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August 22, 2005

Able Danger Officer Shaffer Didn't Name Atta (?)

At least according to his latest telling of his story.

Maguire says this constitutes a "change of story" for Shaffer -- which is sloppy of him. He calls it a change of story because Rep. Curt Weldon claimed that Shaffer had named Mohammad Atta to the 9/11 Commission. Obviously, there's a contradiction between Weldon's story (second-hand, of course) and Shaffer's, but no contradiction I see between Shaffer's claims.

There's room here for mistatements and confusion -- Schaffer may have named Atta to his Pentagon superiors, but not specifically to 9/11 Commission staffers. And a vague or misunderstood question could result in mistatement or misinterpretation.

Bear in mind, there are at least two scandals here-- one, why didn't the Pentagon forward this information to the FBI?, and two, why didn't the 9/11 Commission see fit to investigate this or even mention it in its final report?

They're similar scandals, both about bureaucratic incompetence and negligence and CYA-ing, and it's easy to take a question about one as a question about another, especially in casual conversation.

Captain Ed says this is a misunderstanding-- Shaffer was saying he didn't name the other terrorists discovered in Atta's cell, but he did name Atta himself, Atta being the only name he remembered.

The transcript suggests this is quite plausible, but of course we'll need Shaffer himself to clarify precisely what he meant and what he told the 9/11 staffers.

More... From Captain Ed again. It seems that other members of the Able Danger team are talking to the press-- meaning that we're not just relying on one man's (or two men's) say-so.

posted by Ace at 04:24 PM

Comments

This show is getting less and less interesting as time goes by.

One of the characters needs to flash some nip.

I'm just sayin'.

Posted by: Tom on August 22, 2005 04:47 PM

What happened to the "two" Mohammed Attas? I smell Bill Clinton, the Dean of Dogshit, the professor of poop, the croupedea of crap, the maestro of manipultion, the First Felon among Felons, and the Greatest Liar we've ever had - and that's saying quite a lot!

Posted by: 72 dirty low down dogs on August 22, 2005 05:34 PM

The parapalegic wheelchair bound Swede "Atta" is still selling hot dogs at Cony Island and look buf - kinda like Bjorn Borg.

Posted by: Tony on August 22, 2005 05:40 PM

Or an expose on how Colmes really is an alien.

Posted by: Iblis on August 22, 2005 06:29 PM

My mother-in-law thinks Alan Colmes looks like a turtle.

Posted by: Sobek on August 22, 2005 08:13 PM

Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer
Captain Scott Philpott
more to come???

This story isn't going away...UNLESS conservatives are stupid enough to let the MSM drop it. I'm shocked the NYTimes seems to me the only MSM outlet reporting on this.

Posted by: Tom K on August 22, 2005 11:38 PM

As of today we have three members of Able Danger in the open and telling the same story. It is not beyone belief that there was another Socks Berger in the pentagon, holding a high enough position to steal the documents. Remember that the Pentagon is ran by mostly Civil Service weanies and a lot of them were appointed by the Slick Willie regime, and the PC generals that are still holding on were all promoted by the same. Since one of the members state he had the chart posted on the wall of his office for quite a while i'd say someone took a picture of his office at some time. As work spreads something will turn up..Give it time....

Posted by: scrapiron on August 22, 2005 11:41 PM

Does anyone but me think that Col Shaffer has a hard time speaking in simple, clear, declarative sentences? Dang it's hard to follow what that guy's saying! Reminds me of the only other military intelligence Lt. Col. I have known: Mensa- smart, but so incomprehensible he was still an associate in the law firm at age 50 and had to be kept away from the clients and out of the courtroom.

Posted by: carl on August 23, 2005 07:02 AM

This story isn't going away...UNLESS conservatives are stupid enough to let the MSM drop it. I'm shocked the NYTimes seems to me the only MSM outlet reporting on this.

I hope so. But conservatives do not run the MSM. If they did a lot more truth would be out there and this would be a different country. If they can cover up the fact that Jamie Goerlick erected a higher wall to prevent information sharing and then sat on the 911 Commission charged with looking into the matter, they can cover up anything. Outrageous! It was like a sick joke. If she had been a Republican she'd have been lynched by the media and hustling for traffic ticket and crack dealer clients right now or disbarred. But she got clean away with it! I'm afraid that the MSM has become even more brazenly partisan than during the Clinton years, that they'll ignore anything and get away with it.

Posted by: 72 VIRGINS on August 23, 2005 11:33 AM

It's hard to believe that anyone thinks that the Clinton administration got away with anything. Republican special prosecutors, a republican Resolution Trust corp., a republican head of the FBI and a mass media hungry for all manner of hoaxes inflated into their own phony "gates." That's how I remember the '90s. As far as cover-ups of the 9-11 commission, how about that NORAD non-response? How about those nasty puts placed on American and United at 400 times the normal rates? After 55 specific threats assessed by the FAA, some of which talked of flying planes into buildings, and a PDB titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US" why were east coast defenses not at a state of alert? There are many unanswered questions. Some apply to the Clinton administration and some to the Bush administration. But concentrating on an arcane bureaucratic rule developed back in the 80's and then strengthened by the first Bush administration seems a little bit of a stretch.

Posted by: Bill on August 24, 2005 07:30 PM

Bill,

Would dems tolerate the US being at DEFCON-1 for months on end?

...or would you start declaring the prez paranoid and talking about a section 8.

I suspect the latter.

Posted by: Tony on August 24, 2005 10:41 PM

Tony, that's a good point. I was thinking on the lines of why were they standing down, though. Maybe they didn't need to be at high alert, but who thought it was a good idea that they stand down in the midst of all those FAA warnings? The NORAD thing just doesn't make sense. If they could scramble 2 jets in the air in less than seven minutes over the middle of the country to see what was wrong with Payne Stewart's jet just one year before, why couldn't they be ready to scramble over the East Coast when they've got 3 commercial airliners taken over and they've known about it for over 20 minutes. It's never made sense and it never will until someone explains why they were standing down, who gave the order to stand down, why he gave that order, who was supposed to order a scramble and why didn't he order a scramble? Why don't we know the answers to simple questions like this? Is there a chain of command, or what?

Posted by: Bill on August 24, 2005 11:49 PM

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What? Skeleton of the most famous Musketeer, D'Artagnan, possibly discovered in Dutch church closet.
Dumas picked four names of real musketeers out of a history book, D'Artagnan, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos. So there was an actual D'Artagnan, though he made most of the story up. (Or, you know, all of it.)*

Charles de Batz de Castelmore, known as d'Artagnan, the famous musketeer of Kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV, spent his life in the service of the French crown.
The Gascon nobleman inspired Alexandre Dumas's hero in "The Three Musketeers" in the 19th century, a character now known worldwide thanks to the novel and numerous film adaptations.
D'Artagnan was killed during the siege of Maastricht in 1673, and there is a statue honoring the musketeer in the city. His final resting place has remained a mystery ever since.

A lot of Dumas's stories are based on bits of real history. The plot of the >Three Musketeers, about trying to recover lost diamonds from the queen's necklace, was cribbed from the then-almost-contemporaneous Affair of the Queen's Necklace. And the Man in the Iron Mask is based on real accounts of a prisoner forced to wear a mask (though I think it was a velvet mask).
* Oh, I should mention, Dumas says all this, about finding the names in an old book, in the prologue to his novel. But authors lie a lot. They frequently present fictions as based on historic fact. The twist is, he was actually telling the truth here. At least about these four musketeers having actually existed and served under Louis XIV.
Fun fact: You know the beginning of A Fistful of Dollars where the local gunslingers make fun of Clint Eastwood's donkey and Eastwood demands they apologize to the donkey? That's lifted from The Three Musketeers. Rochefort mocks D'Artagnan's old, brokedown farm horse and D'Artagnan is incensed.

A commenter asked which should be read first, The Hobbit of LOTR?
Easy, no question -- read The Hobbit first. It's actually the start of the story and comes first chronologically. It sets up some major characters and major pieces in play in LOTR.
Also, the Hobbit is Beginner-Friendly, which LOTR isn't. The Hobbit really is a delightful book, and a fast read. It's chatty, it's casual, it's exciting, and it's funny. In that dry cheeky British humor way. I love that the narrator is constantly making little asides and commentary, like he's just sitting next to you telling you this story as it occurs to him.
LOTR is a very long story. Fifteen hundred pages or so. The Hobbit is relatively short and very punchy and easy to read. If you don't like The Hobbit, you can skip out on LOTR. If you do like it, you'll be primed to read LOTR.
Oh, I should say: The Hobbit is written as if it's for children, but one of those smart children's stories that are also for adults. Don't worry, there's also real fighting and violence and horror in it, too.
LOTR is written for adults. (It's said that Tolkien wrote both for his children, but LOTR was written 17 years later, when his children were adults.) Some might not like The Hobbit due to its sometimes frivolous tone. Me, I love it. I find it constantly amusing. Both are really good but there is a starkly different tone to both. LOTR is epic, grand, and serious, about a world war, The Hobbit is light and breezy, and about a heist. Though a heist that culminates in a war for the spoils.

The Hobbit Challenge: Read two more chapters. I didn't have much time. Bilbo got the ring.
I noticed a continuity problem. Maybe. Now, as of the time of The Hobbit, it was unknown that this magic ring was in fact a Ring of Power, and it was doubly unknown that it was the Ring of Power, the Master Ring that controlled the others.
But the narrator -- who we will learn in LOTR was none of than Bilbo himself, who wrote the book as "There and Back Again" -- says this about Gollum's ring:
"But who knows how Gollum had come by that present [the Ring], ages ago in the old days when such rings were still at large in the world? Perhaps even the Master who ruled them could not have said."
In another passage, the ring is identified as a "ring of power."
I don't know, I always thought there was a distinction between mere magic rings and the Rings of Power created by Sauron. But this suggests that Bilbo knew this was a ring of power created by Sauron.
Now I don't remember when Bilbo wrote the Hobbit. In the movie, he shows Frodo the book in Rivendell, and I guess he wrote it after he left the Shire. I guess he might have added in the part about the ring being a ring of power created by "the Master" after Gandalf appraised him of his research into the ring.
I never noticed this before. I know Tolkien re-wrote this chapter while he was writing LOTR to make the ring important from the start. And also to make Gollum more sinister and evil, and also to remove the part where Gollum actually offers Bilbo the ring as a "present" -- Bilbo had already found it on his own, but Gollum was wiling to give it away, which obviously is not something the rewritten Gollum would ever do.
But I had no memory of the ring being suggested to be The Ring so early in the tale.

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Tomorrow is March 25th, "Tolkien Reading Day," because March 25th is the day when the Ring is destroyed in the book. I think I'm going to start the Hobbit tomorrow and read all four books this time.
The only bad part of the trilogy are the Frodo/Sam chapters in The Two Towers. They're repetitive, slow, and mostly about the weather and terrain. But most everything else is good. Weirdly, the Frodo-Sam chapters in Return of the King are exciting and action-packed and among the best in the trilogy. (Though the chapters with everyone else in Return of the King get pretty slow again. Mostly people talking about marching towards war, and then marching towards war.)

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