People may be surprised to find out I have not yet gone through the GSN interview in detail. So here are some of the gems I located in my review today. First is the item I mentioned in a previous post regarding mosques and Atta and his photo.

Shaffer told GSN that one key to Able Danger’s success in identifying suspected terrorists was its willingness to buy information from brokers that identified visits by individuals to specific mosques located around the world. By crunching data about such visits during a six-month period, Able Danger’s data miners were able to spot illuminating patterns and identify potential relationships among alleged terrorists, Shaffer explained.

The photo of Atta which Able Danger had supposedly came from from a mosque he visited. I wonder whether that broker still has the Atta informati0n – including the photograph?

Later in the interview we get to some really interesting points:

SHAFFER:
Once these guys had emerged out of the data crunching, there was an interest to try to confirm or refute their linkage to Al Qaeda, and then to do operations to further exploit them. The reason I can’t go into much more detail is because for the [suspected terrorists based] overseas, the train continued on them. I don’t want to say anything that would violate security, based on the fact that there were other things that came out of this.

Our focus of the Able Danger oversight fiasco is the fact that this data also identified a cell here in the states. That became the critical issue — the fact that the SOCOM lawyers recommended to the chain of command of SOCOM that we could not share that information with the FBI.

GSN:
Let’s get to the crunch. Now you’ve identified five cells, one of which is in the United States.

SHAFFER:
Right

GSN:
At what stage does the Able Danger team say, “We’ve got some pretty hot information here, and we should share this with somebody”?

SHAFFER:
Capt. Philpott came to me and said, “Based on our internal discussions within Able Danger, we are concerned by the fact that this appears to be a group of terrorists here within the United States.” It was at that point in time that he asked me to broker a relationship or a meeting with the FBI.

Keep in mind, I had been asked to develop a parallel, but different, capability for the FBI on one of their terrorist targets overseas. So, at that point in time, I was negotiating with the FBI about parameters and scope of support. The same basic team that was doing the SOCOM stuff was going to be assembled to support the FBI mission as well. That includes some of the same data miners, the same technicians, the same analysts.

The FBI element is new to me, and more on that in a moment. I want to go over how they tripped over Atta and Co. here in the US.

We have to remember that they were running data sets in 6 month batches. What will be critical in how they detected Atta is knowing how many batches they ran and over what time periods. It is conceivable a ‘batch #1’ was run while Atta and Co. were out of country and then later a ‘batch #2’ run sees them here in the US.

Or, they run one batch of data, finding the connections overseas, and as they keep processing and analyzing it they realize the terrorists are here in the US. Not sure from these comments which way this transpired. However, it is clear Phillpott’s group are the ones primarily involved in making the assessment that Atta and Co. are terrorists and are here. Not Shaffer and his group.

OK, so we then find out Shaffer is negotiating to a support parallel data mining effort with the FBI at this very time Phillpott wants to pass their concerns to them!

GSN:
So, at the same time you’re being asked to set up a meeting with the FBI regarding Able Danger, you’re already talking to the FBI about using almost the same data mining resources on another FBI program.

SHAFFER:
Absolutely correct. That was why it was so logical for Scott to come to us and ask for that support. So, I called my FBI point of contact and said, “Hey, I’d like to link the special operations guys up. They’re doing a mission — I can’t tell you about it — but I’d like to make a meeting for FBI and your ‘Bubbas’ to meet with them and discuss the information they have.”

This is weird. This paints Shaffer well outside of Able Danger and its core people. I was scratching my head on this one. I now get the feeling Shaffer’s group simply aquired data, processed it to the point of the linkages being made, and then they passed it onto their ‘customers’. Their customers were investigative/intelligence groups that analyzed the linkages and determined who was a terrorist. That would explain why Shaffer seems to know a lot of things, but at the same time very little detail. He is at the front of the process and is not involved in the products.

This can be seen in this earlier passage by Shaffer that confirms Atta, al-Shehhi, al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi where identified in early work products, not the final report (after the purging of the files):

That’s what it showed. I took a copy of those clusters of information, a copy of a chart produced by Smith and company which showed, early on in the process, the Atta guy and other terrorists. It was this sheet that I hand-carried personally from LIWA down to Tampa and gave to Captain Philpott.

Shaffer and his group bring the list of potential terrorists from the data processing to SOCOM, who then perform the real analysis. This explains a lot of the disjoint nature of the story as it has been coming out.

Here is more substantiation on the pressure they received to desist activities, and possibly to destroy the data, from someone higher up than the Able Danger immediate chain of command:

GSN:
Was the resistance that you were getting to the methodology — we haven’t even gotten to the conclusions yet — driven largely by this individual lawyer or by his organization?

SHAFFER:
By the organization. I’m confident because I started getting problems with this issue back in my headquarters in D.C., through the DIA lawyers. I know they were talking to each other and it became a big issue that all the lawyers in DoD were talking about.

They were definitely getting heat from way up high in the DoD, and possibly the administration. The fact that he heard from lawyers in DC first meant the DC lawyers were not going through the SOCOM group – as they should have been doing per normal protocol. What caused this back door press is important to understand. Fortunately it appears we have plenty of lawyers for potential witnesses in the Senate hearings!

Some interesting tidbits in this section, which in light of the Weldon press conference yesterday really stands out because of the name dropped:

GSN:
The legal department doesn’t make the decision; the legal department whispers into the ear of the commander who makes the decision to either overrule them or overrule you.

SHAFFER:
Right.

GSN:
Who was the commander at the time? General Pete Schoomaker?

SHAFFER:
This never got to the commander. This got to the operations officer level and, as I recall, it was General [Geoffrey] Lambert, the J3 special operations command. I believe it was at that level where this decision was stopped.

Recall from this post Lambert is the Commanding Officer who was furious to have someone go behind his back and order the products and data destroyed. This appears to be have happened at the same time Shaffer is trying to connect SOCOM with the FBI.

So Lambert was possibly forced into halting the contact between SOCOM and the FBI – but who has that kind of clout? Who can stop a meeting to pass information which should not be in the military’s hands into the hands of domestic law enforcement where it belongs? Moreover, who can order the destruction of data behind a General’s back, and still have a job afterwards? I cannot believe this was all simply gears of the bureaucracy grinding away. This seems to be a power play of some kind.

Shaffer does project something quite interesting here:

Second, there’s going to be an e-mail trail, which if people actually look at it, they will realize what we attempted to do. It will prove the veracity of our attempts to move information from point A to point B. This was not done in a vacuum. It was done where we corresponded on these issues.

Most people might conclude ‘point A’ was Able Danger and ‘point B’ was the FBI. From what I am seeing ‘point A’ could also be Shaffer’s group and ‘point B’ be Phillpott’s group. That could lead to some interesting emails that could hint to Atta and Co., if not at least provide contemporaneous evidence to back up the Able Danger claims. Who knows what is in those emails. Maybe some serious complaints about pressure being applied by certain people.

Shaffer also touches on a point I made the other day as well, these data sets could exist outside the Pentagon. They are probably in the hands of the private companies who purchased them for the government in the first place.

Third, I don’t think they’ve found all the databases. Some of these databases are commercially held. We had contractors. There are contractors out there which had this data. I’m not convinced [DoD officials] have gone to all of the contractors and found it yet.

Most defense contractors hold onto contract deliverables for at least 5 years.

It was interesting to go through this so late in the process. There were some real interesting gems hidden in all the information. Sort of like data mining!