The Gorelick Wall & Able Danger, Update XV

Interesting news today that some of the private contractors involved with Able Danger were fired after identifying Condi Rice as a threat:

Cyber-sleuths working for a Pentagon intelligence unit that reportedly identified some of the 9/11 hijackers before the attack were fired by military officials, after they mistakenly pinpointed Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other prominent Americans as potential security risks, The Post has learned. The private contractors working for the counter-terrorism unit Able Danger lost their jobs in May 2000. The firings following a series of analyses that Pentagon lawyers feared were dangerously close to violating laws banning the military from spying on Americans, sources said.

…Sources said the private contractors, using sophisticated computer software that sifts through massive amounts of raw data to establish patterns, came up with a chart of Chinese strategic and business connections in the U.S.

The program wrongly tagged Rice, who at the time was an adviser to then-candidate George W. Bush, and former Defense Secretary William Perry by linking their associations at Stanford, along with their contacts with Chinese leaders, sources said.

…The China chart was put together by James Smith, who confirmed yesterday that his contract with the military was canceled and he was fired from his company because the military brass became concerned about the focus on U.S. citizens.

“It was shut down in a matter of hours. The colonel said our service was no longer needed and told me: ‘You just ended my career.’ ”

Smith also claims his team came up with 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta’s name and photo in 2000.

So now we have a fourth guy coming forward to say that Atta was tagged earlier then the Commission has said. Also it appears that the crew identifying Condi scared the bejesus out of the Clinton Administration with Watergate images dancing in their head. Can’t say I blame them for getting a bit scared but why wouldn’t they realize that you need human beings to sift through the intelligence to put the stuff into context?

The Captain makes some great points:

With visions of Watergate dancing in their heads, they followed their first instincts — fire everyone involved and pretend the program never existed. When J.D. Smith got the axe, the colonel who fired him let him know that Smith’s charts had effectively ended the colonel’s military career.

This would also explain why the data and documentation no longer exists at the Pentagon, and why the military has shown such reluctance to make definitive statements about the program. It might also explain why the lawyers at the Pentagon refused to allow any use of the material. The attorneys might have been afraid that if Able Danger material had to be used in court (that *$&%^# law-enforcement approach to terrorism!), the Pentagon might have had to disclose the rest of the connections made through these efforts — which would not just embarrass the Clinton Administration, but would also certainly destroy Al Gore’s presidential campaign if it came out before the election.

What’s interesting is that this China group gets fired in May 2000. The Atta crew tried to set up the meetings with the FBI in the summer of 2000. I will bet that the China crew had scared the crap out of the lawyers in the Pentagon enough that this may be one reason they denied Shaffer access to the FBI.

Finally The Captain received an email containing some possible additional connections:

CQ reader Ginetta sent me a message earlier today regarding some further Able Danger dots that she had connected. She read Countdown to Crisis by Kenneth Timmerman (a book which I have but have not yet read), a book which focuses on the nascent nuclear threat from Iran. However, after reading about Able Danger here at CQ and the numerous questions it raises about our understanding of al-Qaeda, Ginetta noticed that a passage at the beginning of Chapter 24 might connect Able Danger not just to al-Qaeda but to Iran as well.

Recall that Captain Scott Phillpott went to the 9/11 Commission about a week before Philip Zelikow wrote the report to again inform the staffers about the identification of Mohammed Atta in early 2000, and being turned away. In what seems to be a strange coincidence, Kenneth Timmerman describes a commotion among the Commission staff at exactly the same time. First comes this passage in the prologue:

A treasure trove of documents that 9/11 Commission staffers discovery by chance just one week before the commission report was scheduled for printing in July 2004 bears out the stories I had been hearing from multiple defectors. The clue to the existence of those documents, produced by the CIA and the National Security Agency, was contained in a single dense report, buried beneath a mountain of highly classified intelligence data, where Agency officials obviously hoped it would never be found. The report summarized what the US intelligence community knew about Iran’s pre-9/11 connection to Osama bin Laden and is disclosed for the first time in chapter 24 of this book. Because of the arrogance and willful blindness of our nation’s top intelligence officers, America’s leaders were misled about the threat from Iran before it was too late.

At the beginning of Chapter 24 (page 268), Timmerman paints the picture more clearly:

One week before the 9/11 Commission was scheduled to send its final report to the printers in July 2004, Philip D. Zelikow, the Commission’s staff director, gathered members together for an unusual briefing.

Commission staff members had discovered a document from a U.S. intelligence agency that described in detail Iran’s ties to al-Qaeda, he said. It had been buried at the bottom of a huge stack of highly classified documents on other subjects that had been delivered to a special high-security reading room in an undisclosed location in Washington, DC.

The document was a summary of raw intelligence reports gathered through intercepts and other means, and was uncovered when staff readers — on detail from different intelligence agencies — were turning over rocks before the report went to the printer, just to make sure no worm crawled out. When the chief analyst scanned through the references at the end, he whistled quietly. “There’s trouble in River City,” he recalls thinking. It footnoted seventy-five distinct source documents, labeled from capital A to sss.

Some people said at the beginning of this Able Danger story that this thing has no legs, it’s just Weldon acting kooky again. It’s beginning to look like this story has more legs then a spider.

Check out AJ Strata who along with The Captain are the two best at reporting this story.

Also check out QT Monster’s Place, Edward Jay Epstein, The Pink Flamingo Bar & Grill, & Opinipundit for more.

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