THE DEEP STATE AL QAEDA LIE

TONY SHAFFER AND I DISCUSS BUSH-CHENEY EVIL IN AFGHANISTAN

Happy Fourth of July. We Trumpers have had a good week. So have conservative Catholics.

Interesting times, but eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. I worked on this Substack in the belief that I would have published it sooner. But once I start digging, I want to do the topic justice. Tony Shaffer is a MAGA voice who deserves more recognition. It’s always my honor to talk shop with him. Here’s what our conversation has led me to write.

Bin Laden, Zawahiri, al Qaeda, Pakistan—nightmare names from twenty years past that the United States government elites hid behind as they perpetrated global evil in their fake “war on terror”.

It’s a rare day when LTC Tony Shaffer (ret.) hears something about those nightmare names that he didn’t already know. Recently, as he interviewed me on Ed Henry’s Wake Up Patriots podcast, he did.

Here’s part of our interview.

As with all my appearances on Wake Up Patriots, Tony and I come up with some offbeat insider perspectives. Our Afghan war discussion arose out of Tony and I kvetching about the soft censorship of conservative authors by American libraries and bookstores, like Politics and Prose. Here’s a link to our full conversation, which included the always affable and well informed Chris Cordani.

Tony Shaffer would know about the military-industrial-intelligence complex betrayal of everyday Americans. He’s a former Army Reserve intelligence officer who has been on the trail of al Qaeda since BEFORE the terrorist attacks of September 2001. As he said, “There’s been a lot of kabuki regarding the whole 9/11 issue.”

The book he’s waving around and referring to as having briefly made him a darling of the Left is Operation Dark Heart, which cemented his stature as a courageous whistleblower on our ugly government intel operations, while at the same time ending his 30-year career as an officer in United States Army Reserve.

Now an elected official, a county commissioner in Chowan County, North Carolina, Tony hosts Good Morning Patriots and maintains a constant stream of anti-Deep State analysis on a variety of platforms.

Here’s a telling quote about the depth of Tony’s bestseller by journalist Peter Lance from an article that originally appeared in Playboy Magazine in December 2010.

“Shaffer's book rips the lid off several stories the bureaucrats wanted to suppress: the role of a program named Able Danger in yielding information that could have uncovered the 9/11 plot; Operation Dark Heart, which could have nabbed Al Qaeda's number two leader; and early indications that Pakistan's spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, actively supported the Taliban. These are the incendiary bombs the censors tried to defuse. And this is the real story of Tony Shaffer's book.”

Recall that Al Qaeda’s number two was the infamous Egyptian terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri. That’s the guy Joe Biden took credit for killing in Kabul with an August 2022 drone strike. So, just in time for an upbeat public relations story a couple of months before the midterms.

Do we believe Joe on that? I don’t.

But I believe Tony Shaffer. And had he not published Operation Dark Heart the world would not have the insidious and heartbreaking truth about Able Danger, which thanks to Deep State suppression you probably haven’t heard much about. I know I haven’t.

Peter Lance’s description of Abel Danger is all I could find. My Montgomery County (MD) library system, here in the heart of the Deep State, doesn’t circulate Operation Dark Heart. Plenty of Obama books. Even a couple Biden books. But nothing by me or Tony Shaffer.

Go figure.

I’ve ordered Operation Dark Heart off Amazon, which, as is the case with books, is my only option.

Here’s a quote from Lance’s article that best describes Able Danger:

“In 1999 General Peter Schoomaker, head of the U.S. Special Operations Command, had asked that Shaffer be ‘read into’ Able Danger, a groundbreaking data-mining project aimed at collecting global intelligence on Al Qaeda…Able Danger had a dual purpose," says Shaffer. ‘After the African embassy bombings, it was clear to the Pentagon that Al Qaeda was our new enemy and that eventually we would have boots on the ground against them. So the idea was to identify their members and take them out. The operation wasn't called Able Fun or Able Picnic. It was Able Danger because we needed to get these guys before they could get us again…Within months, Shaffer says, Able Danger had uncovered some astonishing information. ‘We identified lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, in addition to Marwan al-Shehhi, who flew UA 175 into the south tower of the Trade Center, and two of the muscle hijackers aboard AA 77, which hit the Pentagon.’”

And then the Deep State bureaucrats stepped in, and the 9/11 attacks kicked off George W. Bush’s global war on terror.

More from Lance’s Playboy article:

“‘Imagine,’ said then-congressman Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, the number-two-ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, in 2006. ‘You've got the names of four of the hijackers in the spring of 2000, almost a year and a half before the 9/11 attacks, and then it gets destroyed. Well, there was no legal justification for it whatsoever.’”

Tony and his crew identified a serious terrorist threat, and poof, just like that, they were no longer needed. And that was just the Able Danger redirect. The other one was Operation Dark Heart, which actually sounds more like the basis for the Hollywood version of the capture of Bin Laden as depicted in Zero Dark Thirty.

Here’s Lance’s description of that:

“The original edition of Shaffer's manuscript, which I obtained, told of a savvy female analyst who in 2003 had stumbled on ‘the Al Qaeda hotel,’ a hornet's nest of Taliban and high-value target activity in Wana, Pakistan…Shaffer quickly mapped out a mission to penetrate the location using a combination of informants, spies, electronic intel, and psychological operations…but [LTG David] Barno put his foot down. And with that, Operation Dark Heart was effectively dead. Shaffer later speculated that ‘someone on the U.S. side’ passed the intelligence on Wana to the CIA. Cut to months later. When Pakistani forces engaged the Taliban in the bloody battle of Wana, leaving dozens dead, the media reported the forces had surrounded a high-value target believed to be al-Zawahiri. Then suddenly, Shaffer writes, most, if not all, of the Al Qaeda-allied foreign militants fighting alongside local tribesmen escaped.”

Wow. So, they had Zawahiri in March 2004, and he got away.

Let me repeat: Go figure.

So you can bet Tony Shaffer was interested when I told him and Chris about Cheney’s Abbottabad flyover in December 2005.

Looking back at our country’s evil foreign adventures is not a great way to celebrate the Fourth of July. But it is an honest way to do it. I’m finding Tony’s book Operation Dark Heart both fascinating and depressing, given that so much of the 2004ish fervor to defeat Taliban he writes about ultimately led too many families and our country to endure Barack Obama’s and Joe Biden’s betrayal.

It seems the actual war on terror continues to this day.

Here’s a link to check out Tony’s book.

My new website lists all my books, including 15 Years A Deplorable: A White House Memoir. Here’s a screenshot and the link.