How to handle an inconvenient whistle-blower

By Wes Vernon

A Pentagon official who has been causing much discomfort to powerful people in two administrations has received lucrative job offers. One of them required his presence two states away on the very day he was to testify before Congress on the Able Danger scandal. Coincidence?

Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer is one of the military officers who have said that a secret intelligence unit named Able Danger identified Sept. 11 mastermind Mohammad Atta (living the U.S.) as a terrorist fully one year before attacks on New York and Washington. The warnings were ignored. Shaffer is speaking out. That has earned him the enmity of powerful figures in the Clinton Administration (on whose watch the warnings were first issued), the Bush administration (which did not want to start its White House tenure by rattling cages that would have prompted Clinton acolytes to holler "partisanship"), and the 9/11 commission which ignored the Able Danger information.

So there are lots of people who want to sweep the scandal under the rug, and who wish Shaffer and his whistle-blowing colleague, Navy Capt. Scott Philpott would shut up and get out of the way. But they won't. So they have been harassed. This is reminiscent of Harry Truman's admonition that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.

One of the people who understands that warning very well is Congressman Curt Weldon who has been bird-dogging the Able Danger scandal for months. He has even written a book dealing with it. But he has been in Congress for twenty years and is the second ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee. So he at least has the clout to fight back against the stonewall, though there is a special effort being made to unseat him in November. That is a separate matter for a future column.

Shaffer and Philpott have no such clout. Thus they depend on people such as Weldon and Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter to go to bat for them when things get especially nasty, as opposed to regular nasty which is a day in-day out occurrence for them right now.

In my recent interview with Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican, there was the following [slightly edited] dialogue:

WELDON: Now there are a number of investigations underway. The Inspector General [IG at Pentagon-DOD] is continuing an investigation of the way DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] handled Tony Shaffer, and ironically, in the past couple of days, Tony Shaffer has mysteriously received offers for lucrative jobs [from two different companies], both of which have ties to guess who? The DIA. Perhaps that's an effort to buy him off.

VERNON: [Are] you able to identify those firms with ties to the DIA?

WELDON: I'm not because I just got wind of it last night [This was March 14].

VERNON: Are they jobs for which he [Shaffer] would normally be qualified?

WELDON: I assume they are, but you might want to talk to Tony about that.

I made the effort, and found that Shaffer had been ordered not to talk publicly pending the IG's probe. But after several conversations about Able Danger, this column can report the following:

Shaffer got the first job offer out of the blue. It was for a salary comfortably above his current earnings at DOD/DIA. The firm has ties not only with the DIA, but with the CIA as well.

Coincidences do happen, but the prospective employer wanted him to travel out of state in less than 24 hours on the very day he had to be on Capitol Hill in regard to the Able Danger scandal. To take the job, Shaffer would have had to resign his job at DOD, and take on a position as an analyst, for which he has no experience. After resigning from DOD, it would take him at least six months to get his clearance back. Such clearance would have been required in the new job. Moreover he would need to learn an entirely new set of skills, and of course that would also take some time.

OBVIOUS QUESTION: If the new firm could not use him for at least six months, what was the rush to get him out of town on less than 24 hours notice?

The second job offer, while attractive, involved much less pressure.

There are many other questions that deserve answers on Able Danger, and herewith are just some of them:

• Why did a career DIA official, now very powerful in the Bush administration, refuse a briefing on Able Danger during the latter Clinton years? Weldon reminded me of Shaffer's testimony that just as a CD explaining the scandal was starting at the briefing, the career man stood up and said, "I don't want to hear this. I wasn't here. Don't tell me about this."
  
  If the American people only knew how their security and safety are being ignored because of bureaucrats engaging in the game of CYA while awaiting their retirements, there would be a march on Washington the likes of which has never been seen. And no one would need to organize it. It would be spontaneous.
  
  
• Weldon raises the most interesting question about the 9/11 commission: "How could they justify hiring 70 people and spending $15 million and not interview one analyst or any of the people who were doing work on Able Danger? How could they do that? Unless you deliberately did not want to pursue the story?"
  
  
• Why did a top staffer on the 9/11 commission steer away from the investigators the information on Able Danger offered by Shaffer and Philpott? Weldon identifies that person as Detrich Snell (The commission's website identifies him as its Senior Counsel). Weldon says an upcoming book by ABC investigative reporter Peter Lance identifies Snell as "the key link in getting the 9/11 commission to ignore certain information that would have embarrassed the Justice Department during the Clinton administration in the early 1990s."
  
  Another coincidence? Snell was closely allied with 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick. She was a top official in the Clinton Justice Department. You may remember her as loudly and self-righteously badgering then National Security Advisor (now Secretary of State) Condoleeza Rice during commission hearings. That was before it was revealed that Gorelick was instrumental in going beyond the already restrictive and unreasonable requirements aimed at preventing intelligence-sharing among different agencies. Jamie "Stovepipe" Gorelick was a bit more subdued after that.
  
  Commission Chairman Tom Kean — former Republican governor of New Jersey — defended Gorelick against public demands that she be put under oath on the other side of the commission table and answer for that. On at least one occasion, TV cameras showed the two of them doing a polite kissy-face just before commission sessions.
  
  Congressman Todd Tiahrt, a member of the House Intelligence Committee told me in a separate interview that "stipulations she [Gorelcick] put in place have made our country more vulnerable, and we have taken steps to change that." That still leaves open the question of how Gorelick is to be held accountable. Tiahrt says, "I don't know that anything criminal was done. Will we correct the problems she has created? Yes."
  
  As for Snell, Weldon says he is now working for Eliot Spitzer, Democratic candidate for governor of New York, and currently New York attorney general. His demagogue investigations into business and commerce in New York would make the perpetrators of the Salem witch hunts blush.
  
  
• Why is it that a recent congressional subcommittee, according to this column's information (and not discussed in the Weldon or Tiahrt interviews) took testimony behind closed doors on the matter of three mysteriously canceled FBI briefings on Able Danger but made no mention of them in the open session which of course was open to the public and the media? This flies in the face of a letter, signed by Weldon and 248 other congressmen on both sides of the aisle, demanding the truth about the scandal and the cover-up?
  
  
• Why was C-SPAN, normally all over the Hill, specifically not invited to cover the open session?
  
  But there is hope. Other committees will be dealing with this. When I asked Congressman Tiahrt, a Kansas Republican, if the Intelligence Committee would be investigating Able Danger, his response was, "I can't comment on that." I fully respect his obligation not to do a lot of talking about the business of the Intel committee which most often meets in executive session and deals with classified material, but if I were a betting man, I would probably take that as a yes. He says Shaffer and Philpott are "great Americans."
  
  

Here's a condensation of other parts of our Weldon interview:

WELDON: I can tell you when my chief of staff called the 9/11 commission after this story broke last June, their response was when we asked them why Able Danger wasn't in the report, they said we looked at it and we decided not to go down that route. There may have been a bipartisan effert to say look, let's not go down there, it will cause embarrassment on both sides. That's the only thing that I can speculate, that neither side wanted to pursue the full story.

VERNON: So it's a bipartisan cover-up is what it amounts to, I guess.

WELDON: Some people have characterized it that way.

Is it any wonder that there should be a frantic effort to get an Able Danger whistleblower out of town? Anywhere. Timbuktu would be fine. Just so he's not around to spill the beans before Congress.

© Wes Vernon