By his account, Shaffer was not directly involved in data collection or analysis, but served as liaison between Able Danger and the Defense Intelligence Agency, the largest unit of the vast US intelligence apparatus. Defense Department officials did not dispute his version of events, but declined any further comment.
Shaffer said he had decided to allow his name to be made public, in violation of normal security procedures, in response to the statement issued last week by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, the chairman and vice-chairman of the 9/11 commission. They declared that the panel knew of Able Danger but had never been informed that the project had identified Atta or others of the hijackers in advance of 9/11.
The 9/11 commission report flatly declared that no US intelligence agency had identified Atta before September 11. Colonel Shaffer directly rebuts this claim, telling the media that he personally provided information about Able Danger, including its identification of Atta, at an October 2003 meeting in Afghanistan, where he was then stationed as a Special Forces officer. Several members of the commission staff were present and received the information, including staff director Philip Zelikow, now the senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Shaffer said a follow-up investigation was in order to determine what happened to the information on Able Danger he provided to the commission staff. "I'm told confidently by the person who did move the material over that the 9/11 commission received two briefcase-sized containers of documents," he told Fox News. "I can tell you for a fact, that would not be one-twentieth of the information Able Danger consisted of during the time we spent."
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/aug2005/able-a19.shtml
Even according to official accounts, Islamic fundamentalist hijackers entered and re-entered the United States repeatedly over a two-year period, made substantial preparations for the terrorist attacks, including obtaining pilot training on US soil, organized themselves to hijack four commercial airliners simultaneously and crash them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, all without any US police or intelligence agency being aware of their activities.
It is now clear that those who have rejected this account have been proven right. The future hijackers were detected by US government agencies, including the CIA and military intelligence, yet nothing was done either to arrest them or disrupt their operations.
There is only one politically serious explanation of all this:
Powerful forces within the US military/intelligence complex wanted a terrorist incident on US soil in order to create the needed shift in public opinion required to embark on a long-planned campaign of military intervention in Central Asia and the Middle East. Whether or not they knew the scale of the impending attacks and what the precise targets would be, they acted in such a way as to block the arrest of known terrorist operatives and allow them to carry out their plot.
Should this understanding begin to penetrate broad layers of working people in the United States, there will be an enormous public reaction against the intelligence services and the entire political establishment, which is complicit, in one way or another, in the cover-up and political exploitation of the events of 9/11. That explains the extraordinary timidity of the media coverage. Both right and "left" in the official political spectrum are handling the Able Danger revelation like a hand grenade that could go off in their faces.
Liberal publications like the New York Times, despite first bringing the story to wide public attention, have sought subsequently to downplay the revelations. The interview with Lt. Col. Shaffer, who is essentially abandoning his intelligence career by going public, is the kind of "scoop" that would normally rate banner front-page headlines. Instead, it was on the bottom of an inside page, and a follow-up story the next day was buried even deeper, on page 20.
The representatives of the extreme right-Fox, the Murdoch press, Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing talk radio hosts, and an array of bloggers-have made more noise about Able Danger, but only in the service of a political diversion.
They have sought to use Shaffer's account to indict the Clinton administration and shift responsibility for the 9/11 security failure from Bush to his Democratic predecessor. According to them, the decision by the Pentagon not to supply information on the Al Qaeda cell to the FBI, taken in mid-2000 when Clinton was still in the White House, is the product of the so-called "wall" between intelligence operations and law enforcement allegedly set up in the mid-1990s by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick-herself later a Democratic member of the 9/11 commission.
This allegation is entirely groundless. The "wall" never existed in reality, as testimony before the 9/11 commission demonstrated. Information-sharing between intelligence and law enforcement units was routine and continual, except when "black" operations had to be kept secret to preserve official deniability. If lawyers did cite the "wall" in relation to Able Danger, this was likely a pretext for a cover-up ordered for entirely different reasons.
To put it mildly, the picture presented of military and intelligence officials hamstrung by lawyers and legalisms is not credible. The $40 billion US intelligence apparatus is the most ruthless and aggressive in the world, engaged in illegal surveillance, kidnapping, torture and murder. If American intelligence kept quiet about Mohammed Atta, it was because higher interests of state required it, not because of any scruples about civil liberties.
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