Valuetainment - May 15, 2025


＂Ordered To DESTROY 9⧸11 Data＂ – Able Danger Whistleblower EXPOSES Classified Intel Deletion Scandal


Episode Stats


Length

22 minutes

Words per minute

177.82126

Word count

4,089

Sentence count

336

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, retired Lt. Col. Tony Schoomaker tells the story of how he was exposed by the Defense Intelligence Agency for his role in the Able Danger mission in Afghanistan in 2003. He also talks about his experience with the 9/11 Commission and how he handled the aftermath of the attacks.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 If you don't mind, Tony, for you, you're a lieutenant colonel, okay?
00:00:06.420 One of my biggest heroes when I was in the military was a man named Lieutenant Colonel P. Cox.
00:00:10.040 He ended up being a general later on, but he was one of my favorite guys I ever worked under
00:00:13.980 when I was at the 101st Airborne.
00:00:15.700 Lieutenant Colonel is a very high-ranking place to be, and you've seen a lot.
00:00:19.140 You've talked a lot.
00:00:19.820 You have a lot of things that happen.
00:00:21.380 That day, then Senator Biden, today ex-president Joe Biden,
00:00:27.340 says five of them were not allowed to come on today.
00:00:30.580 You were one of the five.
00:00:31.720 I was.
00:00:32.120 What were you told that first you were invited?
00:00:34.420 Who invited you?
00:00:35.180 And then what did they say that you can't come on?
00:00:37.320 Well, let me give a little bit of background for context.
00:00:39.140 So being a lieutenant colonel is a bit of a misnomer.
00:00:45.520 That was a part of my cover that happened during the time I was outed by DIA.
00:00:50.800 I'm in something called the Military Intelligence Accepted Career Program, MICEP.
00:00:54.260 We go back and forth between being civilians.
00:00:57.440 I'm also a retired GS-14.
00:00:59.560 You can look it up.
00:01:00.300 This is unclassified, but I'm just saying.
00:01:02.160 So what happened was, Pat, is that when I came back from Afghanistan,
00:01:09.220 after I disclosed my role in the Able Danger operation,
00:01:15.080 I was immediately suspended by defense intelligence over nonsense.
00:01:21.120 Who suspended you?
00:01:22.000 The Defense Intelligence Agency.
00:01:24.200 This was in the beginning of 2004.
00:01:27.640 Who was the shot caller that did that?
00:01:29.440 Who called the shot?
00:01:30.340 Yeah, it was Major General, I'll think of his name in a second.
00:01:35.960 And he was a Marine Corps general.
00:01:38.240 I'll think of it in a second.
00:01:38.920 Two-star general.
00:01:39.640 Two-star general.
00:01:40.800 He was the DO, the Director of Operations.
00:01:43.940 And at the time, the director was Admiral Jacoby.
00:01:49.020 And when I got suspended, I had some time on my hands because nobody knew what was going on.
00:01:59.140 There was three nonsensical allegations, which, by the way, the Army resolved in my favor,
00:02:04.160 and I got promoted to the lieutenant colonel.
00:02:05.420 You don't get promoted if you have standing at potential adverse actions over you.
00:02:10.540 So the Army saw him.
00:02:11.420 It's like, congratulations, you're being promoted.
00:02:15.000 Defense Intelligence used the three same allegations to suspend my clearance and get me fired,
00:02:19.200 just saying how wacky that is.
00:02:20.720 And think about that from a business perspective.
00:02:22.260 You're looking at facts, and Army says, yeah, this is not nonsense.
00:02:26.660 Defense Intelligence, who I have the issue with, suspend me and fire me over the same allegations.
00:02:33.820 Think about that.
00:02:34.560 We can go through them in greater detail at some point.
00:02:36.080 But, Tony, you have to tell the story as to what you had done in Afghanistan when Mueller came through.
00:02:41.460 Well, I'm saying so—
00:02:42.380 Explain that.
00:02:43.200 So, Zelikow had met with me in Afghanistan.
00:02:51.980 Philip Zelikow?
00:02:52.660 Philip Zelikow.
00:02:53.560 And who is he?
00:02:54.500 He is the staff director of the 9-11 Commission.
00:02:57.000 Kurt mentioned him earlier.
00:02:57.880 Okay.
00:02:58.540 So, when I was undercover—again, this is a bit complicated.
00:03:03.060 When I was undercover in alias in Afghanistan, being the director of operations for the clandestine operations in Afghanistan in 2003,
00:03:13.200 it's when Zelikow came through, Bagram, and he was part of the 9-11 Commission.
00:03:18.320 He and several staffers came through, and their task—this is the 9-11 Commission task—was to do research on events before, the day of, and after the 9-11 attacks.
00:03:30.900 They basically wanted to talk to people with firsthand anecdotal information.
00:03:35.880 So, I raised my hand.
00:03:37.200 It's like, hey, they've probably already heard of this, but I want to talk about Able Danger.
00:03:45.060 And that's—this was October of 2003.
00:03:50.180 And so, what I'm going to tell you now is what I told them.
00:03:53.500 Able Danger was an entrepreneurial concept that was created for the purposes of targeting a non-geographic target, al-Qaeda.
00:04:07.140 You had Eric Prince on a year ago.
00:04:09.640 Eric's concepts—I love Eric.
00:04:12.180 I consider us friends.
00:04:13.480 I hope so.
00:04:15.180 He believes in entrepreneurial concepts.
00:04:17.820 We did that internally.
00:04:18.900 We were trying to figure out the best and brightest way to go after al-Qaeda in 1999.
00:04:25.340 This is a PMC model?
00:04:26.900 It actually is a PMC model.
00:04:28.660 It is a private military contract.
00:04:29.880 Yeah, and I've talked to him about it.
00:04:31.100 Got it.
00:04:31.560 So, what we did is that, as a reservist—I know you're going to laugh at this—as a major, I was down in Tampa.
00:04:39.140 And the DIA rep, Al Downs, said, go talk—this is a major reservist going to brief the commanding general, Pete Schoomaker, on my civilian mission.
00:04:52.600 Pete Schoomaker.
00:04:53.380 Pete Schoomaker.
00:04:54.160 General Pete Schoomaker, who was commander of Special Operations Command in 1999 to 2000.
00:04:58.700 There he is.
00:04:59.240 So, imagine, if you will, when people have a hard time wrapping their mind around this, a little old reservist major goes in to brief the commanding general of SOCOM on what I do in my civilian DIA job.
00:05:13.740 Out of that meeting, Pat, General Schoomaker says, I get him right in to able danger.
00:05:22.300 And I had no idea what that was.
00:05:23.900 So, the next day, I think this was August of 1999, I'm brought down into a secure—yeah, you guys have your thing in a bank vault.
00:05:33.660 Well, SCIFs are like bank vaults.
00:05:35.940 They're secure facilities within secure facilities.
00:05:38.040 I go down, and I'm introduced to Captain Scott Philpott, who's a lieutenant commander, or a commander, and I'm given this big old binder.
00:05:46.240 The binder's about, oh, about five inches thick.
00:05:49.720 He says, there you go.
00:05:50.840 And I start reading it, Scott, Scott Philpott, and I start reading it, and it is like the e-ticket to Disneyland.
00:05:59.340 We're going downtown to go after al-Qaeda. 0.98
00:06:02.420 This is a sweet—this is a concept to go and conduct offensive, offensive operations against the growing threat.
00:06:10.780 Remember you talked about the value judgment of what you invest in?
00:06:13.620 We had already been hit twice in Africa from al-Qaeda, and there was a recognition that that was a growing threat.
00:06:20.760 So, secretly, General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs—you can bring him up.
00:06:27.080 Hugh Shelton was chairman of the Joint Chiefs in 99—had tasked Pete Schoomaker with Able Danger.
00:06:34.880 Able Danger was a campaign plan.
00:06:39.280 You're a business guy, so you guys do campaigns, right?
00:06:41.920 Figure out resources.
00:06:43.200 You figure out objectives.
00:06:44.080 You sign them.
00:06:45.100 You sign resources to tasks to potential outcomes.
00:06:49.420 That's what Able Danger was.
00:06:50.940 It was all an entrepreneurial concept.
00:06:52.840 Interesting.
00:06:53.500 Yes.
00:06:54.520 So, Pete—
00:06:55.400 When did Able Danger start?
00:06:57.680 99.
00:06:58.480 Late 99.
00:06:59.260 Late 99.
00:06:59.780 So, it has nothing to do with 9-11.
00:07:02.040 No?
00:07:02.360 Well, it gets there.
00:07:03.420 Let me get you there.
00:07:04.620 So, Able Danger was the offensive concept off the books.
00:07:11.100 Remember, you see it in the movies all the time, the euphemism of off the books.
00:07:13.880 We were an off-the-books operation.
00:07:15.860 But if I'm not mistaken, it was under Eric Clinesmith's—
00:07:18.780 No, no, no.
00:07:19.300 I'll get to Eric.
00:07:19.880 I'll get to Eric.
00:07:21.040 Eric had no idea.
00:07:22.000 As a matter of fact, he's never been in Reddit in everything we did.
00:07:24.820 So, I'm right into the project, and my job is to develop access for purposes of weaponized technology.
00:07:32.480 Again, think offensively.
00:07:35.240 This is before 9-11, and we're tasked to go kill al-Qaeda before 9-11.
00:07:40.220 Think about the—now, this is the problem with the whole thing we're talking about.
00:07:43.160 This is preventative measures.
00:07:45.760 Bingo.
00:07:46.880 Yes.
00:07:47.600 This is why they want to distract with the chart constantly, Pat.
00:07:52.220 We—this is why they were upset with me testifying.
00:07:55.720 You remember the Israeli op, the pager op, Pat?
00:07:58.660 Mm-hmm.
00:07:58.940 Of course.
00:07:59.400 They weren't the first ones to think about that.
00:08:01.220 Just saying.
00:08:02.140 I have to be careful about where I'm going, because we have to—I'm still trying to get
00:08:05.080 permission from the Pentagon to talk about my role.
00:08:07.520 My role in Able Danger, to this day, has never been disclosed.
00:08:11.120 I've been said to be the coordinator.
00:08:13.560 I've been a reservist.
00:08:15.200 My role was so highly classified—he probably remembers this—I was waived at—in closed
00:08:20.460 hearings with Kurt.
00:08:21.600 I was waived off by the staff director of the House Armed Service Committee, because I couldn't
00:08:26.120 talk about my role.
00:08:26.960 He was literally in the back of the room saying, don't say that.
00:08:30.580 You can't say that.
00:08:31.980 So to this day, we have never talked about—and I'm still trying to get permission to talk
00:08:36.260 about it.
00:08:36.720 Anyway, suffice it to say that what I was doing in my civilian job was what we wanted to introduce
00:08:42.880 to the Able Danger operation as one of the offensive options.
00:08:46.540 And this is the key.
00:08:47.560 This wasn't about waiting until something happened.
00:08:49.680 This was about us, Pete Schoomaker, putting together a team, the best and the brightest,
00:08:54.960 to put together options for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Hugh Shelton, to go do something
00:09:00.040 before 9-11.
00:09:02.060 And that was the whole project.
00:09:04.460 That was the concept.
00:09:05.840 The idea was, Pat, we knew they were coming.
00:09:08.720 We put together a team that would be invested in doing things that have never been done before.
00:09:13.740 And oh, by the way, how do you target something that's never been targeted?
00:09:17.920 How do you do something relating to a non-geographic target, a transnational target?
00:09:24.120 Data mining.
00:09:24.840 At the time, nobody knew about it.
00:09:26.980 Remember, this is 99—this is before anybody understood the power of the Internet.
00:09:31.540 So when I'm tasked to help them figure out how do we go about targeting all the ranch—Pete Schoomaker
00:09:39.000 called it the ranch, the Special Operations Command ranch.
00:09:41.480 That includes the Secret Army of Northern Virginia, Delta, you know, Rangers.
00:09:46.360 It's the options that were available for us to do something.
00:09:49.220 And oh, by the way, the other thing key about this, this was—Able Danger was the first 0.98
00:09:53.480 time Special Operations Command was ever the supported sink.
00:09:57.080 This is important because that means they were the lead.
00:09:59.840 They were the ones asking the other regional sinks to help them. 1.00
00:10:03.640 It was huge.
00:10:04.440 This was groundbreaking.
00:10:05.460 I just pulled up, and I asked, what was the original purpose of Able Danger?
00:10:10.260 Mission objective, number one, map al-Qaeda's global network.
00:10:14.300 The team used open-source intelligence, public records, website news, and advanced data analysis
00:10:19.040 tools to construct link charts of suspected terrorists and their connections.
00:10:23.640 Number two, identify terrorist cells in the U.S.
00:10:27.120 Able Danger reportedly flagged individuals later tied to 9-11, including Muhammad Al-Tah,
00:10:32.280 based on behavior patterns, travel records, and communication metadata.
00:10:36.280 Number three, provide operational intelligence to military planners.
00:10:40.420 The goal was to preemptively disrupt terror plots through actionable intelligence passed
00:10:45.380 to agencies like the FBI and the CIA.
00:10:47.260 That's it.
00:10:48.040 So I got this task, and it's like, what do I do?
00:10:52.260 I knew Lewa was experimenting with data mining, and I'll let Eric talk take over here, because
00:10:58.740 we had no way to map al-Qaeda.
00:11:01.260 So this is a long way to answering your question, I know, Pat, but you need to understand the
00:11:05.460 picture of what got us into the room that day of the hearing.
00:11:07.260 I guess what I want to know is, who told you you can't be in the hearing?
00:11:09.900 Who called and said you're out?
00:11:10.960 The Senate.
00:11:12.060 So DOD leadership, Army leadership said you can't go in.
00:11:16.240 Well, the Senate's the one that-
00:11:17.260 How far before?
00:11:18.260 How far before the hearing did they say that?
00:11:20.200 An hour before?
00:11:20.860 A day before?
00:11:21.380 That morning.
00:11:22.640 That morning.
00:11:23.460 You can pull up pictures of the hearing.
00:11:25.180 I'm in uniform, standing right next to the charts.
00:11:29.600 If you bring up, if you Google Able Danger Senate Hearing 2005, it should come up with
00:11:35.980 a number of time-life pictures that show all of us together, where I'm in the back row
00:11:41.340 next to J.D. Smith, who's going to be coming.
00:11:43.980 Yeah, here we go.
00:11:45.160 Right there.
00:11:46.040 See?
00:11:46.400 I'm right there.
00:11:46.940 I see you.
00:11:48.100 And there's Russ Queso.
00:11:49.040 There's Kurt.
00:11:49.860 There's J.D. Smith.
00:11:50.640 And I think you're there somewhere, right?
00:11:52.820 I'm heading behind one of the maps.
00:11:53.960 So we were going to lay out.
00:11:57.220 Everything I'm laying out to you right now, we were going to lay out in great detail.
00:12:01.080 And so this is where, to answer your question, what I was going to do is build the case of
00:12:05.900 why-and by the way, Pat, one key thing to remember, we weren't supposed to find what
00:12:09.700 we found.
00:12:10.300 We were off the books.
00:12:11.340 We were looking at Al-Qaeda from a fresh perspective.
00:12:15.060 None of us were experts on this issue.
00:12:17.880 I would argue that we became a dangling participle, an inconvenient organization that saw what the
00:12:24.320 deep state was doing, and that's why they came after us.
00:12:26.340 Did any one of you at the time have a relationship with the president, President Trump, currently
00:12:30.220 president?
00:12:31.120 No.
00:12:31.380 No.
00:12:31.720 Did you have a relationship?
00:12:32.380 No.
00:12:32.860 Not until later.
00:12:33.340 Before we show anything, the only reason I'm sharing this is, Rob, do you have a clip
00:12:36.740 of President Trump on Mourning Joe Scarborough?
00:12:39.580 I don't know if you guys have seen this or not.
00:12:41.540 Mourning Joe is doing a show, and they're talking about a book that he wrote that came
00:12:45.320 19 months before 9-11.
00:12:47.620 And just listen to Mourning Joe's reaction to this.
00:12:50.080 Go for it.
00:12:51.320 BuzzFeed dug up an old quote from Donald Trump, talking about a large-scale terror attack 19 months
00:12:58.300 before 9-11.
00:12:59.300 In his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, Trump wrote,
00:13:04.300 I really am convinced we're in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the
00:13:08.140 bombing of the 1993 Trade Center look like little kids playing with firecrackers.
00:13:13.940 Trump also mentioned the mastermind of the attack, writing, quote,
00:13:16.900 One day, we're told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin Laden is
00:13:23.200 public enemy number one, and U.S. jet fighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan.
00:13:28.220 He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later, it's on to a new enemy
00:13:34.240 and a new crisis.
00:13:37.360 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
00:13:39.320 Okay, hold on a second.
00:13:40.420 Is this really Trump before 9-11?
00:13:43.200 Have you read this?
00:13:44.240 It's 2000.
00:13:45.260 Are we making this?
00:13:46.180 Did you make this up, Mika?
00:13:47.780 Nick.
00:13:48.320 I did.
00:13:49.160 Did you make this up?
00:13:49.900 Nick, tell us it's over, right?
00:13:51.760 Because you're wrong about everything.
00:13:53.360 Mika, stop. 0.96
00:13:54.380 God, I think it's over.
00:13:55.320 What's that?
00:13:55.860 What's the rage here?
00:13:56.900 So this is real, Rob?
00:13:57.620 No, it's cute.
00:13:58.500 I think it's cute.
00:13:59.320 So what do you think about the fact that, Robby Kempos, what do you think about the
00:14:02.300 fact that the president said this 19 months before 9-11 happened?
00:14:04.760 I think wise people understood what was forming, because we were told by the chairman
00:14:10.660 of the Joint Chiefs to go look at this.
00:14:12.640 And one of the notable things about this, now, full disclosure, I know President Trump.
00:14:15.660 I was a national security advisor for the Trump 2020 campaign.
00:14:18.220 So I do have, you know, and I did meet him way later in 20, I think, 15.
00:14:23.020 But I think he had a sense, like many of us, that something was brewing.
00:14:27.040 And to continue your point to answer your question, when I was the coordinator of trying
00:14:32.800 to pull the team together behind the scenes, I took the ABLE Danger Team to land information
00:14:38.860 warfare activity at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
00:14:41.040 And that's where Eric comes into it.
00:14:43.320 They were doing an extraordinary job of, again, look at the time frame, 98, 99, 2000.
00:14:51.040 Pat, nobody knew the power of big data.
00:14:54.300 And so we were the first operational unit to actually use a combination of open source,
00:14:59.880 closed source.
00:15:01.040 Part of my job was to actually combine the top secret piece.
00:15:04.260 One of my deputies, Teresa McSwain, Lieutenant Colonel McSwain, brought the NSA database down
00:15:10.520 to Garland, Texas, to combine them together to do this overall targeting, to, you know,
00:15:15.020 basically combine things.
00:15:16.100 This was a major effort.
00:15:17.840 And again, before I let Eric, one second, before I turn it over to Eric, remember, we're talking
00:15:23.980 about a massive investment of resources as you, as a businessman, would recognize as a
00:15:28.480 priority.
00:15:28.980 Yet somehow they reduced it down to a map of a chart they couldn't find to dismiss everything
00:15:35.960 we did because they were so desperate to focus on one thing and push us away.
00:15:40.300 Okay.
00:15:40.540 So now, Eric, were you coming here as an army major, intelligence officer?
00:15:44.260 You're the one that was at, you testified before Congress and were ordered to destroy two and
00:15:49.140 a half terabytes of data.
00:15:50.720 Right.
00:15:50.920 So you know exactly what's in that data.
00:15:54.180 It was, well, yes and no, because before the destruction, we were giving a cease and desist
00:16:01.180 order down through DOD to stop what you're doing because you're violating intelligence
00:16:06.080 oversight rules on how you collected that information.
00:16:08.400 Which is not true.
00:16:09.280 Well.
00:16:09.640 There was no violation.
00:16:10.620 Right, right.
00:16:11.400 One of the problems that, yeah, that was me, a much younger me.
00:16:16.700 Nice time.
00:16:17.420 But what we learned, again, we were running several different operations.
00:16:22.540 This was a very young organization.
00:16:25.180 It was only, I think, two years old by the time this started up.
00:16:30.300 I was the first military chief of the intelligence branch.
00:16:34.640 So it was an operational unit designed to help the army or support the army in fighting
00:16:40.120 information warfare, information operations, psychological deception, operational security,
00:16:45.320 that kind of thing.
00:16:45.820 So we had operational teams, but I had a 24-person intel branch within that group.
00:16:53.160 And we were getting, because of the power that we were given with these new data mining
00:16:57.940 tools, and I'm telling you, they were bleeding edge.
00:17:00.840 We were doing a lot of things that we were making mistakes along the way.
00:17:05.400 I got called in one morning because apparently I had conducted a denial of service attack against
00:17:10.720 DIA, and then now NGA, their proxy server, shut the whole thing down.
00:17:16.500 Only because we were training a harvesting tool to pick up different information, and
00:17:23.820 it hit DIA on a classified network and started harvesting the entire agency.
00:17:29.300 And so, you know, denial of service, they shut the whole thing down.
00:17:31.700 So I got blamed.
00:17:32.540 You know, I got called on the carpet for that one morning.
00:17:34.600 That's what I mean, like the types of technology we were trying to wrestle with and figure out.
00:17:40.320 Once we had gotten those down, and it was a great combination of the data that we were
00:17:45.280 bringing in, the tools that we were using, but also, more importantly, the people and
00:17:48.600 the processes that we had put in place and the folks that I had assigned to different tasks.
00:17:54.200 We had first done an operation using data mining to show Department of Defense how our technology
00:18:01.000 was being stolen, specifically by China and some other countries, and we were able to
00:18:06.640 map it out by using a single technology as a sample.
00:18:10.340 That became a firestorm because it had gotten leaked that we were doing this work.
00:18:16.220 We received a subpoena from Congressman Dan Burton that he wanted all that information.
00:18:20.900 So we spent a weekend making 30,000 copies to deliver it by, you know, a data set on paper
00:18:27.600 to do that.
00:18:28.800 But that got us on the map, and that's why Tony came to see us.
00:18:32.460 Is this anywhere?
00:18:32.980 Is this two and a half terabytes anywhere right now?
00:18:35.120 Does anybody have access to this right now?
00:18:36.840 No.
00:18:37.040 And here's...
00:18:38.400 A hundred percent no one has it?
00:18:39.820 No.
00:18:40.600 I think it may exist.
00:18:42.960 Here's the rub, because it was myself and one of my warrant officer analysts who was on
00:18:49.100 the team, we had to have a deep discussion because we were told, you know, if you're
00:18:53.780 collecting information that has information about U.S. persons from an intelligence standpoint,
00:18:58.840 I mean, they beat this regulation into your head every year as a requirement.
00:19:03.420 So we were warned.
00:19:04.560 Oh, by the way, all this stuff that you had collected, and it wasn't just one chart.
00:19:08.040 It was dozens of charts.
00:19:09.720 We had dozens of connections.
00:19:11.220 We had cells in northern Africa.
00:19:16.020 We had cells in the Middle East.
00:19:17.200 We had cells in the Far East.
00:19:18.480 And then we started seeing cells pop up within the U.S.
00:19:21.380 My hometown of Plymouth, Michigan popped up as a potential operation, a front organization
00:19:27.900 that was using my little hometown outside of Detroit to funnel money into the organization.
00:19:33.020 So it was more than just operatives.
00:19:34.540 Al-Qaeda as well? 0.80
00:19:34.960 Al-Qaeda.
00:19:35.760 So it wasn't just operatives.
00:19:37.080 It was an entire support and sympathetic footprint.
00:19:39.220 But is there enough information here where you know who was behind 9-11?
00:19:45.480 Well, can I add something real quick?
00:19:46.720 Yeah.
00:19:47.060 We had a person that was actually monitoring global movement of individuals of interest
00:19:56.360 via mosques, all the mosques.
00:19:58.160 Okay.
00:19:58.680 Eleandra Mogolliner. 0.92
00:20:00.500 She did a three-hour interview for my oral history, which has never been released.
00:20:04.400 I'm the only one that has the interview.
00:20:05.800 And the DOD IG interviewed her and then basically proceeded to not ask her a single question about
00:20:12.380 what we're about to talk about.
00:20:14.180 Eric was provided via Orion Scientific as the source, detailed data about individuals moving
00:20:22.160 between mosques.
00:20:23.080 So it wasn't simply big data.
00:20:25.160 It was the fact that we were targeting down to the mosque level, which makes it hugely 1.00
00:20:29.420 controversial.
00:20:30.200 You and I can agree that the whole issue-
00:20:31.740 But Pat, there's a bigger story here.
00:20:33.140 The bigger story in the Congress is that I was funding their program as the chairman of
00:20:38.420 the R&D subcommittee.
00:20:39.660 I would go down to Fort Belvoir because all the services were standing up information dominant
00:20:44.160 centers.
00:20:45.040 The Air Force, the Navy, and the Army.
00:20:46.740 The Army to the Fort Belvoir.
00:20:47.920 I was impressed with what they were doing.
00:20:50.280 They were using software like Starlight and Spires and others that no one else was using.
00:20:55.060 John Hamry was the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
00:20:57.240 I suggested, John, you go down and see what your people are doing.
00:21:00.340 He went down.
00:21:01.040 They'll tell you he went down because of me.
00:21:03.160 He looked at it and he called me and said, Mr. Chairman, you're absolutely right.
00:21:06.040 We need this capability.
00:21:07.880 Far beyond what the Army is using it for, we need this capability.
00:21:10.800 I proposed establishing a data fusion center that would not just be for the Army or DOD.
00:21:17.580 It would be for the entire government.
00:21:19.560 So John Hamry suggested to me, Congressman, I will support and manage it either at the
00:21:24.340 White House or at the Pentagon.
00:21:26.400 But you've got to convince the FBI and the CIA to allow us to use their raw data because
00:21:31.120 of the big behemoths.
00:21:32.320 There are 33 classified systems.
00:21:34.680 So on November the 4th of 1999, a date I'll never forget, I had John Hamry in my office.
00:21:40.800 I had the Deputy Director of the FBI, the Deputy Director of the CIA, and I handed them a
00:21:44.420 proposal to create the NOAA, National Operations and Analysis Hub, Policymaker and Warfighters
00:21:51.340 Tool to Deal with Emerging Transnational Terrorist Threats.
00:21:54.320 I didn't write that.
00:21:55.600 Friends in Intel wrote it for me.
00:21:57.660 John Hamry said, it's a great idea.
00:21:59.280 We need it.
00:21:59.840 I'll manage it.
00:22:00.540 I said, I'll get it funded.
00:22:02.040 The FBI said, it's great.
00:22:03.220 We'll support it.
00:22:04.240 And the CIA said, we don't want it.
00:22:06.520 We're doing something called CI-21.
00:22:08.260 The big question for 9-11 is, why did the CIA not want to be a part of a fusion center
00:22:15.400 that the Deputy Secretary of Defense wanted?
00:22:18.380 I was going to fund, FBI was supporting, two years before 9-11.
00:22:23.420 The biggest criticism after 9-11 was the lack of fusion of intelligence data.
00:22:28.140 That's what they were doing.
00:22:29.720 And that recommendation was two years prior.
00:22:31.800 And that recommendation was based on what these folks were doing.
00:22:35.840 Eric, Tony, Eileen Pricer, Scott Philpott, and all the others, J.D. Smith, that were a part of the Able Danger team.
00:22:42.780 That's the big story.
00:22:43.880 And he didn't know about us.
00:22:45.200 I didn't know the details until 9-11.
00:22:47.780 They brought the charts in, and I took them right to the White House.
00:22:50.720 You don't know about Able Danger until 9-11.
00:22:51.860 I didn't get ready to the program.
00:22:53.560 I didn't need to.
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