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August 30, 2005

Able Danger - Franks, Tenet, Goss, and Haynes so far

That's 2 out of 3 Medal of Freedom winners involved, if you're keeping track. Plus one Bush appointee for the Federal Circuit court.

Tommy Franks

If you still can't understand why most of the Able Danger team members are so reluctant to come forward - even now - consider this. Able Danger was a SOCOM operation, initially tasked to its commander, Pete Schoomaker, now the Chief of Staff of the Army. According to the 9/11 Commission:

General Pete Schoomaker, the chief of staff of the U.S. Army and former Commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, said that if the Special Operations Command had been a supported command before 9/11, he would have had the al Qaeda mission rather than deferring to CENTCOM’s lead.

Tommy Franks took over as CENTCOM commander on July 6, 2000. On page 236 of his bestseller, American Soldier, Franks describes speaking to the "CENTCOM intelligence staff" on September 7, 2001:

I spoke about the excesses of Reconstruction after the Civil War, which had resulted in the enactment of Posse Comitatus, the law that prevents military forces from serving as policemen inside the United States. Would that stricture survive a full-blown terrorist attack?

"So, the thing that keeps me awake at night, Sergeant," I emphasized, "is the possible use of our armed forces against American citizens. We do our job well, but we're trained to fight foreign enemies. We're not police officers, sheriffs, or the FBI. If we were ever required to act in that capacity during a major emergency like an attack on the World Trade Center, the effect on America could be devastating. Martial law would not sit well in a free and open society."

On page 235, Franks recalls the summer of 2001:

The summer found our intelligence people working with the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, collecting and analyzing persistent but inspecific indications of planned terrorist activity in the Middle East. This was "all source" information - a blend of human intelligence and technical intelligence. I ordered the component commanders to have their people keep a lower profile. On several occassions, I increased our force protection posture - the Threat Con - but never as a result of a specific threat. Something was bewing, but the best minds at the CIA and the National Security Agency could now pin down the threats with any degress of certainty. Where would we see a terrorist act. . . and when?

As I read the increasingly alarming reports of potential attacks on Western facilities in the region, a thought formed. Al Qaeda had used cars, trucks, and boats as suicide bombs. What about small planes loaded with explosives? I sent a note - first to our embassy in Riyadh, then to other embassies across the AOR - asking the ambassadors to pass on my concerns to their hosts. "We should work to tune the host nations in the region in to this type of threat," I said.

It sounds to me like Franks had a very good idea about Al Qaeda's plans, possibly even thanks to Able Danger, he just assumed the attacks would be overseas, so his concern about Posse Comitatus precluded sharing their intelligence with the FBI. As CENTCOM commander, the Unites States was not in his AOR.

George Tenet

If Intel-Dump can be believed, which I think it can, Shaffer has said:

And lawyers of the era also felt that any intelligence officer viewing open internet information for the purpose of intelligence collection automatically required that any "open source" information obtained be treated as if it was "intelligence information"...does this sound like idiocy to you? It did to me - and we fought it - and I was in meetings at the OSD level, with OSD laywers, that debated this - and I even briefed the DCI George Tenet on this issue relating to an internet project.

Remember this from Weldon's speech?

At the military's inception, the CIA drags its feet and limits its support to the effort. In an off-the-record conversation between the
DCI and the CIA representative to this military unit, a man that I will call Dave and our military *intelligence* officer explains that even though he understands the military's effort is against the global infrastructure of al Qaeda, he tells me that the CIA will, and I quote, never provide the best information on al Qaeda, end quote. Why would they not do that? Because of the effort that they were taking as part of a finding they had on bin Laden himself and if the military's project was successful it would, quote, steal their thunder. Steal the CIA's thunder.

Dave went on to say that short of the CINC, General so and so,
calling the Director, George Tenet, directly, the CIA would never
provide the best information to the military on al Qaeda. To my
knowledge, that information was never provided.

Still wonder why the CIA was dragging its feet on it's 9/11 report?

Porter Goss

The 8/12 statement by the 9/11 Commission (now a "public discourse board") besides backing up Shaffer's and Phillpott's basic story, also contains this interesting statement about what Shaffer told them:

He also complained that Congress, particularly the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), had effectively ended a human intelligence network he considered valuable.

Who was chairman of the Permanent Select Committee at the time?

Porter J. Goss became Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on 21 April 2005. He served as the 19th Director of Central Intelligence from 24 September 2004 until 21 April 2005.

Previously, Mr. Goss represented the 14th Congressional District of Florida for almost 16 years. He was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 1997 until his nomination as DCI in August 2004. He served for almost a decade as a member of the committee, which oversees the intelligence community and authorizes its annual budget. During the 107th Congress, Mr. Goss co-chaired the joint congressional inquiry into the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

William Haynes

The Norristown Times Herald, which continues to get the uncut dope direct from Congressman Weldon's office, tells us this:

The Pentagon pulled the plug on the classified program, however, according to Shaffer, because it feared negative repercussion if the operation went wrong. Shaffer has met with the Judiciary Committee twice recently, he said, and revealed the names of about five Defense Department attorneys who advised shutting down "Able Danger" prior to the terrorist attacks....

The Pentagon's Office of General Counsel is ultimately responsible for legal decisions, he said, and he believes getting hold of the legal papers on "Able Danger" is paramount to resolving the controversy. "If I could have one (set of) documents, I would ask for the lawyers' notes," he said.

Conveniently enough, the General Counsel for the Pentagon, William Haynes, might have already turned over some of his notes to the Judiciary Committee, seeing as how he has been awaiting confirmation from the exact same committee ever since President Bush nominated him for the Fourth Circuit Court on September 29, 2003.

While not officially confirmed until May 17, 2001, this February 19, 2001 organizational chart still shows William Haynes in charge at the General Counsel's office. From January 2001 until Haynes formally took charge, Hayne's current deputy Dan Dell'Orto was officially in charge. Needless to say, both Haynes and Dell'Orto have since been caught up in the torture scandal, which is probably why Haynes' nomination is still stuck in the Judiciary Committee:

A law enacted in 1994 bars torture by U.S. military personnel anywhere in the world. But the Pentagon working group's 2003 report, prepared under the supervision of general counsel William J. Haynes II, said that "in order to respect the President's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign . . . [the prohibition against torture] must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken pursuant to his Commander-in-Chief authority."

Haynes -- through Daniel J. Dell'Orto, principal deputy general counsel for the Defense Department -- wrote a memo March 17 that rescinded the working group's report, and Dell'Orto confirmed that withdrawal yesterday at the hearing. According to a copy of the memo obtained by The Washington Post, the general counsel's office determined that the report "does not reflect now-settled executive branch views of the relevant law."

So to Jon Holdaway, Laura Rozen, Vox Taciturn, Kevin Drum, AJ Strata, and all the others who have been following this story - I have a suggestion. Let's stay with it until all the facts come out, regardless of where it leads, or where we think the "blame" might fall.

Posted by Mike at August 30, 2005 10:17 AM

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