Since Santorum is imploding, I wonder if Weldon could fill his shoes? Any opinions from Pennylvanians?
I was there. He showed us 2 charts, one like what was given to Hadley back in 2001 and one was what Al-Quaida looked like today from info gleaned from AD types. The second chart had hundreds of photos on it, along with the lined references of who was associated with whom. These people mean to do us serious harm...we need to wake up. Things have not changed all that much with regards to info sharing and turf battles within D.C.
Good stuff from Weldon -- hope he can shake up DC and the intel agencies enough to accomplish something! I just bought his book. People who think he's doing this as some cheap "book promo" just have it all backwards -- he describes how he's spent many YEARS trying to reform intel agencies working "within the system" and how he tried in 1999 to have the kind of all-agency threat assessment center set up that could have used ABLE DANGER-type software to track all the myriad tidbits that come into different agencies.... INS, CIA, FBI, DIA, etc. each had relevant pieces of info that could have stopped 9/11 or similar plots in the future, but it's so difficult to get the intel bureaucracies to work together well (and Gorelick's 'wall' is only one part of the problem, because the turf battles are legendary).
Anyway, I've just begun reading the book and I don't know how reliable his main source 'Ali' is for all the info on Iran, but Weldon is definitely fighting the good fight, trying hard to improve our intel and counter-terrorism before we have attacks even worse than 9/11.
Looks like some unnamed source at the CIA 'outed' Weldon's Iranian exile source who he was calling 'Ali'.... its a guy named Fereidoun Mahdavi in Paris, and it's clear from this article that the CIA is busily trying to discredit him:
http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=2330
We know well from the Iraq experience (and it should have been obvious forever and ever) than anti-regime exiles from countries like Iran, Iraq, etc. can have strong motives to present distorted and/or fabricated 'intel' in order to try to get the US to move against the hated government they want to see overthrown.
Still, there are lots of excellent reasons already known for us to know that the MULLAHs of Tehran are the enemies of humanity, and certainly they are our enemies, responsible for a lot of American deaths and more all the time in their terror war against us in Iraq.
The CIA guys are right to be skeptical in trying to vet such 'sources' who may not be what they claim to be, but at the same time with HUMINT so pitifully poor for such countries we can't afford to ignore potentially good sources, either.
BUMP!