American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [96]
Colonel Shaffer worked closely with navy captain Scott Phillpott, and says he attempted to set up a meeting between Phillpott’s superior officer and FBI counterterrorism agents in D.C., so they could work together on following these cells. But three times the SOCOM lawyers kept a meeting from happening. Soon after that, Shaffer got transferred to a DIA project in Latin America.50
Then, after 9/11, he and Phillpott tried to bring the story forward to Congress and the 9/11 Commission. In June 2005, a reporter for a small-town Pennsylvania paper wrote a piece that opened with: “Two years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, US intelligence officials linked Mohamed Atta to al-Qaida, and discovered he and two others were in Brooklyn.” You might think the national media would have jumped all over that, but they didn’t. Eventually, the New York Times did a few stories. But when the 9/11 Commission came up with reasons for leaving Able Danger out of its report, the media nodded off again. Chairman Thomas Keen went so far as to say that “the recollections of the intelligence officers cannot be verified by any document.” Hence, it didn’t happen. And the Pentagon wouldn’t let Shaffer or anyone else testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.51
We talked to Shaffer while putting together this chapter. In his opinion, both the Clinton and Bush administrations were covering up their incompetence. “The Department of Defense does not want to get blamed for making bad decisions, which resulted in information not being passed to the FBI, and therefore being a material factor in why 9/11 happened,” he told us. “That’s why you had DOD coming after me because I blew the whistle. DOD has admitted there are 10,000-plus Able Danger documents, but they won’t release a single one. To me that’s bizarre, because most of the targeting information was done on the open Internet and completely unclassified. It does cause you to wonder.”
9/11 expert David Ray Griffin concluded that the commission and the Pentagon were “covering up dangerous information—information that suggested Atta was being protected. When we combine this observation with other things we have learned about the alleged hijackers—including the money reportedly sent to Atta by the CIA-created [Pakistani] ISI—the Able Danger evidence provides additional reason to suspect that the ‘hijackers’ were really paid assets.”52
A think tank called the Project for the New American Century, composed mainly of right-wing ideologues, wrote a report pre-9/11 titled Building America’s Defenses. The document contains this line: “The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”
We all know the results of 9/11: two unending wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964? We were told that American ships were attacked by the North Vietnamese. Now we know that the incident was manufactured by the Pentagon in order to gain support for escalating the Vietnam War. If the United States government was prepared to stage such a gargantuan event in leading our nation to war then, why would they refrain from doing so again today? Might we look at this as a trend, going into these wars under false pretenses?
Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism at the time, wrote in 2009 that Iraq was “a move that many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.... While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the