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Last week, Weldon went on the record claiming that the Defense Intelligence Agency had information linking Atta and three other men to al-Qaida back in 1999 but had been blocked from sharing the info with the FBI. If they had, Weldon said, the cell might have been broken up and 9/11 might well have been prevented.
Until yesterday, Weldon refused to name any members of the Able Danger team, citing fears that they might be retaliated against for revealing embarrassing truths about how the government failed to protect the country four years ago.
Shaffer himself said that some in the Pentagon are "trying to go dirty on me right now" for what he told the 9/11 Commission about the military’s failure to pass actionable info to the FBI’s anti-terrorism unit.
At the time he met with 9/11 staffers, in Oct of 2003, he was deployed in Afghanistan as a Special Ops officer.
But back in 1999, he was a civilian DIA caseworker and he was impressed with the information Able Danger was able to collect and analyze about the al-Qaida terror network.
Using terms like "massive data mining,’’ ‘‘parallel processing," and "neural networking," Shaffer tried to explain how Able Danger analysts made connections that intelligence agencies weren’t able to make.
"It’s not something that happens overnight. It’s a complex process of algorithms, evaluation, re-evaluation and rigorous review before it is considered a valid assumption or association," said Shaffer.
Later, he said when he tried to explain the process to 9/11 Commission staff members, "I don’t think they understood what we were telling them. It was like trying to show a pig a wrist-watch."
After talking to Shaffer, I know how the pig feels.
Still, he said, "The data we had available (in ’99) indicated these individuals (Atta and the rest) were affiliated with the Brooklyn cell.
"We were able to identify two of the three cells that conducted 9/11. We didn’t ID everybody in the cell, we didn’t know how they were organized or their objective, just their connections to al Qaida."
Yet when he tried to share this information with the FBI, he said he was blocked from doing so by Department of Defense. Part of the reason was recent history and the lack of trust that existed between the federal agencies.
The Branch Davidian debacle in Waco that left 70 people dead was still in the memory banks of all those who had been involved in it, including the U.S. Army Delta Force that advised the siege team.
When it came to al-Qaida, Shaffer believes the mindset of the military was "if we pass the information on to the FBI and they do something with it and if something goes wrong (we’re) going to get the blame for it."
So instead, he says now, the information was withheld, Able Danger was disbanded, and a few months later al-Qaida succeeded in hijacking four U.S. jetliners, flying two into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon.
As it happened, on that fateful day, then Maj. Shaffer was scheduled to meet a colleague at the Pentagon to discuss extending the mandatory retirement age for military reservists. If that meeting hadn’t been postponed, Shaffer would have been in the very wing at the Pentagon into which hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 crashed and burned.
Tuesday, Shaffer said he met with Pentagon Intel boss Stephen Cambone, who is looking into the matter.
Shaffer says he’s confident the truth about Able Danger will come out and that others involved in the unit will be coming forward soon to tell what they know and when they knew it.
His goal he says is to help Weldon resurrect the Able Danger model for intel collection so that future 9/11s can be prevented.
"I fought these battles.." says Shaffer, "and the same issues (of bureaucratic turf protecting) still exist today."
If other Able Danger analysts come forward to back up what Shaffer says, the Pentagon is going to have a lot of explaining to do.
Until then, says Shaffer, when it comes to telling what he knew, "I would like to believe I did my part."
Gil Spencer’s column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. E-mail gspencer@delcotimes.com
