Mark Zaid Confirms Weldon

In an e-mailed response to a couple of quick questions I sent last night, Mark Zaid confirmed what Rep. Curt Weldon alleged in a floor speech and multiple media appearances last night about the DIA’s treatment of LTC Tony Shaffer. Zaid, who has represented Shaffer during the Able Danger controversy, wrote the following (emphases mine):
CQ: Have you heard that the DIA intends on firing Col. Shaffer?
MZ: Of course Ed, I’m handling his security clearance issues. They have moved for his indefinite suspension without pay even before we have concluded his appeal. I have had other DIA clients facing the same appeal circumstances but DIA did not suspend them without pay, at least to the best of my recollection.
CQ: Did they [DIA] send him classified documents mixed in with his personal effects?
MZ: They did send him classified documents and govt property. In fact, they sent the boxes to my office!
CQ: Have they accused him of adultery with a staff member of Weldon’s?
MZ: Early on DoD (or possibly DIA, we don’t know) was spreading unfounded gossip about an alleged romance. That died fast.
Zaid didn’t elaborate further, but I think we can expect more fireworks soon from the Able Danger issue. Hopefully, the focus will return to the more substantive issues about what the program found and who kept it buried. Based on the desperate and incompetent manner in which the DIA has attempted to smear and discredit Tony Shaffer, there seems to be quite a story that the American people should know.

A Vendetta Against Tony Shaffer?

Michelle Malkin noticed a speech by Rep. Curt Weldon, the Congressman who helped uncover Able Danger by finding team members brave enough to go public with their recollections of the program and its identification of the 9/11 hijackers over a year before the attacks. Now Weldon has gone on the rhetorical attack himself, angry at a DIA vendetta that he claims has been waged against Shaffer and the delay in public hearings on the Able Danger program:

A vocal House Republican is calling for a new probe into what he says is a “witch-hunt” by defense officials against a Sept. 11 intelligence whistleblower.
Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Penn., told United Press International that officials at the Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA, had “conducted a deliberate campaign of character assassination” against the whistleblower, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer.

How inept has the DIA been in its campaign against Shaffer? They have hung up his clearance over a series of offenses that go back to his teenage years, events that had to have already been reviewed for clearance renewals over and over again. The DIA now suddenly thinks that the supposed theft of a few pens and a notepad from a meeting when Shaffer was 15 years old makes him a security risk for the nation — but their own staff shows them to have less sense than teenagers:

Weldon told UPI he had written to the Department of Defense inspector general to ask for “an immediate formal inquiry, with people testifying under oath,” into what he called “a clear witch-hunt” against Shaffer, who has been on administrative leave while minor allegations about some expenses are investigated.
Weldon’s move comes after Shaffer said that boxes of his personal effects, returned to him by the DIA earlier this month, contained both government property and classified documents.
“Sending classified material through the mail is a felony, and much more serious than any of these minor, trumped up charges against (Shaffer),” he said, adding that “I want the appropriate persons held accountable.”

Weldon says that the DIA wants to fire Shaffer. That has him enraged and ready to resign from Congress if necessary to pursue the case against the DIA. Michelle reports that Weldon says the smears are about to get a lot more personal:

You can’t let a Lt. Col.’s career be ruined because of a bureaucrat in the DIA…We’re seeing lying. Distortion. Wolf Blitzer told me that a Defense Department official told [Blitzer] that Shaffer was having an affair with a member of my staff…he doesn’t even know my staff! What do we stand for if not the truth? I’ll leave my post, but not until I get justice for this man and the American people.
…scum at the Pentagon are spreading malicious lies.

More on this as it develops. If the DIA really has resorted to these tactics, then it only demonstrates even more that they fear Shaffer and the rest of the Able Danger revelations. What has them so afraid?

Could NOAH Have Stopped The Flood Of Terrorism Before 9/11? (Update with Correction)

One of the bloggers that has kept an eye on Able Danger updates, AJ Strata, notes an editorial in today’s Washington Times written by F. Michael Maloof. Maloof reveals that Congress at one point wanted a national network of cross-functional centers doing work pioneered by the Able Danger team and its mother program, LIWA, but that the Pentagon wanted to pursue its own program instead. Maloof argues that the failure to push NOAH into existence lost us our best shot at stopping the 9/11 terrorists:

Mr. Weldon first sought help from Eileen Preisser, who ran the Information Dominance Center at the U.S. Army’s Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) at Fort Belvoir, Va. He then asked this writer to work with Ms. Preisser to see how the Army initiative could be expanded into a national effort.
As Mr. Weldon envisioned it, the national collaborative center would have been comprised of a system of mini-centers or “pods” of some 34 entities from the U.S. intelligence community and law enforcement agencies to function in a common operating environment.
It would not have been just another analytical unit. The effect of data-mining information that had already been analyzed was to game-plan particular issues and offer options to policymakers and national commanders to deal with them.

Who is Maloof and where does NOAH fit into the counterterrorist effort, pre- or post-9/11? Don’t bother checking the 9/11 report. It mentions neither, even though the Stratasphere seems to have had no troubles tracking this man down. Strata found out that Maloof worked with Richard Perle, and after 9/11 received an unusual assignment: to find out if Saddam Hussein had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks specifically, or with al-Qaeda in general. As one of Strata’s links note, his work on this assignment appears to have angered some at the DoD:

A veteran Pentagon employee who was a key player in the effort to find links between Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida has been stripped of his security clearance, according to senior U.S. officials.
The employee, F. Michael Maloof, is associated with a Lebanese-American businessman who is under federal investigation for possible involvement in a gun-running scheme to Liberia, the West African nation embroiled in civil war. The businessman, Imad El Haje, approached Maloof on behalf of Syria to seek help in arranging a communications channel between Syria and the Defense Department. …
Maloof is on administrative leave and hasn’t been charged with wrongdoing. Those close to him contend that his clearances were pulled in retaliation for challenging the official assessment that there were no operational terrorist links between al-Qaida and Iraq.
Maloof was part of a two-man team created at the Pentagon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to find such links. The team was a predecessor to the Pentagon’s controversial Office of Special Plans.
Maloof and David Wurmser, who’s now an aide to Undersecretary of State John Bolton, claimed they had found evidence that Sunni and Shiite Muslim groups, as well as secular Islamic countries, cooperate to harm the United States despite their many differences.

The excuse for pulling Maloof’s security clearance was his contacts with Imad el-Haje, a Lebanese contact that tried to concoct an arrangement between Saddam and the US to avoid war. In May 2003, Maloof had his security clearance revoked for contacting el-Haje. By November, the US had acknowledged that the contact represented a legitimate attempt on our part to resolve the impasse short of military action:

Early this year, a Lebanese-American businessman, Imad El Haje, relayed word that Saddam would allow U.S. experts and troops into Iraq to verify that he had no weapons of mass destruction, said the officials, who requested anonymity.
El Haje sent his message through a Department of Defense official, F. Michael Maloof, who was involved in a Pentagon effort to find links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, and Richard Perle, the head of a Pentagon advisory panel who was a leading advocate of invading Iraq.
U.S. officials said none of the approaches went anywhere. They were deemed either fraudulent or attempts by Saddam to stall for time to allow international opposition to a U.S.-led attack to build, they said.
“They were all non-starters because they all involved Saddam staying in power,” said a senior administration official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because intelligence matters are classified.

Maloof also has an attorney — Mark Zaid, the same attorney as Lt. Colonel Tony Shaffer. Interesting, and somewhat coincidental that both figures have the same legal representation. (It would be interesting, if true, but it isn’t — Mark Zaid was just quoted for reaction to the article. He doesn’t represent Maloof, per his e-mail to me. My apologies for the error.)
Be sure to read all of AJ Strata’s analysis. However, I have a couple of questions myself. It seems as though the DIA likes to pull clearances on people with interesting testimony to give on issues like 9/11 and the war on terror. Is that why Maloof never gets mentioned or even interviewed by the 9/11 Commission, as far as can be told? If not, what other reason could there be? Maloof has a different opinion on the resources used by the al-Qaeda plotters for 9/11 based on his direct investigation, one of two people who went back and officially looked into the issue.
How could the 9/11 Commission have missed Maloof as a witness?
It’s yet another glaring gap in the process used by the supposedly thorough and authoritative “independent” investigation into the terrorist attacks.

Able Danger Foxtrot VII: The Zaid Interview

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to talk at length with Mark Zaid, the attorney for Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, about the status of the Judiciary Committee hearings and other questions regarding the Able Danger story. Mark and I spoke for about an hour, and his outlook on the runaround he and Shaffer have received about talking with Congress forms the basis of my new column at the Daily Standard, “The Able Danger Foxtrot Continues”:

“We’re presumably waiting for them to reschedule,” Zaid said. “Officially, the Defense Department and the DIA are taking the position–at least with me–that Shaffer is not allowed to testify.” That gag order clearly has allowed the momentum of the story to slow in the last few weeks. When asked about the gag order’s origin, Shaffer’s attorney cannot tell for certain who ordered it. “These guys are talking out of both sides of their mouths,” he replied when asked to identify the agency responsible for blocking the testimony. “The first time around, when the hearing on the 21st was scheduled to happen,” he explained, “the Defense Department was calling the shots, and DIA was continually relaying messages from DIA to me.”
That seems to have changed since the cancellation of the first Judiciary hearing. After Zaid informed the DIA that Shaffer had invitations from other Congressional committees to deliver unclassified briefings, the DIA took charge of the clearance issue–and placed hurdle after hurdle in front of the career officer and his attorney, preventing them from sharing Able Danger’s details with the legislators. “The DIA is calling the shots . .
. First, I had Tony call that [a request for permission] in himself,” Zaid said, “and they refused to act on that. Then I submitted it to Congressional Affairs, and they refused to act on that. They say I’m not specific enough.”
“I said that House Judiciary wants to meet with him. Congressman Davis wants to meet with him. The House Committee on Government Reform wants to meet with him,” Zaid continued. “Somehow, it’s not specific enough because I didn’t list the individual staff members.” Zaid wonders why the DIA wants to know about the names of each staff member that may or may not be present during the presentation of an unclassified briefing. “They don’t want him meeting with certain staff members that might be hostile to them? Well, sorry, that’s not the way it works.”

Zaid tends to think that this reflects incompetence rather than a sophisticated attempt to keep testimony about Able Danger from the public. It sounds a bit more suspicious to me, however, especially when one considers which committees have not asked for a briefing on the program — a fact which CQ readers can discover in the column itself.
I will post an entire transcript of the interview later in the week when I get more time. Zaid and I discussed numerous details of the case, including the Atta timeline and other issues that Zaid clarifies during the conversation. In the meantime, if people want to see Shaffer and the other AD team members tell us how they identified the AQ cells a year before the 9/11 attacks and no one seemed to notice it, contact the Senators and Representatives involved to get Zaid some help in getting the DIA and DoD to start cooperating.

Spanish Verdicts Contradict 9/11 Commission But Disappoint Prosecutors

I wrote yesterday before the Spanish trial judges announced their decision on their only 9/11 trial that the verdict had the possibility of demonstrating the invalidity of the conclusions reached by the 9/11 Commission. The Spanish court did just that, convicting two of the three major figures before the court with belonging to the 9/11 conspiracy — but then confused the issue by letting them off the hook for the actual deaths that conspiracy caused. The Washington Post tried to make sense of the verdicts reached:

A Spanish court on Monday convicted and sentenced a Syrian-born man to 27 years in prison for conspiring with al Qaeda and the hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, alias Abu Dahdah, was one of 18 found guilty among 24 defendants on charges of cooperating with al Qaeda. …
Prosecutors presented evidence that Yarkas and Driss Chebli, a Moroccan, coordinated a key meeting in Spain with the lead Sept. 11 hijacker two months before the attacks.
Chebli received a six-year prison sentence on a charge of collaborating with a terrorist organization. Ghasoub Abrash Ghayoun, a Syrian who videotaped the World Trade Center and other key landmarks in the United States, was acquitted. He insisted he shot the footage as a tourist.
Tayssir Alouni, a journalist with the Arabic-language television network al-Jazeera, was sentenced to seven years in prison. Prosecutors used an interview that Alouni conducted in 2001 with Osama bin Laden as evidence that he had a link to al Qaeda.

If the overwhelming number of convictions belied the 9/11 Commission’s findings that Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh received no material assistance from anyone else in Spain during the odd interlude in Madrid two months before the attacks, the sentencing appeared strangely disconnected from the crimes they conspired to commit. Yarkas got twenty-seven years for conspiracy to commit terrorism, even though his conspiracy ultimately met success with the deaths of 3,000 people, the worst such attacks in history. The Spanish court ruled that although prosecutors had proven his role in the 9/11 planning, he had not taken material part in the attacks themselves. Thanks to this ruling, Yarkas will likely survive to walk out of prison a free man within the next decade.
Even more odd, the court only gave Chebli a six-year sentence for performing more or less the same role as Yarkas. The six-year sentence guarantees that Chebli will emerge from prison within a couple of years, free to coordinate more attacks on Western targets. Both men will make a number of new contacts in prison to allow al-Qaeda to hatch new plots and find new “holy warriors”. Why the twenty-one year disparity between the sentences? Why didn’t the Spanish court recognize that those who conspire to commit murderous acts that prove successful become accessories before the fact to each murder committed — and sentence them properly for it?
As Dafydd at Big Lizards notes, this puts the sanctimonious closing argument from the Spanish prosecutor in the light it deserves:

In clear reference to the United States, the lead prosecutor, Pedro Rubira, called in his closing arguments this summer for “an exemplary sentence which shows that neither wars nor detention camps are necessary in the fight against Islamic terrorism.”

Rubira didn’t get an exemplary sentence; he got instead a ridiculously light sentence for his efforts, proving that the idea of using civilian courts to answer acts of war provides only an illusion of security. He wound up proving the wisdom of the Bush administration’s policy, not deflating it. The Spanish took four years to settle the question of 24 detainees from the 9/11 attacks, and will likely take two more to do the same with the terrorists captured from the 2003 Madrid bombings. In the meantime, the Spaniards wait for the next terrorist attack so that they can arrest a few more people and take another four years to figure out what to do with them — and the ultimate result will be that since the detainees didn’t commit suicide, they cannot be held responsible for the murders.
Brilliant. They have the al-Qaeda martyrs right where they want them now! Dafydd wonders whether the Democrats will still want to argue for the law-enforcement approach in next year’s elections:

Yep, the Spaniards certainly showed us how to do things. I wonder if the Democrats in Washington D.C. will point with admiration in November 2006 to this less-than-spectacular result of the antiterrorism policies they advocate…?

They’ll abandon that strategy about the same time they quit demanding 9/11 Commission-type panels to investigate the response to Hurricane Katrina. Some people cannot admit failure even when it stands out so obviously, as it does in both cases.

Spanish 9/11 Trial Nears Its End

Spanish authorities expect a verdict soon in their prosecution of three alleged 9/11 conspirators, in a case that has received scant attention in the American media — and even less from the 9/11 Commission report. Twenty-four defendants will find out whether a panel of Spanish judges will rule that they gave material support to Mohammed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh in the run-up to the 9/11 attacks:

Three men accused of helping to plot the Sept. 11 attacks waited to learn their fate Monday as Europe’s biggest trial of alleged al-Qaida members neared its finale. …
Binalshibh is alleged to have met in the Tarragona region of northeast Spain in July 2001 with Mohamed Atta, believed to be one of the suicide pilots, for a last-minute planning session.
The lead suspect in the Spanish trial, alleged al-Qaida cell leader Imad Yarkas, 42, a Syrian-born Spaniard, is accused of having set up that meeting along with another suspect, Moroccan Driss Chebli, 33. Both denied knowing Binalshibh or Atta or having anything to do with the terror attacks. …
The third suspect facing specific Sept. 11 charges is Ghasoub al-Abrash Ghalyoun, another Syrian-born Spaniard, who was indicted over detailed video footage he shot of the World Trade Center and other landmarks during a trip to several American cities in 1997.

This may come as news to many Americans, who have not seen or heard much about the Spanish proceedings. The Washington Post covered the start of the trial in April in some detail, when they presented details of the case that never made it into the 9/11 Commission’s final report. The Commission insisted that Atta and Binalshibh never met with anyone else while Atta traveled to Spain, and only relegate Yarkas and Ghalyoun to footnotes, mostly on page 530 of their final report. In those footnotes, the Commission wrote:

Although U.S. authorities have not uncovered evidence that anyone met with Atta or Binalshibh in Spain in July 2001, Spanish investigators contend that members of the Spanish al Qaeda cell were involved in the July meeting and were connected to the 9/11 attacks. … Although we cannot rule out the possibility that other facts will come to light as the Spanish case progresses to trial,we have not found evidence that individuals in Spain participated in the July meeting or in the 9/11 plot.

And one other for Yarkas on page 499:

Notwithstanding persistent press reports to the contrary, there is no convincing evidence that the Spanish al Qaeda cell, led by Imad Barkat Yarkas and al Qaeda European financier Mohammed Galeb Kalaje Zouaydi, provided any funding to support the 9/11 attacks
or the Hamburg participants.

However, the Post reported that the Spaniards thought the evidence against Yarkas looked pretty good, including a conversation caught on a wiretap that informed Yarkas that the caller had “entered the field of aviation”, “classes were going well,” and that “the throat of the bird has been slit.” This conversation took place two weeks before 9/11, but the Commission only mentions it in the footnote to dismiss it as irrelevant.
Spanish authorities also contend that Yarkas passed a phony passport to Binalshibh while in Spain, a contention that once again raises the spectre of Atta’s true travel schedule. The position of the Commission and the timeline of the report depends on the conclusion that Atta never traveled under an assumed identity; it is how the Commission ruled out the trip to Prague in April 2001 that Czech intelligence still insists took place, with a meeting between Atta and a member of Iraqi intelligence.
The Spanish also have on trial a man named Dress Chebli, who allegedly assisted Yarkas in setting up the meeting. Chebli never gets any mention by the 9/11 Commission despite being part of the same indictment.
The report from the Spanish judges should be released today. We will soon see how much it differs from that of the 9/11 Commission, and also see how the media reports it.

Hadley Denies Weldon’s Claims In An Able Danger Sideshow

Rep. Curt Weldon’s credibility may have taken a minor hit in yesterday’s Washington Post with a rather passive denial from National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley that Weldon gave Hadley a chart showing Mohammed Atta as a member of al-Qaeda either before or after 9/11. Weldon claimed in his book that he gave Hadley a copy of a chart two weeks after the attacks, produced in 2000 by the Able Danger team showing the Atta connection and explaining the data-mining project to Hadley. According to the Post, Hadley gave this response yesterday:

But a spokesman for Hadley, who has previously declined to comment on Weldon’s claims, said yesterday that a search of National Security Council files produced no such documents identifying Atta and that Hadley was not given such a chart by Weldon.
“Mr. Hadley does not recall any chart bearing the name or photo of Mohamed Atta,” said the spokesman, Frederick L. Jones II. “NSC staff reviewed the files of Mr. Hadley as well as of all NSC personnel” who might have received such a chart.
“That search has turned up no chart,” he said.
Hadley does recall seeing a chart used as an example of “link analysis” — the technique used by the Able Danger program — as a counterterrorism tool, but is not sure whether it happened during a Sept. 25, 2001, meeting with Weldon or at another session, Jones said.

First, notice the rather weak wording in the denial. Hadley does not recall seeing any such chart, and the chart doesn’t exist in their files. In fact, the Pentagon used this same kind of language initially when pressed for a response after the public revelation of Able Danger. It allows for a non-specific denial which can later fit into further corroboration of Weldon’s claims as well as Hadley’s. It says very little, other than Hadley doesn’t recall it.
Now, one can argue that if an NSA saw such a chart, it should be highly memorable. However, in the first few weeks after 9/11, many theories and hypotheses floated through DC and the media, and it could be that Hadley saw any number of charts and reports with similar kinds of connections. It also could be that Hadley knew about Able Danger (or found out about it later), couldn’t discuss it then and had the chart shredded. Using “I don’t recall” leaves all sorts of possibilities open without tying one to any specific outcome.
What we do know is that the Pentagon admits it has five witnesses who do specifically recall seeing Mohammed Atta identified as a potential AQ operative well before the 9/11 attacks, as well as three of his fellow hijackers. Four of the five recall his picture being on the chart. Whether Hadley recalls the incident that Weldon describes is a side issue at this point. We need to hear from the Able Danger team themselves to see whether they will testify to that identification, how those connections worked, and why the Pentagon would not allow them to coordinate with the FBI to target Atta prior to the attacks.

Who Is Dr. Preisser?

Dr. Eileen Preisser has come up several times in the past few days as a key analyst in the Able Danger project. Originally unnamed in Col. Tony Shaffer’s assertions of the determinations of the project, he said that a female PhD reminded him that Mohammed Atta and three of the other 9/11 hijackers had been identified from their data-mining as potential al-Qaeda operatives within the US over a year prior to the attacks. This week, Shaffer supplied the name that had remained elusive until now.
So who is Eileen Preisser? Currently, she works within the Department of Homeland Security, or did at least in 2002 as the head of the group preparing first responders to terrorist attacks. She described herself as a cross between Xena, Warrior Princess and Joan of Arc. She has also been described as the director of the DoD’s Homeland Defense Technology Center and a key advocate for aggressive IT approaches to counterterrorism:

Eileen Preisser, director of DOD’s Homeland Defense Technology Center, said the ultimate success or failure of the Homeland Security Department will be determined by the intelligence and IT plan that’s proposed and the person selected to lead that effort. Preisser spoke at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association’s TechNet International 2002 conference in Washington, D.C.
“The kicker that will determine if it succeeds or fails is the intelligence and IT plan that’s prepared,” Preisser, a congressional fellow who also advises the Executive Office of the President on technology, told Federal Computer Week.
“There has to be a [chief information officer or chief operating officer]-type person to bring together all the disparate capabilities that exist and create a new and exciting virtual information environment that will set the pace for everything else in government,” Preisser said. “If you hire a 65-year-old to do it, it will fail. If you hire former military, it will fail.”

One has to wonder about the last two admonitions in this analysis. This article came out a year after the Able Danger project was shut down by older military leadership, and Preisser sounds like she’s talking from experience. Again speaking from experience, Preisser gets even more specific:

Preisser said she fears that the new department will just add more bureaucracy to a system already overloaded with red tape. She added that agencies were just beginning to move “horizontally over the last nine months, and forcing them to go back will be the hardest cultural shift.”
An interagency organization can be successful as long as the various parts are united by their mission and outfitted with the “same standard suitcase and equipment, and put in the field together,” she said, adding that the interagency operational security (OPSEC) group is a prime example of one that works.

Able Danger was an example of this kind of interagency operational security group. Preisser sounds as if her experience in these matters gave her confidence in it as a model — which would again tend to bolster the contention that Able Danger not only functioned well but produced usable data. She expressed no hope that an expanded DHS would alleviate the issues with sharing the data, however, as an expanded bureaucracy would only intensify the obstacles for such sharing, not break them down.
Does this sound familiar, and does anyone see why the 9/11 Commission might have wanted to avoid talking with Preisser? Oddly, for someone already working in this field for the DHS, the Commission never bothered to talk to her about the issues involved in data sharing while the commissioners publicly ridiculed two administrations for failing to connect the dots. Her name appears nowhere in the “final’ report.
The same cannot be said of Congress. As I posted earlier this week, the National Security subcommittee in the House spoke to Preisser in closed session exactly one month after the attacks. No one knows what was said during that session, but Rep. Christopher Shays gave a summary the next day during an open hearing (the transcript misspelled Preisser’s name):

Mr. Shays. In a briefing we had yesterday, we had Eileen
Pricer, who argues that we don’t have the data we need because we don’t take all the public data that is available and mix it with the security data. And just taking public data, using, you know, computer systems that are high-speed and able to digest, you know, literally floors’ worth of material, she can take relationships that are seven times removed, seven units removed, and when she does that, she ends up with relationships to the bin Laden group where she sees the purchase of chemicals, the sending of students to universities. You
wouldn’t see it if you isolated it there, but if that unit is connected to that unit, which is connected to that unit, which is connected to that unit, you then see the relationship. So we don’t know ultimately the authenticity of how she does it, but when she does it, she comes up with the kind of answer that you have just asked, which is a little unsettling.

It looks like Preisser wanted to tell someone about Able Danger within a month after the attacks, and perhaps did so. Perhaps she still wants to talk about her work and the results she got from her expertise in data mining. The public record on Preisser, which appears to stop in 2002, gives every indication that this expert should have been central to any investigation of the gathering and analysis of intelligence on terrorists. We need to hear from her now.

Able Danger Foxtrot VI: The Pentagon Backstep Redux

Earlier today, the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that it had an agreement with the Pentagon to allow the five witnesses to testify in open hearings on the Able Danger project and its identification of the four lead hijackers of the 9/11 attacks. Now the AP reports that the Pentagon may yet block that testimony again, and that the only certainty at this point is continued uncertainty:

On Friday, the Senate committee announced the Pentagon had reversed its position and would allow the five witnesses to testify at a new public hearing scheduled for October 5.
The Pentagon denied anything had changed, despite behind-the-scenes negotiations to reach a solution agreeable to both sides.
“Our position has not changed,” Defense spokesman Bryan Whitman told Reuters. “This is a classified program and there are still aspects of it that are not appropriate for an open hearing. And that’s what we have told the committee.”
Not so, responded William Reynolds, the judiciary committee’s director of communications.
“The Pentagon has agreed to make five witnesses available. Although there was no talk at the time when they made that offer, the assumption was that it would be in an open committee hearing,” Reynolds said in an interview.
“If the Pentagon has issues with that, they need to let us know,” he added.

Arlen Specter has hinted at bringing charges against Pentagon personnel for obstruction of a Congressional investigation, and others in the Senate have talked openly of a DoD cover-up on 9/11. It seems better for the Pentagon to act now to demonstrate openness and cooperation before Specter starts issuing subpoenas not just for the five witnesses he wants, but for people like Shelton and Schoomaker as well.
Several CQ readers point out in comments and e-mail that the Pentagon represents many entities, some of them competing with each other. Of course this is true, but the political leadership handles the relationship with Congress. That starts with Rumsfeld and works its way through his staff. This constant back-and-forth with Congresss shows that the indecision exists in the political section of the DoD. No doubt they have received contradictory data from other factions, but the lack of consistency has to be laid at the feet of the Secretary.
He’d better correct this soon, too. The dance routine has started to look more like a burlesque stall tactic.

Able Danger Foxtrot V: The Pentagon Backstep

The Pentagon has reversed itself — again — in the Able Danger soap opera playing out in Washington DC. After agreeing to provide witnesses to the Senate Judiciary Committee, then forbidding them to testify on the eve of the hearings, the Pentagon now says it will allow all five Able Danger team members to provide public testimony on October 5th about the program:

The Defense Department on Friday reversed its earlier decision to bar key witnesses from testifying about just how much information the U.S. government had on the Sept. 11 hijackers before they led the attacks that killed 3,000 people.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has therefore scheduled a second hearing for next week on the formerly secret Pentagon intelligence unit called “Able Danger”. …
The Senate Judiciary Committee said in a statement Friday that the Pentagon now will allow five witnesses to testify. Among those are Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott and defense contractor John Smith.

I wonder what happened to cause this change in attitude. It appears that the heavey-handedness of the last-minute change caused some problems even among those Senators inclined to support the White House, such as Arlen Specter. More likely, the Pentagon and White House may have underestimated the visibility that Able Danger has achieved over the past month.
We can surmise a couple of items from this reversal, especially given the hostility that Shaffer showed towards the Pentagon as a result of the initial cancellation. First, the gag order had little to do with ongoing operational security. It would take much more time than 72 hours to secure personnel and intelligence, and if the Pentagon still had those assets in operation, the witnesses would remain gagged. That means the Pentagon pulled the witnesses for some other reason.
Anyone want to guess what that reason might be? Whatever the reason, they have made clear that the Pentagon fears the truth coming out about Able Danger. Many have speculated that the program showed connections between the Clinton Administration and China, and that caused the Pentagon to hush up Able Danger. Perhaps, but that cannot explain the actions this week in pulling the witnesses off the stand at the last moment. The Clinton Administration has come and gone, and even a possible Hillary administration would come no sooner than almost four years from now.
The reason, therefore, has to involve people at the Pentagon right now. It seems to me that the Pentagon has the most to lose if speculation that it deliberately withheld cooperation from the FBI when it could have stopped 9/11 is true, and that it has to answer for the destruction of the materials if the witnesses testify as expected. Those decisions could involve high-ranking brass, such as Hugh Shelton (ret.) and Pete Schoomaker, and perhaps even Donald Rumsfeld. Or perhaps they just involve second-tier leadership – which is why the Pentagon decided to reverse itself after seeing the public reaction to the aborted hearing Wednesday.
October 5th should be pretty interesting. Expect to see three new names pop up, including Dr. Eileen Preisser, who seems to hold a central role in Able Danger and the analysis that found the terrorists a year before the attacks. If so, the 9/11 Commission will be the first casualty, but not the last. This story will not go away soon.
UPDATE: Corrected spelling of Dr. Eileen Preisser. The wrong spelling did lead me to this transcript the other day, so the mistake was not entirely unproductive.