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China Study Rocks The Hill and Unleashes The Purge: While Cambone tried to link the data purge to this 90-day rule, Weldon and the other witnesses (with first hand knowledge) pointed to the LIWA China Study that was being done in parallel to the Able Danger study. I have stated all along this was the lynchpin, the source of all later cover ups and mistakes and lost opportunities. We all know the story so I will not repeat it here, but what we learned from the hearings is how far up this went. Weldon let slip that the initial China...

No you're right Tony, and the significance here is that the FBI Director back then, Louis Freeh said in October of last year on national television, that if he had had the Able Danger information the FBI might well have been able to stop the hijacking. In our hearing past week, and we had both classified and unclassified, we had five people that testified under oath that they believed the same thing. That if the data they collected, that if the analysis they did had been able to be passed to the FBI, they agree with Louis Freeh, that would...

MediaChannel.org used the powerful new MediaVision tool to monitor television news coverage of the Able Danger Congressional hearings. To our astonishment CNN's "Lou Dobbs Tonight" was the only news show to give Able Danger any significant coverage. We were so shocked by the lack of coverage that we created an online campaign to try to pressure TV news networks to cover, as Lou Dobbs put it, "what could be the biggest scandal of our lifetime." Click here to send networks an email demanding coverage! So, sadly, here it is. All the TV coverage we could find thus far:

..36th Item: We come in the middle of the response about the 90 day rule on data. The problem is this doesn’t make sense since the data was there much longer than 90 days. The corrective action is to process the proper forms. Somehow that was fixed easily in Garland (the data set contents had not changed), but in LIWA it caused the deletion of the data, then the firing of the contractor in mid performance, and then it closed down the LIWA support for SOCOM. Sorry, not buying it. The purge was a response to issues in the China...

25th Item: 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!

Audio of the today's entire Able Danger hearing is posted here.

Rep. Curt Weldon: I've learned some additional things that are new. You saw the Arlen Specter hearing in Judiciary that occurred in September. It's very troubling to me that it appears as though the DOD witness did not tell the truth. We had testimony that all of the Able Danger data-mining material was destroyed. I now know that that's not the case. In fact, I now know there's data still available. And I am in contact with people who are still able to data mining runs on pre-9/11 data. In those data runs that are now being done today, in...

The Able Danger portions of the House whistleblower hearings is posted here.

I am now liveblogging the US House Subcommittee hearing on national security whistle blowers. Lt. Col. Shaffer just finished his opening statement. He will be questioned during this hearing. You can listen now on C-Span Radio. The permalink to this post is here.

WASHINGTON — An active-duty military intelligence analyst has told congressional investigators that 9/11 pilot Mohamed Atta surfaced 13 times in a controversial Pentagon computer program before he executed the attacks, The Post has learned. Congressional sources said last night that an officer in the Pentagon's secretive Land Information Warfare Center told the staff of Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) about the computer hits.

It's looking like the Able Danger story (which the 9-11 Ommission Commission totally disregarded) may be about to take off. I'm told that this Wednesday's House Armed Service joint subcommittee hearing on Able Danger will have some surprises.

In a move that ought to terminate any long-shot chance he had for a political comeback, former Vice President Al Gore criticized his own country yesterday before an audience in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. It remains to be seen whether members of Gore’s party will stand up and rebuke him for this act. Ignoring one of the primary lessons of the 9/11 terrorist attacks -- which was that Saudi-born terrorists exploited a lax U.S. visa system -- Gore, in Jiddah, shot venom at the manner in which the U.S. government tightened visa-and-immigration enforcement after the terrorist attacks. As reported by the...

Everything you always wanted to know (but were afraid to ask, or the answers were classified…) about the controversial Able Danger data mining project, which identified four 9/11 hijackers a year before the terror attacks. 1. Did Anthony Shaffer, or anyone on the Able Danger team, obtain a photo of Mohamed Atta from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), as Shaffer’s interview with Government Security News (GSN) states? The photo of Atta came from an information broker who provided it and others. Shaffer’s comments were made to GSN based on his knowledge at the time, which came from his knowledge...

Bush administration critics continue to insist that the president could have gotten all the wiretap authority he needed from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to intercept terrorist communications as they plotted the next 9/11 attack. But it turns out, the 9/11 Commission strongly disagreed. As noted on yesterday's "Meet the Press" by National Review Online reporter Byron York, 9/11 Commission Report clearly states: "The FISA application process continues to be long and slow. Requests for approvals are overwhelming the ability of the system to process them and to conduct a surveillance.” In a passage not noted by Mr. York, the...

George Soros is an exacting  taskmaster. In return for his money, he demands productivity. What he requires of employees and business associates in the investment world, Soros also demands from the political operatives he funds. “Mr. Soros isn't just writing checks and watching,” notes Wall Street Journalreporter Jeanne Cummings. “He is also imposing a business model on the notoriously unruly world of politics. He demands objective evidence of progress, and assigned an aide to monitor the groups he supports. He studies private polls to track the impact of an anti-Bush advertising campaign, and he is delivering his money in installments,...

A report commissioned in mid-1999 by Rep. Curt Weldon (R) looks into possible Chinese front companies in the US seeking technology for the Chinese military. Dr. Eileen Preisser and Michael Maloof are commissioned to make the report. Dr. Preisser, who runs the Information Dominance Center at the US Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) and will later become closely tied to Able Danger, uses LIWA's data mining capabilities to search unclassified information. According to Maloof, their results show Chinese front companies in the US posing as US corporations that acquire technology from US defense contractors. When the study is completed...

I Repeat -- When is the 9/11 commission going to chastise the Senate for not passing the Patriot Act???

WHAT DID the 9/11 Commission know and when did they know it? That's what I want somebody with subpoena power to ask about Operation Able Danger. Or, as ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh said to me this week, "Why is the 9/11 Commission talking about hurricanes and tunnels and all these other things when it looks like they may have missed the single most important fact with respect to Sept. 11?" Freeh was answering my request for a response to comments made by Lee Hamilton and Tom Kean on "Meet the Press" last weekend. Operation Able Danger was an intelligence data-mining...

It’s Time To Investigate Able Danger and the 9/11 Commission Crucial questions have gone unanswered too long. 'Tis the season when annual performance awards are handed out. If there is one for chutzpah, could there possibly be a more worthy candidate than the 9/11 commission? It appears that this panel, an astronomically overrated study in self-absorption, is finally going away. You can never be too sure, of course. Clinging to the last fading glimmers of limelight, the august commissioners have already once overcome statutory death. Resurrecting themselves as an ombudsman through the miracle of private financing, they've been keen to...

'Tis the season when annual performance awards are handed out. If there is one for chutzpah, could there possibly be a more worthy candidate than the 9/11 commission? It appears that this panel, an astronomically overrated study in self-absorption, is finally going away. You can never be too sure, of course. Clinging to the last fading glimmers of limelight, the august commissioners have already once overcome statutory death. Resurrecting themselves as an ombudsman through the miracle of private financing, they've been keen to morph from our high-profile raconteurs to our high-profile conscience. What they are, though, is a high-profile debacle....