Able Danger Hearings, Part III

I’ve begun the slow process of transcribing the Able Danger hearings, which can be found here. Meanwhile, AJStrata has found a nugget in his listening so far: (h/t Able Danger Blog)

Holy Cow! Weldon has a signed affidavit from a witness that talked to one of Cambone?s staff recently and who said Cambone?s group was going to ?kill this story? and Shaffer had no credibility. The name is Butch Willard This is right after Cambone claimed no one was not trying to ?bring the information forward?. If Weldon is right, Cambone just perjured himself and is in hot water now. The witness is an ex intelligence officer (woman). They moved all this to the closed session!

After Cambone’s extensive opening statement this does not come as a surprise. The whole looooong statement appeared very much like a whitewash to me. We checked and found nothing, we checked again and found nothing…..blah blah blah.

AJ also notes:

Another huge item. Cambone calls Able Danger a success because it was used in ?the campaign? or military planning exercise. I once worked on those planning systems collectively called GCCS. So what this comment tells me is Able Danger did its prime mission – it identified Al Qaeda members and cells so they could be taken out. What Cambone is saying is Able Danger played a role in our rolling up of Al Qaeda world wide, in Afghanistan, in places like Yemen. It means its impact was quite positive in the end. That could explain why so many have tolerated those crude acts in 2000. Able Danger might just of allowed us to quickly find and neutralize many, many Al Qaeda members after 9-11, and may have led us to folks like Shaikh Mohamed Khalid. Inside the intel community, Able Danger?s success could be legend for all we know. All speculation, but Cambone was pretty clear about the respect of this program and where it products were used.

Curt

See author page