Shaffer's ABLE DANGER Statement - Part 1

Page 6: Part 1 of

Tony Shaffer's ABLE DANGER Statement -

UNCLASSIFIED DRAFT

PREPARED STATEMENT OF
ANTHONY A. SHAFFER, LT COL, US ARMY
RESERVE, SENIOR INTELLIGENCE OFFICER

BEFORE THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICE
COMMITTEE (HASC),
CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2006

“ABLE DANGER and the 9/11 Attacks”

(U) Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you and provide you background and related issues surrounding the ABLE DANGER project. I applaud the Committee’s interest in investigating this complex topic.

(U) ABLE DANGER was a good news story: the Department of Defense’s effort to target Al Qaeda’s global structure [ ] – to identify their global centers of gravity, and by the full range of military options [ ] decisively engage and defeat them.

(U) In the world of today, this is not a new concept, as we have been at war with this organization since 11 September 2001 – what is unique to ABLE DANGER is that this effort was commenced in September 1999 – fully two years before that clear and unforgettable September morning that will forever remain transfixed in our collective memory.

(U) ABLE DANGER was the right mission, at the right time, with the right people against the right enemy – an out of the box concept that at its heart was an effort to bring back a modern version of the Office of Strategic Studies (OSS); an organization that served at the forefront of this country’s secret battles of World War II.

(U) Using the then 1999 era cutting edge technology of “data mining” as pioneered by the U.S. Army’s Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA), the ABLE DANGER team was able to establish a ‘starting point’ for the ABLE DANGER effort.

(U) GEN Shelton publicly confirmed the existence and mission of ABLE DANGER this past November – it was his concept, refined by GEN Pete Schoomaker, the then (1999/2000) commander of SOCOM that we, the ABLE DANGER team brought to life.

(U) The idea was to take the ‘best and brightest’ military operators, intelligence officers, technicians and planners from the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), the U.S. Army and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), in an entrepreneurial endeavor, much like bringing the best minds and capabilities from Ford Motor Company, General Motors and Daimler-Chrysler to focus on a single challenge. In the case of ABLE DANGER, the challenge was to discover the global ‘body’ of Al Qaeda – then, with this knowledge, prepare military and intelligence “options” that would be supported by the “actionable information” that was being produced by the project.

(U) The objective of ABLE DANGER, as is in the 27 Jun 2005 congressional record, was simple: to go after Al Qaeda.

(U) This was no “experiment” or simply “a planning exercise” as has been portrayed by some in the media and at the Pentagon. And my role was not simply a ‘courtier’ of information as has been inaccurately portrayed by a Pentagon spokesman in the summer of last year.

(U) The story I will present to you today is how, despite all the project had going for it, the operation failed. This bold and audacious operation, with this critical focus was recently opined by the 9-11 commission to be “not historically relevant”… We hope to show you the truth of how relevant and important this effort was – and how it will rewrite the history of 9-11.

(U) In the initial data runs conducted by LIWA on behalf of SOCOM in early 2000 the ABLE DANGER team discovered intelligence information of interest to us. I had used LIWA and its data mining capabilities in support of DoD activities engaged in offensive operations planning.

(U) This unclassified data mining was the heart of the intelligence foundation – what we found to be a critical method that detected not only Atta, but also the Al Qaeda threat in the port of Adan, Yemen, just days before the attack on the USS Cole. The idea was to then refine the data and use classified data from DIA and NSA to confirm and enhance the terrorist linkages established via the unclassified data.

(U) In the end, the ABLE DANGER team was not able to provide this key, and what was believed to be “actionable” information to anyone due to the breakdown in the ability to pass information between communities of the U.S. Government.

(U) According to multiple public comments by former FBI director Louis Freeh made this past November, had he and the FBI received the information we had within the ABLE DANGER project – information that SOCOM asked me to broker a meeting with the FBI to discuss transfer of same – they, the FBI, may well have been able to complete their picture of the gathering Al Qaeda threat and potentially disrupted or disabled the 9/11 attack. And, more importantly, the ABLE DANGER team had put together, using the amalgam of both open source and classified databases specific operational “options” to offensively target and disrupt the larger, global Al Qaeda structure; offensive options that were prepared and briefed to GEN Shelton in January of 2001.

(U) You might ask how I can be so confident in my statement regarding ABLE DANGER’s likelihood of preventing the 9/11 attacks – here is why:

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-(U) When this occurred in the late 2000/early 2001 timeframe, one of the U.S. governments best potential shots to not only detect the Al Qaeda 9/11 planning effort, but to obtain actionable information regarding Al Qaeda leadership was lost.

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