August 17, 2005

Able Danger update.

The NYT reports on Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, an Army intelligence officer, who has come forward to say that "two briefcase-size containers" of Able Danger documents were passed on to the 9/11 commission.
Former commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton said last week that the military official who made the claim had no documentation to back it up.

Shaffer rejected that remark. "Leaving a project targeting al-Qaida as a global threat a year before we were attacked by al-Qaida is equivalent to having an investigation of Pearl Harbor and leaving somehow out the Japanese," he said in the Fox interview.

In the Times account of the interview, Shaffer said he was ''at the point of near insubordination over the fact that this was something important, that this was something that should have been pursued'' in describing his efforts to get the evidence from the intelligence program to the FBI in 2000 and early 2001.

What can Kean and Hamilton say to this?

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