Unaccountability

Media is a Plural - Rory O'Connor's Blog - December 9, 2005
Able Danger and Unaccountability
http://www.roryoconnor.org/blog/index.php?p=151

A December 8 Washington Post article by Dana Milbank, "Intelligence Design and the Architecture of War," described a question-and-answer session that followed a recent National Press Club speech by former deputy defense secretary (now World Bank president) Paul Wolfowitz.

"How do you account for the intelligence failures....in Iraq?" Wolfowitz was asked.

"Well," he said after a long pause, "I don't have to."
Precisely. That very lack of accountability at the highest levels of the Pentagon continues to be one of the biggest reasons why the world's only superpower is losing the war on terror.

Accountability for intelligence failures, Wolfowitz explained, just wasn't his problem. "And it's not just because I don't work for the U.S. government anymore," he said. "In my old job I didn't have to. I was like everyone else outside the intelligence community... We relied on the intelligence community for those judgments, so the question is, in a way, how do they account for it?"

To Milbank, the pass-the-buck, laissez-faire attitude exhibited by Wolfowitz "was an unexpected response from a man who, as the Pentagon's No. 2, sat atop 80 percent of the nation's intelligence budget and an intelligence agency that made particularly aggressive claims about Iraq's weapons."

But after months of chasing the Pentagon for answers about, and accountability for, intelligence failures relative to the Able Danger data mining operation -- which purportedly identified four 9/11 hijackers a year before the worst terror attacks ever on US soil -- the Wolfowitz "What Me Worry?" response was exactly what I expected.

Just this week, for example, after literally months of silence, the Department of Defense finally provided an answer -- of sorts -- to my many queries.
That's the good news. Now the bad news: the answer is "No."

More specifically, as this email message from my now-frequent pen pal, DOD press officer Commander Gregory Hicks, puts it:

Rory - Per our conversation last week, the Secretary, Mr. Di Rita and Mr. Whitman have all declined your interview request. R/ Greg

I felt badly for Greg, having read him the riot act a few days earlier out of frustration at the continued stonewalling by DOD and the related Defense Intelligence Agency. But I felt worst for the rest of us, since responding to inquiries, and providing answers about accountability, is (at least nominally) Greg's job.... Or is it?

Given that "Information Operations’ is a key component of DOD's ongoing war on the press...ah, global terrorism, and "Information Dominance’ is its goal, and the 'Fourth Estate' has lately been redefined as the 'Fourth Front,' it's not surprising that the information exchange with Hicks and a prior parade of press officers at DOD and DIA have thus far been strictly one-way.

Still, it's more than a little odd that Pentagon officials continue to pretend they know nothing about Able Danger. After all, the United States Army initiated the entire program! Surely the Army is still part of the Department of Defense?

Nonetheless, months of queries concerning Able Danger elicited nothing other than this week's denial of my requests to speak to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, or his spokesmen Larry Di Rita and Bryan Whitman, or indeed ANYONE in the Pentagon.

My quest began in September, when Hick's predecessor, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Conway, told me DOD "had nothing" on Able Danger and my queries should instead be made directly to DIA.

But when I did so, DIA spokesmen Don Black and Commander Terrance Sutherland each subsequently said my questions should more properly be addressed to DOD. By the time I went back to DOD, LTC Conway had moved on, and Commander Hicks had taken his place. But Hicks was also unable to find any information. So he asked me, "Do you have any more info on this that can gain us some clarity on it and help define our search?"

It was hard to believe, I told him, that neither DOD nor DIA had any data on Able Danger, since "several DIA analyst and officials" had toured a secret Raytheon-run Able Danger facility in Garland, Texas between approximately August 2000 and January 2001.

"Maybe you should query Art Zuelke, the DIA chief of the Transnational Warfare Group or his colleague, Cal Temple, who was sent down to find out how the project was working," I suggested. "Or maybe try the National Reconnaissance Office, since even to enter the facility one had to have an additional NRO clearance."

Despite the specifics, DOD remained somehow unable (or unwilling) to find any reference to Able Danger anywhere within its vaunted information systems.
I had also repeatedly asked for information about the clumsy and transparent attempts to silence Able Danger whistleblower Tony Shaffer, a DIA employee who had earned the Pentagon's ire by speaking to journalists about the program. Shaffer was slated to testify before Arlen Specter's Senate Judiciary Committee on September 23, until the Pentagon pulled the plug at the last minute and refused permission.

'Why the gag order against Shaffer and other Able Danger personnel?" I asked DIA spokesman Sutherland.

"I know nothing about it," Sutherland responded. "Show me the gag order!"

And Commander Hicks could only add, "I am not getting any responses yet. When I do, I'll let you know."

Meanwhile, Shaun Waterman of UPI learned from Shaffer's attorney, Mark Zaid, that a letter signed by the DIA's principle deputy general counsel, Robert Berry, specifically forbid Shaffer from testifying. After Shaffer had been "told verbally" he would not be allowed to testify, Zaid had requested the decision be put in writing. But somehow the spokesman for the DIA was "unable" to find anything out from the principle deputy general counsel for the DIA.

For that matter, the DIA spokesmen might also check in with DOD flack Bryan Whitman, who told the press on September 20 that the Pentagon had blocked testimony by Shaffer and others. Whitman said in a statement that testimony about the program "would not be appropriate - we have expressed our security concerns and believe it is simply not possible to discuss Able Danger in any great detail in an open public forum." He offered no other detail about the Pentagon's reasons for blocking the testimony.

The Pentagon might also want to talk with Retired General Hugh Shelton, who confirmed the Able Danger al-Qaida data hunt to Sacramento Bee reporter James Rosen this week, and said he was briefed twice about it before Sept. 11 attacks.
"Right after I left SOCOM (Special Operations Command), I asked my successor to put together a small team, if he could, to try to use the Internet and start trying to see if there was any way that we could track down Osama bin Laden or where he was getting his money from or anything of that nature," Shelton told Rosen, who noted that "Shelton's assertions are significant because they raise new questions about the government's knowledge of the al-Qaida network before the Sept. 11 attacks, and about the subsequent findings of the 9/11 commission, set up by Congress to probe the attacks."

Shelton said Gen. Peter Schoomaker, now Army chief of staff, set up a team of five to seven intelligence officers after Shelton was promoted to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1997 and Schoomaker succeeded him as Special Operations commander. Schoomaker briefed Shelton on the program's progress in late 1997, and then sometime between 1999 and 2001, Shelton received a more extensive briefing from Defense Intelligence Agency officers involved in the program.

In its final report, the 9/11 commission said it had not identified any of the 19 hijackers before the attacks. But Able Danger operatives like Tony Shaffer say they tried unsuccessfully to bring it to the attention of the Commissioners.
How do the 9/11 Commissioners account for their intelligence failures? They don't. Instead they simply deny them, as Thomas Kean, Lee Hamilton, Tim Roemer and Slade Gorton have done repeatedly ever since the Able Danger story first broke in August. Why? Because -- like Paul Wolfowitz and his former boss Donald Rumsfeld -- they don't have to. Not yet at least.

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