Whatever has happened to this—someday someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain “problems.” Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL, is getting the most “protection.” - an FBI agent
If he's telling the
truth, then the entire history of the last five years needs to be
rewritten. His name is Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and he's one of the
two military intelligence officers alleging that the Defense Department
had located Mohammed Atta and other hijackers in America in 2000.-John Podhoretz, National Review's The Corner
I figured the Able Danger story wasn't over yet. Sure enough tonight, one of Rep. Weldon's sources on the Able Danger story has gone public. He was interviewed during the last hour of Michael Savage's radio talk show this evening. I managed to record most of the interview. Here is a transcript (this is a long post, but this is vitally important):
Lt. Col. Athony Shaffer: ...But there were a number of us, Michael, I will tell you who were working this issue very hard before 9-11 and that one of the things that I hope will eventually come out when they really do investigate Able Danger is all the missteps and bureaucratic problems we faced trying to do our job, trying to actually trying to penetrate the bad guys.
Michael Savage: That's primarily because the spy aspect was downplayed or eliminated by several administrations before Clinton? Is that really what happened?
Lt. Col. Shaffer: Human intelligence collection and I'm a qualified officer, I went through the training with the (inaudible) agency, that that kind of collection was downplayed over the years. The people wanted to rely on pontifical measures such as signals intelligence and imagery. The problem is that that doesn't tell you what the enemy's thinking and how they're operating. Now we're talking about Al Queada, a very elusive enemy who lives amongst us. For example, to site the recent London bombing, you have the picture in the news of these guys going out and doing a white water rafting trip. Well, I'm sure, based on my knowledge of how terrorists operate, that was probably their final planning meeting. That was where they get together and say, hey, here we go, this is what we're going to do. This is the final rehearsal, go to it. The problem is that we have to figure out how to target that level of target and I'm telling you that a picture from a satellite isn't going to give you that.
Michael Savage: So I understand that you need men on the ground who speak Arabic who can penetrate the cell, isn't that what you're saying?
Lt. Col. Shafer: Yes sir, and that's where we were going with a lot of this. That was the role of my unit, to try to push information out of Able Danger to do things with it in the real world. And again, I can't get into specifics but I think that you get the idea that we're trying to take this lead information that Land Information Warfare was putting together so we could do something with it. Something that we call actionable information. Now, (inaudible) was going about doing a number of very complex datamining exercises. They had put together a really really advanced set of technologies which focused on using any number of sources of information, something called datamining. I've seen the blogs on this on the internet and some people get it right and some people get it wrong. Let me just try to simplify it for everyone. It's basically taking every bit of information that you can find and making sure that it's tagged with the relevant time it was collected, the relevance of that information to other pieces of information, the location the information was collected, and the individuals involved in the collection of that information. This can be from any source. We're talking about internet, talking about databases such as INS, Lexis/Nexus, anything. And the idea then is to take all this data and put it together in a big database and then use datamining tools. Datamining tools then go in and rack and stack the information using a number of sub programs, algorithms, which look for patterns. Now this is key because what we were looking at is trying to target terrorists in the real world. You and I, Michael, you have your life, I've heard you on your show talk about your life. So those are data points. Take those data points and you put those in the computer and say, I'm looking for someone who's very similar to Michael Savage. And that computer takes that information and using these algorithms searches through these 2.5 terrabytes of information. So what you establish then is a pattern of information. I hope I'm not getting too complicated here.
MS: No, no I'm following you, but let's pause for a moment. I'm following your, but I don't know if the average listener is. Let me do something else for a moment Lt. Col., Mr. Shaffer if I may. Let us go back to WW II where we knew who the good guys and the bad buys were as I do today. But some listeners are confused. Let us say that a gestapo cell of the Nazis was established in New York City and they were pretending to be bakers or bartenders or whatever, living on W. 86th St., in Germantown, Yorktown at the time. Surely the FBI at that time had spies who were German speaking who might have played the role of bus boys or a waiter in order to get close to them. Isn't that more or less what we're talking about as the only effective way to break an enemy's internal ring in this country?
AS: Well that's absolutely true, Michael, but what we're talking about here is a step away from that. I mean that you have to identify these guys as bad guys first and that was what Able Danger did.
MS: Oh, OK, so you're saying that this bad guy goes out on a boat, he eats meatballs and he has a dog, say a poodle-that's me, for example. Now who else goes out on boats, eats meatballs and has a toy poodle is in essence what you're saying.
AS: Exactly, pattern analysis based on previously existing patterns. Some of the information we used was based on the first attack in '93 against the World Trade Center. Taking the information, basically the profiles of those guys and saying, OK, what if there's...taking these 8 datapoints for example-just-again let me be clear here for your listeners. I am not a technician. I am an intelligence officer who focused on human intelligence. What I've had to do is learn that basically the techniques we're trying to adapt to the 21st century. I mean this is a new century, we have new capabilities. This is new technology we're trying to adapt for the purposes of targeting. Now this technology then was focused on basically taking a profile of known terrorists, then using that basic profile against other individuals, looking for that. That's an example of one of the things you would do.
MS: Can we pause for a minute, Lt. Col.? I have a hundred questions. The listeners are just flooding the board here to speak with you. Can you stay with us over the hour?
AS: Yes sir.
MS: Did liberal lawyers inside the Dept. of Defense hamstring the best and the brightest in that secret unit known as Able Danger and prevent them from bringing that information to the FBI to break the first terrorist cell in the United States. Joining us again is Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer who has come out of anonymity to say, wait a minute now, this is absolutely true. The 9-11 Commission heard about it after the fact and they're not talking the truth here. The fact of the matter is he will take your questions on the Savage Nation momentarily. I want to put it in context for you for a moment. Perhaps you can go back in time with me to 1939. You know that Hitler is making a move in Europe. You fear he's making a move with spies in America. He has them all over America. They are disguised as waiters, bus boys, and they are primarily living in areas where there's a German presence, where there's a German community. So he sends a few of his undercover Gestapo agents to America. One of them is a waiter in a restaurant on W. 86th St. And you send your best FBI guys to act as waiters, bus boys and bartenders. And they're working there for a few months and they get to know Hans and suspect he's a terrorist working for Hitler and about to do some sabatage on the New York docks, blow up a transport ship or whatever. Or send information which will help them sabatage the ships and what not. And your plant finds Hans one day in the basement by accident on a crystal set and he is saying, "Come in Berlin, come in come in." You know and then he says, "Wait a minute, I got him." Now he goes back to you and he says we got him, we got Hans on the crystal set talking to Germany." We got to break him, but I don't have the power to break him because there's a wall separating us from breaking him. We got to go now to lawyers who tell us whether we can or cannot turn it over to the other division. And the lawyers say no, you can't touch him because he's got a green card. That sets the stage for where we are and why we got hit on 9-11. Joining us again is Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer on the Savage Nation. Lt. Col., welcome back to the program. I know it's a crude analogy, but more or less, what kind of information did your folks gather that should have been turned over to the FBI, that this is a terrorist cell? Can you disclose that on the show today?
AS: I will go into as much detail as I can, I mean obviously, there's 2 areas I cannot get into-either current operations or things which came out of this which may have been adapted in a different way. What I'm going to try to stick to is the facts as I observed them relating to the missteps of how information was handled regarding that group of terrorists, that individual.
MS: Yeah, but I'm saying that you didn't stumble upon Atta saying come in (inaudible) or anything like that.
AS: Your analogy regarding the technology is I think an effective of putting it into the listeners minds. What we did was we took the fast developing technology, these advanced algorithms, looking at patterns, and that pattern analysis popped up essentially clusters of individuals. And those clusters of individuals what the (inaudible) had come up with to show us saying this is what the information we got. Now keep in mind this is open source information, datamining of open source information. That's critical here to the whole story.The information we used for the most part was that which was available off the open internet, through commercial and private databases which you can purchase your way into. Taking all of that then evaluating it. It's similar in a way to what you're talking about, the idea of a crystal set being used in WWII and the information being intercepted. We intercepted their patterns, we looked at how they looked through the data and this is again the 21st century adaptation of this. So to continue to answer your question what I took from Land Information Warfare Activity was essentially a chart. A chart probably about a 2x3 which had essentially 5 clusters around the center point which was bin Laden and his leadership. And using known information, much of which was already in the press, we looked at those relationships. Able Danger was about relationships and linkages, not about individuals being in certain places at certain times. I think that the press has misrepresented that from what they've reported so far. So I'd like to make sure that we clarify that. We were looking at potentialities. These names that we talked about were talked about in the news, were popped out of that data. There was something about them that made them shine in reference to the other hundreds of names which came up on the radar scope.
MS: You can't say what those parameters were or can you?
AS: For 2 reasons, first, I don't know them. I was not the technician doing the run.
MS: OK, fair enough.
AS: I can't give you something I don't have. The things that I do know about it, I'm sure Michael that you'll understand this, I don't want to give the enemy the...
MS: No, I'm a little concerned about this show to begin with because I'm sure that if there are terrorist cells in America they're searching the news to see what a free society can give them to gain advantage over us. I appreciate that .
AS: So what we're talking about here, and again I'm trying to stay in the same general area, is that the technology told us certain things. There were certain data points which were of interest to us. And it was that information that I physically took in the form of a chart. It was unclassified. I brought it down from (inaudible) down to Tampa to provide it to the Able Danger cell to start looking at.
MS: So let's go if we can to the next step. You've got the documents, you've brought them down there, what happened next?
AS: Well, I can tell you that the analysts were enthusiastic. It was like, wow, this is something we can start looking at for finding what really makes sense to go after. Now, again, we're talking about raw data which is why we pay analysts to go look at it and tell us what's good and bad about it. And they use different methods to do analysis of the information to validate it. Now validation here Michael's a very key thing. You don't want to go, and that was one of the big lawyer concerns about, you don't want to go doing something to violate somebody's rights or somebody's US citizen rights. And we supported that, but I believe the lawyers went overboard on it because in essence the information that we had and were using was open source. I was at the Pentagon today and we were talking about some of the issues relating to this and they flat out said that those issues relating to open internet and what an intelligence officer can look at. And you know something that you look at as Michael Savage and you make an evaluation of is maybe entirely different legally than if I look at it as an intelligence officer on the internet even though it's open source. I mean that's how crazy it is.
MS: You mean even I as a private citizen can come to conclusions and talk about them on the radio and you guys can't?
AS: That's essentially what it comes down to.
MS: So you have less authority and power than an ordinary citizen? That sounds backwards to me.
AS: Well the concern here is, from my understanding of the law, is that we have to be careful to not be intrusive to US citizen's rights.
MS: Oh but come on Lt. Col. we're living in extraordinary times. Samuel Johnson wrote, "The law is an ass." We can't let lawyers dictate our survival or we'll all be dead. That's one of the things that I believe. Do you believe that there are more of these terrorist cells in the US now?
AS: My personal belief, again I can't say anything about data, my personal belief is of course. If you were fighting us, you know, one of the things that you mentioned is, you know, you have to understand your enemy. The idea here is that they understand us and they are listening to us. So they're trying to figure out any scene that they can stick their capability into. And so I'm certain that they've figured out ways and again, personally speaking and not speaking for the Dept. of Defense or anyone else, one of my personal concerns is the southwest border.
MS: The southwest border, OK, the open border policy, here we go again, even the Democrat Governor Richardson declared a state of emergency. You know, I don't want to put you in hot water here, but the federal government is out to lunch on this issue.
AS: And again I'm talking as a citizen here, please separate my status from...
MS: Fair enough, one citizen to another, we're having a beer together on the Savage Nation. There are terrorist cells, they are ready to strike, but this time if they're uncovered there would be no such wall or would such a wall still be in existence.
AS: I do believe based on The Patriot Act, is that there probably are some holes in that. I'm not a lawyer and I can't speak to every aspect of it. I do believe that congress has done as much as it can to date to actually kind of break down those walls. I think that they did look at the issues which separated one intelligence collection from law enforcement, but I think they really did break those walls down.
MS: We hope that we don't have to say, Mr. President break down that wall. I mean to do a parody here, it's not a funny situation. I thought that the Jamie Gorelick mentality had been erased by now, you're telling me that some of it still exists?
AS: You're at the heart of the matter, Michael, yes, you're talking about a culture though. You can put somebody in a new set of clothes, but they may still do the same thing. That's what we've done here to a certain extent. We've taken the (inaudible) restrictions away, but you've left in place the culture and all the officers who allowed 9-11 to happen in the first place. There was no accountability. So some of the concerns that I personally had over these years, sitting back, knowing what I knew about what we could have done, and watching all of these people who kind of, I'll be blunt here, kind of you know, were asleep at the switch and still got promoted after the fact. Nobody was shoved aside when the time came that they had to pay the piper.
MS: Why can't they be moved aside? President Bush is certainly different in leadership with regard to the War on Terror than Bill Clinton was. We all know that. He's done 100% job overseas, why can't he move vociferously to replace those deadbeats?
AS: I think that's part of the, I can't speak to this, I'm not a policy person, but it seems to me that the administration's doing everything it can and I can site directly my personal experience recently with DOD. We met with Dr. Cambone yesterday, who is the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and it is his primary focus right now to ascertain all the facts as to what happened with Able Danger. And I do believe that they want to get to the bottom of it for what you said, lessons, so we can be sure that we don't have the same failures that went wrong with Able Danger and other operations, this is not unique, this is just the most recent one I think and may have had some significantly great consequences in my opinion. But I do believe that there the leadership has this interest and I do believe that they want to get to the bottom of this. They're not always supported by the bureaucracy.
MS: Now we're going to get callers in a moment, Lt. Col. because this is a real groundbreaking show and I know that you'll have more time today on the radio than you did on Fox television in the last hour. I think that you'll have a chance to answer the American people directly, at least those American people who have the motivation to want to get to the bottom of this. I have these questions for you. Do you believe that the NCTC, The National Counter Terrorism Center could do the job of Able Danger today? You spoke about this information Phillip Zelikow, Executive Director of the 9-11 Commission, and you stated that he did not pass on that information to the 9-11 Commission. We're going to ask you that. And then I'm going to finally say to you, sir, you're looking to restart a similar intelligence gathing operation today. Do you feel that by coming out in the public today, that you will be aided in your desires or will it actually hinder your efforts to restart a similar intelligence gathering operation right here on the Savage Nation.
AS: Well I don't know all the names. Michael, you have to understand that it's been quite a while since I talked to them and I think that it's been pretty clear that I got kind of the brush off when I got back from Afghanistan when I wanted to talk to them again and they didn't see me.
MS: Let me clarify for the listeners, you are a genuine intelligence officer, you've done field work?
AS: I got the bronze star when I was in Afghanistan for my tour over there. Plus I was actually assigned to several units to include doing an air assault with the Rangers.
MS: I just wanted people to understand that they're talking to the real stuff and the right stuff rather than another lawyer who may just be making it up. So please Lt. Col., forgive me for asking such an embarrassing question, but audiences generally have a very short attention span and they're very cynical and they tune out very easily. So you know what's going on and we are still in danger obviously because there are cells in this country. But again, can I go back to the cells in this country because that really concerns me more than who said what when and were they qualified. If the FBI, if a unit such as yours, if Naval Intelligence, if the CIA (inaudible) such a unit, wouldn't they act as they did just now in Lodi, CA? Break the unit and deport the people if they're found to be who they are?
AS: I'd like to believe that. I think it's key to understand the Able Danger story, the era of pre-9-11 and now are significantly different. I do believe that if we had similar information now we identified these potential individuals as terrorists, the first thing we'd do is contact our colleagues in the FBI and say, "Hey, we don't know if this is something or not, but this is what the data's telling us." And I think that we'd be able to sit down and share that information with them and get kind of an idea, is this a fluke, is this something to do or not? The era that we were living in at the time, Michael, nobody really believed, and I'll be blunt here, really believed that Al Queada would be a threat to the country. I've got to be honest with you. My colleagues thought we were all crazy. At one point in time, senior DOD officers compared my little unit called Able Danger to, you've probably seen the movie, Kelly's Heroes. They called them Shaffer's Heroes, they're off on their own doing stuff. So you have to understand the perception was, "Hey, you guys are really going somewhere that you don't need to go. We can use these resources somewhere else."
MS: Confessions of a dangerous mind. I understand how it is to be an outsider, believe me. And it's often the outsider who makes the discoveries, it's not the man who just does what everyone else is doing. But given the fact that you are there and there are men like you still around this country, thank God, are we safer today than we were in 1999 and 2000?
AS: I think we are safer to the threat that existed pre-9-11. I think that we have fixed a number of the loop holes, I think...
MS: That's the problem, the enemy is pretty smart and like the retro-virus that causes Aides, they keep mutating and changing form isn't that the problem?
AS: Exactly. I heard an interview with Jim Woolsey the other day when he's talking about the London terrorists and how they've adapted. That's the problem here. We have clearly the technology edge on the whole planet. We need to find ways to use that technology in smart ways so we can continue to keep a leg up. And then, technology's not the answer, it has to be used to enable our ability to do good human intelligence operations to penetrate these groups. So, and Michael, this is one of those things, you know, where we want to be is least obtrusive as necessary to ge the information. I do believe that, I'm an American citizen and I think it's important that people feel good about their privacy.
MS: Well you're talking to the wrong guy about feel good spying, I want feel bad spying personally to make me safer. I think most Americans would like some feel bad stuff now. Given that it's a personal opinion, and not generally shared by the general population, could you please stay with us and take some listeners' calls because I am learning tons of stuff on the Savage Nation and I hope so are my listeners.
MS: ...sanities and inanities of liberalism, to be quite polite about it in the past administration. Joining us now is a man who tried to get that information to them so they could break the cell and 9-11 wouldn't have happened apparently. Here's Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer making his first radio interview in the United States and there's a reason for it which we'll find out in a moment. Lt. Col. welcome back to the program. What is the main reason for your coming forward at this time. I mean certainly you're basically a clandestine officer and now you're out in the public. Is there a reason for this?
AS: Yeah, let me put it in terms which I think is simple and just as direct as I can be. There's the axiom that all politics are local. And I feel the same way, all security is local. That's kind of the way that I look at it. We are not entirely as secure as we should be based on what you just talked about. In fact the enemy is adapting, they're changing all the time. Therefore, the reason this all popped up is not, I hope your listeners understand, this is not us coming back and saying, "hey, we want to get out here and just stir the stuff up so everybody gets upset again.
MS: You're not intending to bring harm, excuse me, to bring shame upon the Clintons. You're not doing this, people are going to say, oh, this is just a Republicans trying to get the pressure off Bush and they're simply trying to blame Clinton again. That's not what you're doing here.
AS: Like I mentioned, Michael, the security is local. The idea, you know, I have an 11 year old son, and I want to do everything in my power to make sure that we're using every tool in the arsenal to detect these guys before something happens. I mean, I live in Washington. This town is a target. A lot of different cities are targets I believe and the enemy would like nothing better than to get some sort of a weapon into this city I believe. Therefore, I think it's in everyone's best interest, everyone, I mean not just someone living in Cottonville, KS, not just people in the midwest, not just people in New York, and not if you're Republican of Democrat. We need to figure out a way to really fight this war. And I think that my colleagues and I who worked on the Able Danger project were committed to that course of action, and Michael, I spent 22 years fighting the secret wars that people never hear about. That's a good thing. One of the things that we can't talk about are the successes. We've done a lot of really good things, but we can't talk about those things so we have to focus on the things that go wrong for the very reason of correcting them so they are successes too. That's the idea here. And you asked about the NCTC earlier and I do believe the NCTC is a step up from before. You've got the big agencies now sitting in the same room so that's a big step forward. Now the next step, I think, is to start equipping them with all the necessary tools they need to enhance their job.
MS: Excuse me, is Mr. Negraponte sort of the czar of intelligence today?
AS: He is the czar, he has become, he has taken on the role that used to be given to the DCI, the Director of Central Intelligence, which was the previous one was George Tennet. The idea here is that you're going to have an artiber at the senior level. One of the problem, in my opinion, Michael, in working in this community for the past 20 years, is that the DCI is also dual hatted as the chief of CIA. That led to a lot of bad decisions in my judgement by the fact that the CIA would kind of influence this guy. I can tell you that my ilk, the DOD flavor of us are all as good or better than our CIA brethren. The problem is we never got a shot. A lot of the time we've always been kind of the little brother, you know, and it's just-we'll do it ourselves.
MS: I hear you, but you know, bear with me for a minute. Radio is a medium that's very personal. Now you say that you earned the bronze star for your tour in Afghanistan. Do you care to tell us what your training consists of? I mean are you a former Army Ranger?
AS: No I'm not. That was one of the most unique things about the fact that I got to go with the Rangers. No I'm not a Ranger, it's unique that I was actually able to go with them, and I'd like to believe that the fact is we're trained so well in what we do have training in, that we can adapt to that.
MS: I mean you jumped with the Rangers?
AS: No, I didn't jump, but we did an air assault with helicopters.
MS: An air assault, it's still more than I've done. The issue is that you've been there and you've taken some dangerous positions and maybe this is the most dangerous position you've ever taken politically, what would you say to that?
AS: A fool would say that they're not afraid of the potential consequences of being in a situation such as I'm in right now. I spent, Michael, the entire day Sunday thinking about this event, this potentially happening. And I talked to my family, I talked to my friends, I wanted to make sure that I was doing this for the right reasons. I'd like to believe my entire life that has been kind of my bell weather. Am I doing the right thing for the right reason? The other thing is that the American taxpayer pays a lot of money to train us. This may sound, you know, like it's out of a movie or something, but I'm telling you, I've always kind of considered how I make decisions as what would the American taxpayer believe if they knew about this. Would they think that I'm doing the right thing by taking this action in this operation or would they say, that's stupid, why would you do that? So I think the American people have to understand that there's a group of us who really have tried to do the right thing for the right reason all these years and very often you've got people who are careerists, who are bureaucrats, who have an agenda which is not necessarily in line with the best interests of the country. And I think that's one of the things that we talked about earlier regarding the laws being changed, but I don't think we've changed the culture yet. And that's something, the cultural change is something that will take some time to do. And I think that what happens to me now will either help other folks to feel empowered to either take and do the right thing or if I get squashed, then obviously people like me who want to do the right thing, are going to say, "well, I guess it's just not worth it."
MS: God, this is amazing, but there's another element here and we all face it in this business too, which is that you've given your name today on this program. You know, that's an issue as well. You're a man with children, you know we all worry about this. But the fact of the matter is that we are Americans, we've got to draw together, we've got to understand how intelligent our enemy is, how dangerous he is, and we've got to fight him as the retro-virus is being fought with better drugs and more intelligent design. I think that's what you're after here.
AS: That's exactly what came up. We're trying to reassemble a team to do some of these things. To actually take and be aggressive, to try to adapt, as they adapt, we adapt, to try to stay one step ahead of them. Going back to the original team of Able Danger, Michael, we actually took some of the best and the brightest. People who were out of the box thinkers, who didn't think in linear terms and put them together on that team. So I think that that's exactly what we need now, to have more, you know, really creative thinking to go after and get at these guys where they live. That should be our objective to win the war. Not to just sit back and wait for something to happen.
MS: No we can't play passive and wait for them to strike and say what do we do now. We have to strike them before they strike us. And of course President Bush did that in Iraq. That's a big point. President Bush did that in Iraq, now that's the theory. Now the question is, are we striking them in America and breaking the cells before they hit. Look at this one in Lodi, CA. Isn't that a good example of a success?
AS: Absolutely, Michael, and I think that that's the key here and also if you look at the London bombings. These people, like you mentioned the WW II example. One of the things that the Germans were trying to do is get sleepers in, people who appear like you and me who can pass through society and not be detected. Well, the idea here, and you mentioned too is these plants try to go into these communities where they try to swim among the fishes. What we've got to do better, much better, is try to figure out those trends and tendencies which might indicate, hey, these guys really aren't on the up and up. And again, I go back to the London bombing where the appearance is that all of these guys, most of them from what I understand from reading in the press reports, were upstanding citizens. They were model citizens.
MS: Yeah, rugby, beer, dating, the whole scene. They were just average guys.
AS: So how do you go about detecting that and do it in such a way that you do it ahead of time. It is not easy and I think, again, that this is why we as the technology leader of the planet need to be looking at adapting, making new technologies to allow us to look at patterns. This was, again, the focus of Able Danger, essentially pattern analysis, looking at these sorts of things using this Army technology, the Land Information Warfare technologies to do that sort of thing.
MS: Yeah, well I'm going back to the WW II analogy again in another way. I remember as a little boy watching the war stuff. And there were generals and there were admirals, they were almost honorary positions. They were men in their 50s and 60s who had no military background, but they were generals. Why? They had some valuable quality that the military deemed necessary. I believe Gen. Sarnoff, for example, if that was his title, of NBC. He volunteered to help in the war effort. Is there any chance that the military will reach out to the general community? There are some amazing people in business, not in the military who might be able to help you in some attempt to undermine the retro-virus before it strikes again.
AS: Michael, one of the parts of my job for the past 6 months has been to look at different things that we could possibly use to do that very purpose. I mean we've talked to people about technology, we've talked to people about how they think, and not to plug any specific books, there are some really great books out there about how to deal with chaos theory. And so much of this, and I think you are very big on bringing nature to light and kind of how patterns kind of repeat themselves. I think we have to do a similar thing here at the level of the real world. You travel, the terrorists travel, so to do this, figure out how those actions relate to the chaos around us.
MS: I'm not following. You said I travel, the terrorists travel. I didn't catch, what do you mean?
AS: We all live in the real world. You have to live your life. I mentioned this earlier to you. You do your day to day chores, you do these things which have a pattern. And so when we live in the real world terrorists live in the real world. What we have to do then is figure out when they do those things, when they're deviating from a pattern, and what that deviation means.
MS: I see, so in other words, so they have to be people of interest to begin with, they have to be suspects don't they?
AS: That's where you look at the overall greater patterns. We're talking about patterns in patterns here which is the general theory of what we were trying to do. But to get back to your original questions, yes, one of the things that we're trying to do is to figure out a way that we can bring the national labs into this, the university system, I mean, Michael, there's tons of intellect out there I don't think we've even looked at as to how to go about trying to do some of these things.
MS: There's the average citizen who often surprises me with their analytical skills and their ability to break it down to the simplest terms to come up with the right answer. I've had insurance salesmen, I've had real estate brokers and I've had secretaries call with the most astonishing insights on many topics. How do we tap into the genius of the American mind?
AS: That is a daunting problem and I don't think that I've broken the code on it yet.
MS: No, none of us can. It's almost a random question in a certain way that has no application, there's no way to do so. Well, let's take a quick caller here on the Savage Nation, the people are dying to ask you questions. David on WOR in New York, you're first up, make it quick please. Go ahead.
Caller: Yeah, I've been outraged about this and it would have been prevented, I think, if they'd have been able to talk with each other. But now that this is out in the open this strategy, I'm wondering.
MS: What's the question please? Just give him a question, I would like that.
Caller: I didn't hear anything about this on the weekend. I'm only hearing about it on Fox and the Michael Savage show.
MS: I understand because I'm interested. I can't believe that Able Danger's not being covered. I think that I disconnected the colonel. Is that true guys? Can we get him back? He's there. Lt. Col. why are we not hearing more about Able Danger from the main stream news, do you think?
AS: Well, I don't know. I mean I think it was significant that both the New York Times and actually agreed on an issue for once and have the Times break
MS: I think that's amazing as well. Why did the New York Times decide to go with the story? Is it because it's a real good story?
AS: I couldn't talk to you about the philosophy or how they made the decision. I'm just kind of amazed that we have 2 diametrically opposed media outlets kind of focusing on this. I'd like to believe, Michael, that this is a bipartisan issue of people who are truly concerned about the safety of the country who are going to pause and say, what lessons did we not learn from this, and, what did the 9-11 Commission maybe miss in their investigation. I think that's one of the concerns that I directly have based on the fact that I presented them information which I considered valid and I was told by the folks on the ground when I briefed them that this was important, that we want to talk to you again, please call us. And once I got back to the United States I called them and I got a brush off.
MS: This is what we're going to do, we're going to take a quick commercial break, we only have a few minutes after that. We have a caller from Ohio who is going to ask the cynical question a skeptical question, rather. Can others corroborate what you're saying?
MS: ...not so much who were the lawyers, let's go get them. That would be nice, but the question is, how do we avoid that from happening again? If you want to pursue it as individuals listening to the show, go after them through the congressmen and demand an investigation. I don't want to see this happen again and we now go back to Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer who knows an awful lot about Able Danger. This is a radio exclusive on the Savage Nation. Lt. Col. I know that that's what your goal is here is not let's get the lawyers, it is as much as let's make sure we get the terrorists.
AS: Absolutely. While I think there is an issue of accountability here and I think our system has been lacking in accountability for a number of years, I do believe that the best thing we can do is figure out how to preclude any sort of attack of a 9-11 nature again, ever happening. The best way to do that is again, adapting to and figuring out how the enemy is trying to overcome the counter measures that you put in place and try to make sure that our measures are effective in getting them somewhere else before they hit here.
MS: You see, they don't function by our rules. You know that better than I do. You know, I'm reminded again, forgive me for going back in history, of WW II when young men went out and fought the Japanese in the Pacific campaign. Many of them had come from just nice American backgrounds. They would see a wounded Japanese, the medics would call out to them, the wounded Japanese soldier would blow up a grenade and kill himself and the medic. It was a shock to our young men who were raised to be trusting and kind. To be honest with you, this kind of behavior occurred. It took a while for our men to become as vicious as them and kill them first. And I'm worried that we're still not really at the level of understanding that they're pretty vicious. That's the climate that we're talking about or the philosophy that we have to overcome. Isn't that what we're talking about here?
AS: Absolutely. Let me, I'm glad you brought that point up because, let's look at the example of Abu Ghraib versus beheading. I'm a soldier, I've been down range, I've done some things and somehow I still don't quite understand in my mind the equivacation of Abu Ghraib. Some bad things happened there, but I say someone losing their life on video as someone saws your head off is significantly worse.
MS: That's why I put the beheading videos on michaelsavage.com and I've never taken them down. When people watch them they come away revulsed. They hear men screaming and crying as their heads are being sawed off and the enemy is chanting to Allah. They come away as a different person. They can't believe that people would do this. That's what's missing in this whole discussion. I agree with you.
AS: Michael, I don't think people have been touched personally by this war as much as WW II. For whatever reasons, I don't think idea has inculcated our society to the level it should. That we are truly at war. That these people are out to undermine everything that we stand for and what this country does very well.
MS: You are 100% right. I have only a minute and a half and we've got to get to Dave who has a skeptical question. Dave, go ahead please.
Caller: Yes, not that much sarcastic. I was a city investigator for years. The flow goes upstream and downstream as far as contacts in law enforcement through state and federal agencies. And more so downstream than upstream, believe it or not. My question would be, there should be 50 to 60 investigators that know about this at the local level-Atta, the air training and everything else. How do these people come forward to verify the Lt. Col.'s story?
MS: I hear you, Mr. Shaffer, the answer?
AS: Part of the answer is that there are others who have this information who are now working to be able to get permission to come forward. Call it brave or call it stupid I've decided to come forward now by talking to the senior leadership of the DOD and the fact that they want to get to the bottom of this. And at this point in time I'm confident that they want to get to the bottom of this. Therefore, what we're trying to do right now is find ways for other folks who were my colleagues and associates who did other parts of this-the folks who did the technology piece, the folks who did the integration piece and one of the operations officers in Able Danger all want to come forward.
MS: I'm sorry that we're just flat out of time. Lt. Col. Shaffer, I want to thank you both as a radio host and as an American not only for being on the show, but for doing your work. More than for being on the show, and I pray to God that this public exercise will yield more freedom for the Dept. of Defense rather than the opposite. Thank you so much. May God bless you.
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