As usual the Able Danger story is slogging along at a snails pace. Why is the question. A few articles in recent days ask the same question:
The whistle-blower who embarrassed a presidential administration about its intelligence failures has seemingly been punished for his actions. No, this isn’t about President Bush and Joe Wilson.
Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer knows a little about intelligence failures and being persecuted for saying things not in tune with the conventional wisdom.
He is the Army Reserve officer who went public in August with details about a secret military intelligence unit called Able Danger that, using a technique known as “data mining,” determined pre-9-11 that four of the future hijackers were al-Qaida operatives.
Shaffer has been stripped of his security clearances, in effect being fired from his post at the Defense Intelligence Agency, a move that could effectively end his military career, on charges ranging from making false statements to showing his military identification while intoxicated and, yes, stealing ink pens.
Is this punishment for disclosing that Able Danger had identified Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and three other hijackers as members of al-Qaida in early 2000? U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., thinks so and has called for a review by the Pentagon’s inspector general.
For his part, Shaffer notes the same people who now judge him unfit promoted him to his current rank in October 2004.
Last June, Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., made known Able Danger to the public in a speech at the end of the legislative day under a rule known as “special orders.”
“Two weeks after 9-11, my friends from the Army’s Information Dominance Center, in cooperation with special ops, brought me a chart,” Weldon said. “What’s interesting in this chart of al-Qaida is the name of the leader of the New York cell. And the name is very familiar to the American people. That name is Mohamed Atta.”
Three other hijackers ? Marwan a-Shehi, Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi ? were also tagged as al-Qaida operatives two years before 9-11.
In September 2000, the unit recommended that the information on the hijackers be passed on to the FBI “so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists,” Weldon told The Associated Press.
Weldon also recently charged on Fox’s “Hannity and Colmes” that two weeks before the bombing of the USS Cole, the Able Danger operation detected that something was afoot in Yemen and two days before it arrived there issued a warning ? that went nowhere ? that the Cole should not enter the port of Aden.
But that was back in the days of the “wall of separation” between foreign intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement that forbade information sharing. That wall was built by Bill Clinton’s No. 2 person at the Justice Department, Jamie Gorelick, who should have been a witness before, but instead was a commissioner on the 9-11 commission. Pentagon layers nixed the exchange.
Since then, others have come forward to confirm Weldon and Shaffer’s revelation that 9-11 might have been short-circuited on Clinton’s watch had this information been shared and acted upon. Witnesses include Capt. Scott Philpott, the Navy officer who managed Able Danger for the Special Operations Command.
But liberal Democrats and their allies in the media aren’t interested, perhaps because the dots, when connected, point to Clinton and not Bush.
They are more focused on whether “Scooter” Libby engaged in political hardball than whether the U.S. could have prevented the attacks on New York and Washington that killed 3,000 people and started the war on terrorism in the first place.
And that my friends is the answer. The story has no legs with the MSM because these dots will most definately be connected to Clinton. The left does not care about the truth, all they want is to be proven right in their beliefs. If everything points to exactly the opposite they either ignore it or attack the truth bearer. What have the Democrats become?
As AJStrata put so well:
It is important to know what happened. If honest and open analysis had unearthed uncomfortable information regarding Clinton?s administration connections to China, the answer was not a cover up and destroying all data associated with the technology that made the connection. Especially data on Al Qaeda terrorists which had nothing to do with the China studies being done in parallel.
If we cannot protect the results of efforts by the good men and women simply trying to do their job and protect this country from attack when challenged by short sighted political appointees – we are in real trouble in this country. We need to know what happened with Able Danger and how people could use their positions to destroy critical and possibly life saving information.
Some question why the DoD would still to this day be squashing any attempt at a complete investigation. I believe that just like the CIA and the State Department the DoD is full of bureaucrats who have no loyalty to the White House. It’s just the same old bureaucracy not wanting their mistakes to see the light of day.
I also still believe to this day that the only concrete proof that would have tied this thing together went into Sandy Bergers pants and into the toilet.
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