Inteldump's Jon Holdaway has some more insights on the Able Danger story. (Holdaway's original post on the Able Danger subject last week attracted the comment of then still anonymous LTC Shaffer, so it's particularly worth paying attention to). Shorter Holdaway: the recent revelations would seem to point to internal-SOCOM issues, which apparently are not unknown in Holdaway's Army-JAG world. E.g. if you listen to Shaffer really carefully, who suppressed Able Danger's findings were not just "DOD" lawyers (and certainly not DOJ lawyers), but SOCOM lawyers, and even SOCOM command, which apparently (according to Shaffer) was inhibited in the post-Waco atmosphere from being exposed as doing anything that could be perceived as legally controversial on US soil. See Shaffer's comments from the NYT yesterday:

...The officer, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, said military lawyers later blocked the team from sharing any of its information with the bureau...

"I was at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued," Colonel Shaffer said of his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the F.B.I. in 2000 and early 2001...

"It was because of the chain of command saying we're not going to pass on information - if something goes wrong, we'll get blamed," he said.

(emphasis added).

It seems likely DIA and even OSD may not have known anything about Able Danger or its findings, especially at the time. But what happened when the 9/11 commission requested all documents on Project Able Danger from the Pentagon and the administration in October 2003 -- and then a second time -- is a key and unresolved question here. Did the commission get all the documents, and if not, why not? There's been a hint from Shaffer's camp of documents going missing, including from his office.

Holdaway also cautions that he still has a lot of concerns with the whole story, and particularly the fact that Shaffer can only be providing a "limited, albeit important" side of the story, given his role was providing support to the Able Danger team, not at the center of it. Stay tuned, I don't think we've heard the end of this story, and anticipate we could see it evolve quite a bit.

More here.

Posted by Laura at August 18, 2005 09:38 AM