There seems to be many secret agencies and projects that are run by the government. One has just to try researching secret projects and secret agencies before they find so many of these things, that they realize that they have taken on a daunting task. It is one thing to have some secret projects and secret agencies, but when you have the amount that we have, you begin to realize that this is way out of control. Could it be that we are classifying too many things as secret? There is a growing group of people that believe this. They cite the fact that even documents that were declassified are being classified as secret again. This certainly seems strange doesn't it? This seems even more strange to me because anyone that has seen some of these documents knows that they are redacted and some are redacted so much, that there is hardly anything left to read except for the heading and date.

Moving on to secret agencies and programs, we notice that we certainly don't have a lack of these in this country. I personally have no idea how many agencies are really in the government. Sure you could try and look it up and you would get a list, but not everything would really be on it. You couldn't trace funds to find anything out because the funds are hidden in other programs. Now I am not saying that we shouldn't have a secret agency or two, but the problem with these things is that they are usually secret only to us and not our enemies. If this is the case, then what is the purpose of keeping them secret? It seems to me that the only purpose is to hide the amount of funding these agencies are getting.

It is being said that we have an intelligence unit, for lack of a better word, that was founded in 1999 to hunt terrorists. Apparently it was created under the direct orders of the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and a general was the head of it. Sounds pretty good doesn't it? All was not what it seemed, however. In order for the unit to be effective it had to know what was going on in other agencies. This turned out to be like Pepsi asking Coke for it's formula. You would think that since we all are supposed to work toward the same goals in this country that cooperation would be a given. Well it isn't and wasn't in this case according to one of the officers involved in Able Danger. He claimed that the CIA didn't want to share anything with Able Danger. Able Danger leaders made it a point of telling the CIA that they would not be competing with them to find and kill Osama bin Laden, but it was said that this made no difference. I think that one of the problems here was that you had a civilian unit, the CIA, that had many political types who always fear for their jobs, watching a military unit start to do what they felt was their job and they weren't going to just stand by and let this happen, even if the unit was more efficient, or should I say especially if that unit was more efficient.

It was said that Able Danger had a degree of success in the past at finding terrorists. The unit collected data on when terrorists visited certain mosques. They were said to be getting a lot of info because they paid people to tell them when they saw someone at a mosque. All this info was plugged into a sophisticated software program that could then identify patterns, making these people vulnerable. Not only were patterns found, but relationships between people were discovered. So here we had a way of possibly identifying many of the world's terrorists and linking them to their contacts. Once all these people are known, it is a lot easier to find them and break up their cells. Looking at Able Danger, I think that we would have to say that this unit was a great idea and the cost was relatively cheap. You would have thought that a great idea like this would be utilized to the utmost, but politics, jealousy and cronyism being what it is in this country were more important to some individuals than protecting our country.

The military insisted that they were on a completely different mission than the CIA. When they were asked to describe the difference, they stated that they were trying to get the 'body' while the CIA was after the 'head'. I presume that the 'head' was Osama bin Laden. Anyone who has dealt with political units and the CIA is definitely one, should know that they will never allow any competition to spring up. Even if the people in the new agency or unit don't think that they are competing, it doesn't matter. What matters is the fact that the political entity thinks that it is being competed with. I had a personal experience with this once myself. I am not going to tell you what agencies were involved, but I will say this, they were only state agencies. I was in charge of establishing a computer unit. The main computer was a mainframe and it was to be used by all the units in the state in my agency. There was a commissioner who was in charge of all computing operations in the state. He was political and really knew nothing about computers, but was paranoid about his job. My unit had about 100 stations that were hooked up to the mainframe. This was many years ago and I decided to ask for a commodore computer so that I could do some word processing. As hard as this is to believe, I received a call from the Commissioner, cursing me out and saying that I was only ordering this computer so that I could run everything off of it and make him look foolish. These are the problems you have when dealing with political types that are so afraid of their jobs that they render everyone else helpless. By the way, I was never able to do any word processing because I never got the computer. This type of attitude puts the hack (political type), first and everything else second, no matter how important everyone else thinks the matter is.

Able Danger was able to produce charts showing connections between terrorists and frequency of visits to certain places and mosques. It seemed that everyone connected with the unit was very happy with the results. It is said that Able Danger is only a shadow of it's former self. Since the top leadership has changed it had been nowhere as effective, according to sources. A controversy exists over Able Danger. Some claim that the unit reported three times to the 9/11 commission and yet the commission states they never received any testimony from them. Is Able Danger still active today? I can not say for sure, but if it is not receiving cooperation from other agencies than it's mission is being limited.