Able Danger Hearings, Part II

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Able Danger hearings were conducted today, finally. QT Monster’s Place liveblogged the hearings and has audio up here.

UPDATE

James Rosen has an article with a short summary of the hearings:

The Pentagon’s top intelligence official clashed repeatedly Wednesday with former operatives of the clandestine Able Danger program over how much the government knew about al-Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Much of the testimony focused on whether hijacking mastermind Mohammed Atta had been identified long before the tragedy.

In a rare public display of bitter disputes within the close-knit military intelligence community, three members of a computer data-mining initiative code-named “Able Danger” told Congress that the Sept. 11 attacks might have been prevented if law-enforcement agencies had acted on the information about al-Qaeda they unearthed.

“It shocked us how entrenched of a presence al-Qaeda had in the United States,” former Army Maj. Erik Kleinsmith told two subcommittees of the House Armed Services Committee.

J.D. Smith, a defense contractor who also worked on the Able Danger team, said he used Arab intermediaries in the Los Angeles area to buy a photograph of Atta. Smith said Atta’s photo was among about 40 photos of al-Qaeda members on a large chart that he personally delivered to Pentagon officials in 2000, more than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Asked by Rep. Curt Weldon, a Republican from Pennsylvania, how certain he was that the chart contained Atta’s photograph, Smith responded that he kept a copy of the chart on the office wall.

“I’m absolutely certain,” Smith said. “I looked at it every day.”

[…]Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, testified Tuesday that an extensive Pentagon review of Able Danger under his direction failed to locate the chart its operatives say they produced, and didn’t find evidence documenting their other claims.

“There’s no one here looking not to bring the information forward. We simply have not found it,” Cambone said.

Pentagon officials previously said the al-Qaeda data produced by Able Danger had been destroyed because of regulations that prevent the military from maintaining information on U.S. citizens or legal residents.

But in a series of tense confrontations, Weldon told Cambone that his military sources had informed him some of the Able Danger data still existed.

“What’s going on here?” Weldon asked. “Is this a massive effort to deny reality?”

Weldon said that an unidentified current Pentagon employee had, within the last three weeks, run computer searches using pre-9/11 Able Danger data. They had five hits on “Mohammed Atta” and three hits on “Muhammed Atta,” Weldon said.

“There’s been no investigation!” Weldon said. “There’s been no analysis by the 9/11 commission or anyone else.”

Macranger posted his take on it:

Anyway, I didn’t hear anything today (although some minor points others have noted I find ‘difficult’ at this point), I haven’t heard up to this point. Although I do have privy to some information I can’t get into yet (there is a reason I’m anonymouse…). But what I did hear seemed disjointed a bit, and Weldon is still coming off, well a little “off”. He’s got the facts down, but he keeps jumping around and yelling.

I know he’s frustrated, but he has to get rid of the “emotional” preaching of Able Danger’s gospel. It’s not going to sell in the Beltway where he needs the support. He needs to keep plugging away, but there are forces already out to shut him up. But trust me, I’m told that as far as senior leadership is concerned the word is “give him a lollipop and pacify him for a while” – thus hearings to “shut him up”. If Weldon needs “Stately Attention” to this, he needs to be Stately.

[…]Just a note, do read Shaffer’s written testimony compelling. Although it seems – well, coached, it lays out some facts and brings up more questions. And again, for Col. Shaffer, lose the persecution complex – no matter how justified. Just lay out the facts of the operation as you know them. Playing the martyr is simply going to throw this fight into the crapper.

And then you have AJStrata’s excellent rundown:

Tenth Item: Cambone claims it was the LIWA Intelligence Oversight Officer who determined that the Able Danger data had to be destroyed (I guess along with the China study data). I seriously doubt that. The data was the property of a SOCOM general and no oversight officer is going to destroy a general?s data without telling him. Is Cambone being spun or is he doing the spinning? Cambone said the officer looked at LIWA support for SOCOM and determined this was not proper. Except JD Smith and others have said it was the China Study that triggered the purge, which I seriously doubt was for SOCOM. I mean 95% confident it was not. This is bogus and inconsistent with what the blogosphere has learned since last summer. It was not LIWA-SOCOM issues with data – why is Cambone making these inaccurate statements?

Then he goes on to some truly silly claim about a ?Required Terms of Reference? authorizing cross support between LIWA and SOCOM not being in place. But this would not cause destruction of data! I believe all that represents is paper work between two government organizations to move funds – nothing more. That is a real stretch of an excuse to destroy data. That TOR bit is a smoke screen. We need to know about the China study data, who owned it and who ordered it destroyed.

Eleventh Item: He does admit that 9-11 terrorists were on a chart in 1999 used to demonstrate and train people. Then he goes on to make some lame statement about how that data still had to be assessed to filter out the false positive linkages to Al Qaeda. I mean – duh! We all know the raw runs with unvalidated linkages is what came out of LIWA-Orion. It was the fact those sets with 9-11 terrorists never got out of LIWA-Orion and to SOCOM and the operational phase that IS THE ISSUE!

As for me, I have yet to get through the hearings.? I want to transcribe the whole thing so people can reference it, but this will take some time.

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cURT,

Here’s what the WashPost says about the Able Danger Hearings and LtCol Shaffer in particular. I don’t what these people have against hearing the truth…as if they would know it if it walked up and smacked them in the face! Essentially they have written Weldon and his witnesses off as hysterical and crazy. I’ll let you decide just who is “crazy” and who is “hysterical”!!!

:wacko_tb:

http://blogs.washingtonpost.com/earlywarning/2006/02/tugging_on_the_.html

Carol