Chickenhawk Congressman Curt Weldon has been using the Able Danger story as a pretext for the reestablishement of a strong, permanent, legally-acknowledged "data-mining" program to use supercomputers to spy on America and Americans.

But the real lesson of Able Danger should be clear. It doesn't matter whether it's data-mining or shoe-leather -- independent-minded government investigators who get too interested in designated patsies find their reports ignored, their work product destroyed, their careers ruined. (The ones who live, anyway.)

From CQ 2/10:

"[...]Another scheduled witness, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) operative Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, will tell the committee about what happened after he went public with his insistence that U.S. intelligence knew about the impending Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and could have prevented them. He entered what’s often called a "wilderness of mirrors" — a phrase spies use to describe a paranoid world where their life of deception turns back on them.

Shaffer, who spent years as a super-secret DIA agent handler, surfaced last year in stories about a deeply clandestine DIA data-mining unit code-named "Able Danger," which he says latched onto the movements of Mohammed Atta and other al Qaeda hijackers weeks before the Sept. 11 attack. Another leader of the units says the same.

Shaffer will tell Shays’ Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations how his career was sidetracked and his reputation trashed when he challenged the official version of events handed down by the Sept. 11 commission, a source familiar with his 66-page prepared statement says.

But the next day, Feb. 15, Shaffer will get a chance to tell the whole Able Danger story under oath to a closed-door, joint hearing of two House Armed Services subcommittees.

The fact that Shaffer, now on paid leave from the DIA, is finally getting such a forum to tell his story is testimony to the weakened power of the White House to control events related to intelligence abuses on Capitol Hill. More than 200 members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have signed on to a demand that the Defense Department investigate Shaffer’s claims.

For months Shaffer’s version of events has not only been dismissed by Sept. 11 commission Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, but tarnished through his close association with Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania. Weldon has a reputation among intelligence journalists, fairly or not, as someone whose allegations aren’t always backed up by the facts.

As Shaffer’s scheduled testimony drew near, there were whispers that the White House had engineered the lifting of Shaffer’s gag order in exchange for a promise that he would focus on Clinton administration intelligence failures, not their own.

[...]

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Also interesting: It looks like Shaffer is no longer a member of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, a group dedicated to establishing legal protections for whistleblowers working in the military, CIA, FBI, Gestapo Homeland Security, etc.