that do nothing to collect intelligence but exist only to push it around Beltway offices.

In fairness, who could have predicted that outcome? Well, here's where I break my vow:

07/22/04: Executive Summary Balanced And Disappointing
08/02/04: Bush Adopts The Expanded Bureaucracy Approach
08/23/04: New Intelligence Reorganization Proposal Not Much Better
12/02/04: Tenet Joins Fight Against 9/11 Intelligence Reform
12/08/04: Does Anyone Like This Intelligence Reform Bill?
03/31/05: When Bureaucracies Grow, They Tend To Collide
06/07/05: I Love Hate To Say I Told You So ...
11/27/05: Intelligence Agencies Multiplying Out Of Control

All of this nonsense can be traced back to the formation of a supposedly independent panel while timing their efforts so that their report would get published in the middle of an election. We can also thank the John Kerry campaign for transforming a set of recommendations into the 347 Commandments that somehow garnered immunity from the process of rational debate and scrutiny. Anyone who looked at this document with any careful scrutiny could see that the solution promised more bureaucracy and never addressed the real issues in communication and coordination. We had ten people on this panel who represented bureaucracies their entire lives; when one only owns a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and this is a perfect example of that wise proverb.

And just for the record ... well, you know.

Did Pakistan Buy The 9/11 Commission?

Jeff at Protein Wisdom found a report in the India Telegraph claiming that a Pakistani newspaper bragged about the nation's payoff of the 9/11 Commission. The Friday Times reports that their foreign office paid lobbyists "tens of thousands of dollars" to ensure that the final report painted Pakistan in the best possible light:

The Pakistan foreign office had paid tens of thousands of dollars to lobbyists in the US to get anti-Pakistan references dropped from the 9/11 inquiry commission report, The Friday Times has claimed.

The Pakistani weekly said its story is based on disclosures made by foreign service officials to the Public Accounts Committee at a secret meeting in Islamabad on Tuesday.

It claimed that some of the commission members were also bribed to prevent them from including damaging information about Pakistan.

The magazine said the PAC grilled officials in the presence of foreign secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan and special secretary Sher Afghan on the money paid to lobbyists. ...

The Pakistan foreign office defended the decision to hire the lobbyists, saying it was an established practice in the US.

It would be quite a provocative claim, if there was any way at all to substantiate it. The only claim that can be easily addressed is the last one quoted above; lobbyists represent anyone with enough money for a retainer. The initial claim could just refer to the Pakistanis hiring a PR and lobbying firm to spread the word on Pakistani cooperation in the war on terror. The Saudis launched a $5M ad campaign in 2003 attempting to do the same thing with the American public.

However, the Friday Times claims that commission members took bribes to cut out any information that would paint Pakistan in a bad light. That seems difficult to prove, and from what I see of the Telegraph's report, they offer little besides this unsupported assertion. The allegation would generate laughter under normal circumstances, but the omission of a number of important facts from the 9/11 Commission's work assists in making this story more credible. Normally I would not ascribe to corruption that which can be explained to incompetence, but the amount of items missed by the panel has begun to look very strange indeed.

In looking through the commission's executive report, Pakistan only comes up five times in 31 pages. All of those references are fairly straightforward, the last of which is a recommendation to engage Pakistan more closely as a partner in the war, if possible. The full report has 311 references to Pakistan. If they wanted to keep Pakistan out of the final report, it's hard to see how they succeeded, although nothing in the report implicates Pakistan in the 9/11 plot, either.

The simplest explanation would be that some members of the Pakistani foreign service padded their personal accounts, and when they had to explain the difference, told their bosses they spent it on bribing American politicians. I'm not inclined to believe that the sins of the 9/11 Commission include bribery among incompetence and arrogance.

Able Danger, The Lawsuit

The principals in the Able Danger story have filed suit to restrain the Department of Defense from retaliating against Tony Shaffer and to allow these witnesses to retain counsel during the closed hearings that Congress has scheduled into the data-mining program. Mark Zaid, representing Shaffer as well as contractor J. D. Smith, filed the suit on Monday against the DoD, DIA, the Army, and their attorneys in the DC district court.

I've copied the text into the extended entry of this post. Most of those who have followed Able Danger will not be surprised by the allegations in the lawsuit. However, the extent of obstructionism should raise some eyebrows in Congress, who may wonder why the DIA will not allow these witnesses to share the fruits of the Able Danger effort with their committees, even in closed session:

25. In September 2005, both Shaffer and Smith were scheduled to testify before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss their involvement with ABLE DANGER. Shaffer submitted proposed testimony to the DoD for classification review, but the DoD has never responded. In any event, the defendants claimed all information concerning ABLE DANGER was classified and refused to consent to allow the 8 testimony. Their undersigned counsel, Mark S. Zaid, testified in their place on September 21, 2005.

26. Just days before Shaffer was to testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, the DIA revoked his security clearance amidst allegations of criminal conduct and unfavorable credibility determinations. The DIA specifically asserted that Shaffer had lied during appeal proceedings. Upon information and belief, the revocation of Shaffer’s security clearance, particularly the speed at which it occurred, was, in part or in whole, in retaliation for Shaffer’s public and/or private comments concerning ABLE DANGER. Additionally, as part of Shaffer’s security clearance adjudication process, the undersigned counsel was provided access to classified information.

27. By letter dated February 2, 2006, the plaintiffs renewed their request to share relevant classified information with their counsel, particularly in order to appear in a closed, classified House of Representative’s hearing.

28. By letter dated February 14, 2006, defendant Peirce responded on behalf of all defendants denying the undersigned counsel’s request for access to classified information. Upon information and belief, defendant Berry participated in drafting and formulating the defendants’ response. Peirce, as DIA General Counsel, does not possess the authorization or qualifications to render clearance determinations under the circumstances.

Why has the DoD assigned questions of classification to its counsel rather than the top brass? Peirce apparently addressed the security issue directly rather than simply passing along a finding by those in Defense tasked with reviewing the use of classified material. Under the circumstances, this looks a bit suspicious, especially since so much of AD has already been discussed in public, thanks to the 9/11 Commission's bout of obtuseness that kept it from their review of the terror attacks and the US defense posture at the time.

Congress should ask these same questions of the DIA and DoD. Their commission report has lost credibility thanks to the effort of some at the Pentagon to keep the defunct program under wraps. One would hope that they would find some interest in getting to the real truth about pre-9/11 knowledge of AQ and the obstacles that the AD team faced.

Behind The Scenes At Able Danger

An inside source on the Able Danger controversy -- one that has provided CQ with reliable background information in the past -- gives some interesting background information about the recent hearings on the data-mining program that the 9/11 Commission did its best to ignore. The source writes:

The Able Danger hearing was noteworthy for things that did not happen. One interesting item that everyone seems to have missed is that Steve Cambone did not swear in for his testimony to the subcommittee. (In fact, he refused to swear in, but this was not made an issue by the subcommittee.) Thus, no matter how blatantly erroneous his testimony was, he can't be charged with perjury as he did not testify under oath.

Also, Zelikow was excoriated in his testimony during the closed session by the Representatives present. He was called a liar to his face.

Steve Cambone was the director of the DoD's Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation, and reported directly to Donald Rumsfeld; he is the USD/I now. Philip Zelikow held one of the top staff positions on the 9/11 Commission and was Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer's initial contact with the commission. At first he encouraged Shaffer to provide more information after their initial meeting in October 2003 in Afghanistan, but when Shaffer returned back to the US in January 2004, Zelikow had suddenly lost his enthusiasm for more discussions about Able Danger. Zekikow now works for Condoleezza Rice at the State Department.

If this is accurate, it appears that Congress has also found Zelikow's role to hold some interest in how Able Danger got buried. Perhaps more of this curiosity will be evident in the publc hearings to come.

UPDATE: My source mistook Steve Hadley for Steve Cambone. I have corrected the post above.

Able Danger Conference Call

Earlier this evening, I was able to participate in a conference call with Mark Zaid, the attorney representing Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer in his dispute with the DIA in the Able Danger controversy. Joining in the call were the group of bloggers that has kept the fire burning on this key element in our failure to discover the al-Qaeda terrorists in our midst before they successfully staged the 9/11 attacks:

Mark Coffey of Decision ‘08

Mike of Able Danger Blog

QT Monster

Rory O’Connor

Pierre from Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill

Bluto from Jawa Report and The Dread Pundit Bluto

AJ Strata already posted a good review of the conversation with Zaid over the Congressional hearings this past week, after Shaffer finally got an opportunity to speak publicly about the Able Danger program. The hearings fell rather flat, despite Rep. Curt Weldon's best efforts. The press has lost interest in covering the program that apparently put lie to the notion that the intelligence community had no idea of the threat profile of AQ in the US before the attacks.

As Zaid points out, the lack of press almost certainly results from the committee members themselves; the only thing that Republicans and Democrats have in common these days is a desire to push Able Danger out of sight. The FBI also appears to have gotten the same disease as the two parties. The FBI, which once acknowledged that several attempts occurred to have meetings between its agents and the Able Danger team now denies that any such contacts occurred.

I have not performed much better, to be fair. Other issues have pushed Able Danger off of my radar screen, and even Zaid noted that no explosive developments have arisen from the story in weeks. Nonetheless, the above bloggers have done an excellent job in maintaining some interest in the story. The conference call gave me an opprortunity to pick the thread back up and start pressing Congress for more hearings. Zaid thinks that three or four more committees may conduct hearings on the matter, and the DoD Inspector General is expected to issue a report on AD sometime in May. Zaid believes that an unclassified summary will be part of that, but if it isn't, he will take action to get a declassified summary released.

Shaffer and the rest of Zaid's Able Danger clients can use some donations to their legal fund. Those donations can be sent to:

Mark S. Zaid, Esq.
Krieger & Zaid, PLLC
1920 N Street, N.W.
Suite 300
Washington, D.C. 20036

Zaid is deep into out-of-pocket territory on this case, and the men who risked their careers to make sure that the entire story of American intelligence efforts to combat AQ before 9/11can use your support.

The 20-Foot Rings Of Able Danger

AJ Strata has more on the Able Danger story tonight, following the release of a National Journal article at Govexec.com that might fill in some of the blanks on why the program lost its backing in mid-2000, just when it appeared to make headway against al-Qaeda. As Shane Harris reports, the second dry run of the data harvest that eventually spawned Able Danger turned up more politically difficult names in connection to Chinese espionage:

The experiment "went well," the former IDC employee said. "Unfortunately, it went too well." During construction of those link diagrams, the names of a number of U.S. citizens popped up, including some very prominent figures. Condoleezza Rice, then the provost at Stanford University, appeared in one of the harvests, the by-product of a presumably innocuous connection between other subjects and the university, which hosts notable Chinese scholars.

William Cohen, then the secretary of Defense, also appeared. As one former senior Defense official explained, the IDC's results "raised eyebrows," and leaders in the Pentagon grew nervous about the political implications of turning up such high-profile names, or those of any American citizens who were not the subject of a legally authorized intelligence investigation. Rumors still abound about other notable figures caught up in the IDC's harvest. "I heard they turned up Hillary Clinton," the official said. The experiment was not continued.

"We determined that there were significant methodological problems," Hamre said of the IDC's techniques. Data-correlation analyses on raw information "produce impossibly large numbers of potential correlations. The numbers are too large to be operationally helpful."

But it appears not everyone in the military establishment agreed. Over the next several months, Kleinsmith estimated he gave more than 200 briefings on the IDC to members of Congress, generals, and senior government officials. "I could tell in three to four minutes if someone 'got it,' " Kleinsmith said. Hamre got it, he noted. And so, it seems, did officials with the Army's Special Operations Command, who, despite the unease over the China experiment, came to the IDC asking for information about a then-shadowy organization called Al Qaeda.

This history of LIWA and Able Danger makes the timelines a bit more clear than in the past. The Pentagon ran the Chinese experiment in 1999, during the height of the impeachment backlash and well after the worst of the Chinese campaign-funds scandal. Turning up Hillary as part of the research would not have been all that dramatic, as speculation about how closely the Chinese had tied themselves to the Clintons through the efforts of their intelligence agents. In fact, it probably would have culled John Kerry's name as well.

I doubt that the data proved anything about Hillary other than the connections to the already well-known Johnny Chung and Liu Chaoying. Nevertheless, as the results got wider exposure in Washington, the pressure of having all these important political players sitting in a database must have triggered a case of nerves at the Pentagon. A year later, as the IDC went through the Able Danger exercise using the same data harvest as part of its information, the order came down to kill all data that contained American citizens -- and one would have to presume that everyone understood that citizens such as anyone named Clinton would get especial scrutiny. That data cull crippled the ongoing effort to find al-Qaeda assets inside the US, although the AD team continued to focus outside the country for more terrorists using the technology.

Read the rest of this piece for an excellent rundown of Able Danger and the context from which it sprang, and then recheck AJ Strata's excellent analysis of the information. I'd put this as confirmation of some of the most interesting theories about the program, but it still doesn't explain why the FBI never went back and rechecked on the status of this promising counterterrorism program.

Shelton: Able Danger My Idea

General Hugh Shelton confirmed that the Able Danger program had backing from the highest levels of the military and that he had at least two personal briefings on the progress of the program tracking al-Qaeda prior to 9/11 -- again raising the question as to why the 9/11 Commission ignored this program entirely in its supposedly thorough look into American preparedness for a terrorist attack:

In his first public comments on the initiative, which some former intelligence officers now say was code-named Able Danger, Shelton also confirmed that he received two briefings on the clandestine mission - both well before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Right after I left SOCOM (Special Operations Command), I asked my successor to put together a small team, if he could, to try to use the Internet and start trying to see if there was any way that we could track down Osama bin Laden or where he was getting his money from or anything of that nature," Shelton said Tuesday in an interview. ...

In Washington, sometime between 1999 and 2001, Shelton received a more extensive briefing from Defense Intelligence Agency officers involved in the program.

Shelton said he doesn't recall hearing or seeing Atta's name in those briefings or at any time before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"To be candid, there were not many specifics in it," Shelton said of the later briefing. "There were no names that surfaced that had not surfaced before through normal intelligence channels. There was no identification of any new players, or anything of that type."

Shelton, though, said that a CIA representative and an FBI representative were present at the second briefing. And he said, "I know for a fact that I was told that they had been a part of the effort" to track al-Qaida through computer data-mining.

That puts a much different light on the status of the program. Up to now, we've heard that the FBI knew nothing of AD and its efforts. Now we have the FBI attending high-level briefings on its progress. No one before this, to my knowledge, has shown any operational awareness of the program on the FBI's part prior to the 9/11 attacks. Doesn't that beg the question of why the FBI never followed up on AD and any information it might supply?

Check out AJ Strata for more, and we'll stay on top of this as developments warrant.

Intelligence Agencies Multiplying Out Of Control

In yet another example of how the 9/11 Commission got its facts and its recommendations completely wrong, the Washington Post reports this morning that the Pentagon has expanded its domestic intelligence surveillance -- mainly by creating even more agencies and bureaucracies in competition with other resources already in place. Now, Walter Pincus doesn't write the article with that point in mind; he wants to frighten people with the thought that Bush has become Big Brother, or wants to allow Don Rumsfeld to do so:

The Defense Department has expanded its programs aimed at gathering and analyzing intelligence within the United States, creating new agencies, adding personnel and seeking additional legal authority for domestic security activities in the post-9/11 world.

The moves have taken place on several fronts. The White House is considering expanding the power of a little-known Pentagon agency called the Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, which was created three years ago. The proposal, made by a presidential commission, would transform CIFA from an office that coordinates Pentagon security efforts -- including protecting military facilities from attack -- to one that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage.

The Pentagon has pushed legislation on Capitol Hill that would create an intelligence exception to the Privacy Act, allowing the FBI and others to share information gathered about U.S. citizens with the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies, as long as the data is deemed to be related to foreign intelligence. Backers say the measure is needed to strengthen investigations into terrorism or weapons of mass destruction.

The proposals, and other Pentagon steps aimed at improving its ability to analyze counterterrorism intelligence collected inside the United States, have drawn complaints from civil liberties advocates and a few members of Congress, who say the Defense Department's push into domestic collection is proceeding with little scrutiny by the Congress or the public.

"We are deputizing the military to spy on law-abiding Americans in America. This is a huge leap without even a [congressional] hearing," Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a recent interview.

The efforts even include an Able Danger-like program, serviced by AD contractor White Oak Technologies, to perform data harvesting on commercially-available information databases. Each branch of the military service now has its own domestic surveillance program, even the Marine Corps, which as part of the Department of the Navy should have had access to naval intelligence. While civil libertarians will scream bloody murder at these efforts, in wartime our military bases as well as our cities, power plants, water supply, food infrastructure, and many other key domestic points require protection from sabotage.

The problem doesn't spring from domestic surveillance itself but the ridiculous number of agencies now set up to perform it. That alphabet soup creates two main problems, both of which could easily be foreseen in the Omission Commission's glib solution of slapping two layers of bureacracy on top of the intelligence structure at the time, rather than really reorganize American intelligence to fit the current threat posture we see in today's world.

The first problem comes from gap and overlap; with this many agencies all looking at the same mission, each with its own bureaucracy and turf to protect, expect a lot of inefficient duplication of effort and lack of sharing of data. Since these little agencies will in all likelihood follow the same kinds of dynamics that all little agencies exhibit and communicate poorly with each other, we can expect gaps to develop without any detection or accountablity.

The second problem comes closer to Pincus' concern -- how to manage all of these agencies to ensure that they follow the rules properly while generating good data for enforcement. The more of these independent agencies that get spawned, the more difficult oversight becomes. In fact, it becomes more difficult to understand even basic borders like jurisdiction, let alone overreach.

All of this mischief started with the Commission's celebration of bureaucracy as the salvation of intelligence. Rather than demand a complete restructuring of the myriad intelligence entities in the US into two or three agencies -- one each for foreign, domestic, and military intel -- the Commission claimed that data-sharing was hampered not by artificial divisions of labor between bureaucracies but not enough layers of bureaucracy above the agencies themselves. It demanded (and received) two additional layers of management between the actual intel gatherers and the decision makers of the government.

Now we continue to pay the price, with a new explosion of intel agencies. History has shown us that these discrete groups will work professionally but insularly, and that the pieces that each discover will only generate the threat assessment necessary after a catastrophic attack -- when everyone demands to see the records leading up to the disaster to determine what went wrong. It will apparently take another 9/11 to wake Americans up to the danger of this wrongheaded approach, unfortunately.