Informed Speculation

The best bit:

SHAFFER: I was tasked by the Navy to look at bringing back some of the aspects regarding the technology of the Able Danger capability earlier this year. Through our research and coordination with Congress, with Congressman Curt Weldon, we came to find that the information we provided to the 9/11 Commission had never got to the commissioners. Subsequent to that being discovered, Congressman Weldon and his staff did additional research, and we came to find there was a significant amount of information that was totally deleted or not provided to the actual commissioners.

S. O’BRIEN: But the 9/11 commissioners did their report a while back.

SHAFFER: Right.

S. O’BRIEN: I mean, why isn’t this six months ago, even earlier than that? Why now?

SHAFFER: Well, I understand. I can’t address the report, other than I know I provided information to Mr. Zelicow (ph) in Bagram of October of ‘03. That information was significant in the fact that in their 12 August statement, they talk about that he called back immediately, requesting more information. I was asked to talk to him in January of ‘03, where I called his office — I mean January ‘04, where I called his office, and they changed their mind about talking to me. S. O’BRIEN: Well, I’m — forgive me for a moment.

SHAFFER: Go ahead.

S. O’BRIEN: I want to kind of walk through this slowly and clearly.

SHAFFER: Sure.

S. O’BRIEN: You sort of are pointing out that things were mired and bogged down in dates. But when this was not part of the 9/11 Commission’s report, why didn’t you say, “This is ridiculous, I must go public now, because there was a crucial drop in information, someone dropped the ball, I need to tell the American public?” Why not do that?

SHAFFER: Right. There were two reasons.

To be totally honest with you, we believed that there may have been a classified annex. Not being on the commission, not being — not working at that level, I had no way of knowing. I had to believe that there must have been some reason that that information was not provided to the public, either by follow-on information — operations of some sort that related to this or something else.

S. O’BRIEN: OK. That explains it for me, then, at least. You’ve claimed that this is information that you had about a terrorist a full year before 9/11.

SHAFFER: Right.

S. O’BRIEN: Mohamed Atta, who was obviously part of this team of hijackers. Where did this information that he was a terrorist linked to al Qaeda, where did this come from that you had that nobody else in the security branch, as far as we can tell, had that information?

SHAFFER: I didn’t have the information. I was part of the task force which supported Able Danger.

What I did was I married the land information warfare activity, LIMA, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, an Army unit, Army capability, to the special operations command for the purposes of this exercise, this targeting exercise of al Qaeda. What the LIWA did — and it was their ability to go through massive amounts of open-source data, 2.5 terabytes, and look for patterns that related to previously-known terrorists. It was that information then which popped up…

S. O’BRIEN: So, by trolling the Internet and LexusNexus, things like that, I think that’s what you mean by open source data? Am I right about that?

SHAFFER: Open source — anything that’s not a classified database. We’re talking about commercial databases, financial databases. Anything that’s out there that relates to the real world.

And let me be specific on this. S. O’BRIEN: And his name pops up?

SHAFFER: Well, yes, because terrorists live in the real world. As we recognize from the London bombings, there’s a picture of the terrorist in a whitewater rafting trip. They live in the real world just like we do. They plan in the real world.

S. O’BRIEN: What were those documents that — give me a sense of what kinds of documents targeted Mohamed Atta a year before 9/11 as a potential terrorist.

SHAFFER: For a couple of different reasons, I’m not going — I’m not going to get into very specifics for this, because, again, we’re trying to figure out a way that we can continue to do this. And I don’t want to give away anything that someone can use against us.

S. O’BRIEN: But it’s open sourcing, right? I mean, so it would be available to anyone.

SHAFFER: The sourcing, I’ve covered the sourcing, which is essentially open source. Now, how we arrayed that and how we use the technology — you know, first off, I’m not the technician. I’m an intelligence officer relating to human intelligence. I was one of the folks who was the — one of the managers in the process.

What the process actually did, though, was take this information, using advanced algorithms, looking for patterns, and it popped up this information based on all the information that was available on the open source — out of open source systems on these individuals.

Hat tip to Jim Geraghty…