The Able Danger bit has been fairly big news around DC lately, I have even been told not to erase any emails/documents/official things dealing with the program. I don't have any, so I am following those instructions to the letter...
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The big problem is that while Lt Col Anthony Shaffer, CAPT Scott Philpott and others have claimed that Able Danger identified several of the 9/11 hijackers well before 9/11, most notably Mohammed Atta, they have produced no evidence. Whiel they might sound pretty cheesy, nothing other than the recollections of a few of the people who worked on the program (out of many) has come up to corroborate their claims. The supposed chart that had Atta on it was supposedly destroyed (the guy who claims he had it said he had to get rid of it during a move or renovation and he threw it away
, if I had something with that hot a peice of information on it I would have held on to it really tight.....) and no other documentation exists to back up the claims. And the dates that people claim that Able Danger picked up on Atta and the others were before they entered the states or on anyones' radar screen. How they would have picked him out is a mystery.
Another problem, Lt Col Shaffer has no first hand knowledge of all of this, he was the DIA liason to Able Danger and only passed on what he was told about Atta by others involved in the program. He never saw the chart in question or anything else with his own eyes. Oh yeah, one more thing, Lt Col Shaffer had on administrative leave since March 2004 and has lost his security clearance. He loses a little bit of credibility.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,170878,00.html
Yet another problem, Rep. Curt Weldon has brought up a few other things that he claims the Intelligence Community, specifically the CIA, has ignored and/or screwed up on. While you can find plenty that the CIA has screwed up on, some of Rep. Weldon's claims are a little shaky to say the least. In his book,
Countdown to Terror http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0895260050/103-6198410-1844666?v=glance&n=283155&v=glance , Rep. Weldon claims that he has a source that knows that Iran is hiding Osama bin Laden, is preparing terrorist attacks against the United States, has a crash program to build an atomic bomb and, as a Shiite country, is the chief sponsor of what is a largely Sunni-directed insurgency in Iraq. While there might be truth to some of them, his source (named 'Ali' by him) is most likely a man labled as a fabricator by the CIA and has proven very unreliable in the past
http://www.answers.com/topic/manucher-ghorbanifar .
Plus, how is Rep. Weldon risking his career by coming forward with this information? The only threat to is career is not getting reelected.
So while the Able Danger story is definitely tantilizing, it has been a lot of smoke and no fire. There has been no evidence to back up the claims of Rep. Weldon, Lt Col Shaffer and all of the others who have made the claims about the program.
