Thank you to www.abledangerblog.com for pointing out the link to video of today’s press conference:
C-Span Video
(Realplayer is required.)
We have transcribed a brief portion of those comments, which follow:
Thanks for coming out today. Reluctantly, I stand to provide further info on the Able Danger situation.
When I first started this effort back in June, when the full Able Danger story came to my attention, I said it could be anything from gross incompentence to a coverup bigger than Watergate.
I, today, will tell you after months of looking at this issue that there is a coverup that’s taken place and continues to take place, and therefore I am asking for a criminal investigation as of this date.
I just finished an hour and a half meeting with the Inspector General at the Department of Defense; four employees went into extensive briefings and they advised me there had been two other requests, besides mine, of their office, including a request from the Senate and the other a request from the House.
So there are three separate requests for an Inspector General investigation specifically on Able Danger, and the deliberate persecution, intimidation and the ruining of Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer’s career. It is absolutely outrageous what’s occurred, because an Army Lt Col, a Bronze Star recipient, has been punished and had his career ruined for telling the truth.
The handling of Tony by the Defense Intelligence Agency is an abomination. The Agency needs to be held accountable. They went to such extremes to destroy Tony’s career that they accused him, to both Wolf Blitzer at CNN and to a reporter from Time Magazine, that he was allegedly having an affair with someone in my office. They accused him of stealing pens that belong to the government in a written document that I have a copy of. Well, it turns out, when you talk to Tony, when he was 15 years old and his father was working for an American embassy overseas, he admitted when he took a lie detector test to join the military, that he in fact had taken some pens and given to classmates in school. The DIA actually included that, without stating the facts of the issue, as a reason why they should remove him. And obviously, the theft of those pens took place when he was a youngster, 15 years of age.
They also sent him a letter on September the 23rd, from the DIA Counsel, that he was not eligible to receive any more classified documents from his file and he was denied that privilege because he in fact had no longer classified status. Two weeks later that box, marked DIA, along with several others, were transported to his lawyer. In that box were six classified documents. The stupidity and the arrogance of the Defense Intelligence Agency was such that they actually sent back to Tony Shaffer, two weeks after they told him he had no security clearance, six classified documents. Also in that box were a bag of governmental pens. Now, they accused him of stealing pens, yet they sent him pens–federal property, I might add. They also sent him a $300 GPS machine, which belongs to the gov’t, They sent him federal property, and they sent him the mail of other DIA employees. In fact, there were probably 25 or 30 bank statements, personal letters and information, addressed to someone that Tony doesn’t know, but included by the DIA, which in fact is a crime, being sent to Tony’s office.
This whole story is bizarre. This whole story is outrageous and the truth needs to be told. The reason why the DIA is so aggressively after Tony Shaffer is because, in telling the truth, he’s going to embarrass bureaucrats within the defense intelligence community, he is going to embarrass politicians in the previous administration, and perhaps some in this administration. He is going to lay out a story that’s going to be corroborated by at least five others….
