As you’ve likely read, the Pentagon blocked members of the Able Danger data mining project from testifying today before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee:

Bryan Whitman, a Defense Department spokesman, said in a statement that open testimony about the program “would not be appropriate - we have expressed our security concerns and believe it is simply not possible to discuss Able Danger in any great detail in an open public forum.” He offered no other detail on the Pentagon’s reasoning in blocking the testimony.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is chairman of the committee, said he was surprised by the Pentagon’s decision because “so much of this has already been in the public domain, and I think that the American people need to know what happened here.”

Mr. Specter said in a telephone interview that he intended to go ahead with the hearing on Wednesday and hoped that it “may produce a change of heart by the Department of Defense in answering some very basic questions.”

One of the those who had been scheduled to testify, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, reportedly said the gag order came at the behest of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

It seems like just yesterday the 9/11 Commission was demanding access to every 9/11-related document, no matter how sensitive:

“Any document that has to do with this investigation cannot be beyond our reach,” Mr. Kean said on Friday in his first explicit public warning to the White House that it risked a subpoena and a politically damaging courtroom showdown with the commission over access to the documents, including Oval Office intelligence reports that reached President Bush’s desk in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.

“I will not stand for it,” Mr. Kean said in the interview in his offices here at Drew University, where he has been president since 1990.

“That means that we will use every tool at our command to get hold of every document.”

Now that Able Danger has called into question the Commission’s findings, however, some former Commissioners seem less than enthusiastic about letting the light shine in:

No one from the Sept. 11 commission will be present [at today's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing], despite the fact that [Rep. Curt] Weldon has publicly blamed them for — in his words — “ignoring” evidence about the project.

Commission staffers say that after Shaffer told them about the project in 2003 they requested documents about it from the Defense Department, but found nothing to support claims that the team had nailed Atta.

Former GOP Sen. Slade Gorton of Washington told United Press International that he had volunteered to testify [MM: presumably under oath], and had been invited to do so, but had to cancel at the last minute owing to an unexpected conflict. He said that he would be submitting a letter [MM: presumably not under oath] in place of his testimony, which would “answer, in detail, all the questions” that the committee had.

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Able Danger blogging…

Dr. Sanity liveblogged the hearing today. Tom Maguire takes a look at the witness list. QT Monster has the latest on an Able Danger news tracker.

Captain Ed:

The Pentagon might think that withdrawing its witnesses will keep Able Danger from breaking wide open, but they will find themselves sorely mistaken. This only demonstrates that the program found something that the Pentagon still wants hidden. If that includes a finding that their program not only found Atta and other AQ terrorists over a year before the attacks, but also predicted the USS Cole attack three weeks before it happened, and that the Pentagon shut down the program anyway, eighteen Senators will want to know why.

AJStrata:

There are ways to handle this without exposing classified information. This looks like some kind of cover up or something. I doubt it is - but it will be played that way. How come they couldn’t work out rules for discussing the matter without compromising intel? The big questions are policy and responsibility - not intel.

Andy McCarthy:

Remember the vaunted 9/11 Commission hearings? We were told that it was so urgently important that the public understand accurately the history of government counter-terrorism activities prior to the attacks that all manner of classified information was declassified – including, famously, a presidential daily brief from the intelligence community (among the most sensitive documents generated by the government) outlining the al Qaeda threat circa August 2001. Indeed, under great political and media pressure, the president’s then-National Security Adviser Condi Rice was compelled to give hours of sworn public testimony about everything she and the administration did from January 2001 through 9/11.

Why is it that this was important enough for the National Security Adviser but somehow not important enough for a group of intelligence operatives in connection with a program that hasn’t existed anymore for years?

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