Posted on 08/18/2005 6:43:48 PM PDT by mercy
Tonight Shaffer, with his usual concise and direct style, gave us new tidbits to ponder.
In response to Hannity's question regarding how and why the infomation was not passed along Shaffer offered, "A two star general repremanded him in his strenuous insistance that the information regarding Atta and three others should be passed to the FBI. He was blocked and blocked completly by this two star who went so far as to upbraid him and remind him he was a general and Shaffer was not. "
This is one more significan blow to the criminal actions of the 9/11 CYA commission and perhaps a certain general. I can't wait till his name comes out. Perhaps he is no longer in the chain of command as sure he would still be working to block this coming out.
Although it didn't get much notice on FR earlier today information from Shaffer stated that the Bush Administration had known about these revelations since two weeks after 9/11. Very nearly four years. evidently they chose to let sleeping dogs lie. Probably part of Bush's 'New Tone in Washington' plan.
We're getting off topic here but I had a place in the 97-98 I used to go to called The Jeffersonian Project. Anyone remember that? It was sort of like FreeRepublic and I think I either found FR through them or through Drudge. After I found FR, I never went back to Drudge. What I like so much about this place are the comments everyone makes to the story. Bounces it around and you get to hear various opinions and ideas. Drudge is just headlines and stories, no feedback.
What WAS his name?
That would be Weasley Clark.
You miss my point. A poster named Mathluv suggested it would be easy to track down a 2 star. I simply pointed out--from experience--that unless you have other information to go on, like a clue from Shaffer, tracking down who that 2 star may have been would not be easy. I said in the Pentagon they're a dime a dozen meaning there are scads of 2 stars around. With a distinct paucity of information on the web today about who was where when, it would be tough to try and dope his/her name out w/out more information. If OTOH Shaffer says, it's trivial because you have the name. If this story has legs, then I would expect someone would name the general or admiral involved.
I use VADM for vice admiral, a 3 star admiral. In the Navy, a 1 star is often abbreviated RDML, a 2 star by RADM, 3 star VADM, and a 4 star is a full Admiral or ADM. That's the convention we usually used.
Back in the late 1980s, I was involved with a DOD science and technology group that oversaw the basic and applied research programs in the 3 Services. One of the thrusts had to do with supercomputing. At that time, we were just starting to build massively parallel computers and the talk was all about teraflop capability. I expect the computational hardware the Able Danger folk were using for their data mining included such parallel computers. So the prefix "tera" in the sense it is being discussed here was being commonly thrown around in the late 80s. When LTG Hughes was head of DIA (Feb 96-Jul 99), one of the agency thrusts was to use information technology (IT) and the development of military intelligence information systems. This was the front end of what we now call network centric warfare. It's all about collecting massive amounts of data and information and then using computational techniques to fuse it into operational knowledge.
"The 15 boxes also makes me go hummmm. What could possibly be in 15 boxes? A box of paper has 5000 sheets of paper."
Just yesterday, the administration released another 30,000 pages of material related to the nomination of Judge Roberts to the supreme court. That's in addition to the thousands upon thousands of pages already released. How many boxes would that be? And that's just one guy. Don't think you can make much out of the number of boxes vis-a-vis the Able Danger story.
If I remember, originally Kissinger was supposed to head this commission. The press went after him, and so Kean was named.
In retrospect, the Administration probably should have complained about Gorelick. However, there were other things going on at the same time, and they apparently made the judgement that this was not a battle they could win.
No one does everything perfectly, including President Bush. However, I think that the chickens are coming home to roost on the commission, and that makes me quite happy.
I worked for a textbook publisher for over ten years. I was amazed at the number of high school teachers who were not 'math people', but even more amazed at the ones at middle school - who were 'only' elementary ed majors.
Where my grandchildren go to school, they have three very good math teachers in HS. Even the ones at middle school seem to be good, although I know the 6th and 8th grade teachers are not really 'math'.
My s-i-l WILL make sure all four kids do well in math. They have a good start!
Now would be a good time for him to select nuclear.
Here is a bit more about dates of Gorelick tenure.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1466520/posts
The Pentagon is now denying that Able Danger made any mention of Mohammed Ata prior to 9/11. The CYA mentality is out in force. Shaffer needs coorboration and fast.
But the 30000 pages covers many years of work related paperwork. Atta was just being watched. How could that generate 75000 pages of paperwork?
Where'd you hear it?
Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, wrote to all DIA personnel this week to explain the protest resignation of a DIA analyst in October. The analyst, Kie Fallis, quit the day after the USS Cole was attacked by suicide bombers in Aden, Yemen. Mr. Fallis charged that a report he had written on the threat of a terrorist attack in Yemen was suppressed by senior DIA officials.Mr. Fallis' resignation letter stated that he had "significant analytic differences" with DIA superiors over a terrorist threat assessment produced in June.
U.S. intelligence officials said there were warnings, but they arrived too late. The National Security Agency issued a report shortly after the Cole was bombed warning of attacks in the region —too late to be useful.
Adm. Wilson said he asked the Pentagon inspector general (IG) to investigate Mr. Fallis' charges. In an awkwardly worded statement, the three-star admiral said on Wednesday the IG "found no evidence to support the public perception that information warning of an attack on Cole was suppressed, ignored or even available in DIA." What about the private perception?
The admiral's statement drew smirks from several intelligence officials. It relied on a dodge often used by intelligence analysts to dismiss unwelcome information. Saying there is "no evidence" —like that presented to a court of law — is often used to mask the fact there is lots of intelligence to the contrary that spooks would rather not talk about in public.
One piece of the puzzle that Mr. Fallis uncovered was an intelligence report about a secret meeting of al Qaeda terrorists in a condominium complex in Malaysia in January 2000.
Information obtained after September 11 identified two of them as Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who would be on American Airlines Flight 77 when it crashed into the Pentagon. They met with a former Malaysian army captain, Yazi Sufaat, described by Malaysian authorities as a key link in Southeast Asia for al Qaeda, who later would be tied to the bombing of the Cole.
What alarmed U.S. intelligence at the time was that Malaysian security officials traced the men to the Iranian Embassy there, where they spent the night.
Time to put up or shut up ... let Col. Shaffer name names ... Enquiring minds want to know.
Shaffer says he was trying to broker a connection between SOCOM and the FBI. Shaffer told Spencer that one reason that Able Danger got denied permission to brief the FBI on their findings was that there was a fear not just among Pentagon lawyers but among Special Ops command that if things went badly with any FBI operation to take out the al Qaeda cells they had identified, it would be “another Waco."
Spencer says, “He didn’t blame the DoD lawyers so much, but the command” (for blocking the team from sharing their findings with the FBI). “Not Schoomaker…. It rose to the level of a 2-star, 3-star general,” who he didn’t name...
All the other reports I read just said two star, Wilson was a three star. Considering his obstruction in the Cole incident, I would be willing to be my last dollar it is him.
Just my $.02, but this sounds to me as though it could be preemptive action against two things: First, President Bush doesn't allow the left to paint him as hating Clinton because he doesn't "name names" immediately. Second, the information is way too juicy to be kept secret, and therefore the administration can wait for it to surface with out dirtying their hands by revealing it directly.
One of the tenets of GWB's administration is plugging the leaks to a large extent. This move is in character. If the timing of these revelations - just when Hillary's starting to enter the gates for the '08 presidential race - is merely beneficial coincidence, perhaps there is a divine hand orchestrating all of this.
If this had come out in 2001, it would not have affacted Hillary that much. She had not managed to divorce her image from her husband's yet. Now that she has sufficiently differentiated her image from the rapist's, she will have a harder time sloughing all of this off onto him.
Thoughts, anyone?
You make a lot of sense. Sounds quite Rovian. Hope so.
It stands to reason anybody with half a brain in the adminstration could see the 'Ends Justify The Means' Omission Commission' was going to be a put up job from the gate. It could easily be the case that Shaffer is Jack Ryan and is fully supported. I know I wouldn't walk out on this limb all by myself as you'd have to know it would only be sawed off and all would be for naught. Yes I can imagine very skilled hands indeed managing this in the finest detail. HopeIhopeIhopeIhope.
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