Maj. Eric Kleinsmith
Appearances
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
2005, I believe. This is September 2005, the first testimony in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Right.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
It was, well, yes and no. Because before the destruction, we were giving a cease and desist order down through DOD to stop what you're doing because you're violating intelligence oversight rules on how you collected that information.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Right, right. One of the problems that... Yeah, that was a much younger me. Nice time. But what we learned, again, we were running several different operations. This was a very young organization. It was only, I think, two years old by the time this started up. I was the first military chief of the intelligence branch.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
So it was an operational unit designed to help the Army or support the Army in fighting information warfare, information operations, psychological deception, operational security, that kind of thing. So we had operational teams, but I had a 24-person intel branch within that group.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
And we were getting, because of the power that we were given with these new data mining tools, and I'm telling you, they were bleeding edge. We were doing a lot of things that we were making mistakes along the way. I got called in one morning because apparently I had conducted a denial of service attack against DIA, and then now NGA, their proxy server, shut the whole thing down.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Only because we were training a harvesting tool to pick up different information, and it hit DIA on a classified network and started harvesting the entire agency. And so, you know, denial of service, they shut the whole thing down. So I got blamed, you know, I got called out on the carpet for that one morning.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
That's what I mean, like the types of technology we were trying to wrestle with and figure out. Once we had gotten those down, and it was a great combination of the data that we were bringing in, the tools that we were using, but also, more importantly, the people and the processes that we had put in place and the folks that I had assigned to different tasks.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
We had first done an operation using data mining to show Department of Defense how our technology was being stolen. specifically by China and some other countries. And we were able to map it out by using a single technology as a sample. That became a firestorm because it had gotten leaked that we were doing this work.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
We received a subpoena from Congressman Dan Burton that he wanted all that information. So we spent a weekend making 30,000 copies to deliver it by a data set on paper to do that. But that got us on the map, and that's why Tony came to see us.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
No.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Here's the rub, because it was myself and one of my warrant officer analysts who was on the team. We had to have a deep discussion, because we were told, if you're collecting information that has information about U.S. persons from an intelligence standpoint... I mean, they beat this regulation into your head every year as a requirement. So we were warned.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Oh, by the way, all this stuff that you had collected, and it wasn't just one chart. It was dozens of charts. We had dozens of connections. We had cells in... Northern Africa, we had cells in the Middle East, we had cells in the Far East, and then we started seeing cells pop up within the U.S.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
My hometown of Plymouth, Michigan popped up as a potential operation, a front organization that was using my little hometown outside of Detroit to funnel money into the organization. So it was more than just operatives. So it wasn't just operatives. It was an entire support and sympathetic footprint.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Part of it is when you're doing data mining, you're harvesting everything. Including open source. Intelligence collectors are very restricted on what we can collect when a U.S. person comes up. But when a tool does it, it gets everything. And so you have to be able to go through that and excite all the information about U.S. persons.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
This is a throwback from Vietnam days and Pike and Church Committee 75, that kind of stuff. So they wrote these regulations for intel collection, but they never updated them, again, because we were the first data mining operation.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
So on the evening of 9-11, we were all on the phone with each other because we knew it was coming. We had deep conversations the entire time we were running this operation that we knew something was coming. So 9-11 happens. We're all talking to each other. And the watch phrase was, so it begins. We knew this was coming out. And that was, you know.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
We knew something was coming. They were coming offensively, and they had already established a deep footprint.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Yes, that was before Able Danger.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
No, that was a different effort. He had subpoenaed it, so we had to make copies of it and send it to Capitol Hill. But the rest of it you destroyed, I guess. Yeah, then in November is when the Able Danger started. It was in March, spring the next year, that we were given the cease and desist. And while that was going on, when you collect information about U.S.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
persons, even if it's incidental, which is the tools, you can't read 2.5 terabytes of data with the human eye.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
in that time so 90 days hits were required to delete all that and since we were given a cease and desist order the clock's still ticking the 90 days hit i had a lawyer come down from my command says here's your day delete the data or go to jail and i had to sit with one of my warrant officers we had a deep moral discussion on should we hide some of it should we just put some on a removable hard drive and hide it in a file cabinet and we ended up deleting all of it and that's
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
That's about the worst day you could ever spend in the military knowing now, in hindsight, that you're now the guy that could have prevented 9-11.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
So here's the issue. I'll give you an example for what we did when the FBI came down. We were talking to them about able dangers. We gave them... a car dealership in Morocco that was used as a front organization. We gave them, here's a car dealership. Who was them? The FBI. We had some FBI agents that showed up.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Right. So it was just, the front was the business, but in the back, we knew the people that we're associated with were funneling information in. The first question the Bureau asks, or the agents there, is like, well, where'd you find this? And what we showed them was, well, here's the hit that we got on unclassified information.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
And it was this really wild Michigan militia conspiracy theorist website that said, you know, the FBI is trying to arm the KGB in northern Michigan to take over Upper Peninsula. Chelsea Clinton's real father is Webster Hubble. And then there's this car dealership used as a front organization. And so, you know, this is what I mean by raw information. It was all on the same page.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Yes. The story we've all read about. The web page that the tool hit had this on the page. And so we're showing this to the Bureau. And this is what I mean, the difference between raw intelligence versus what comes out of an agency, which has to be peer-reviewed and edited and screened and then produced into a very slick product.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
We were feeding raw information out to Congressman Weldon, out to PACOM, out to all these organizations.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
I had my own, I mean, I had a small shop of 24 analysts. So we were doing it on a very small level, but it wasn't the size of, you know, we're not the 40,000 people that work at NSA or whatever. So we got 24 people working in the second floor basement of this organization. So the Bureau looks at this and says, you guys are a bunch of cracks.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Even though we were able to show additional information that corroborated it and show them right there, it didn't matter. It was the fact that you just squandered your credibility because what you saw as the tip-off came out.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
You know what? Yeah, I don't even. We didn't even touch that stuff. And again, that's the problem is when you go after stuff.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
The second time I had to, we went up to testify was in February of 2006. And we had, you know, after everything's done, you know, you've got reporters floating around the room and everything. And I had one guy come up to me and he was asking me some very personal questions. What are you doing now? What are you doing for work? That kind of thing.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
Followed me out into the hallway and I said, you know, I'm sorry. I'm not going to answer any more of your questions. I don't know who you are. And he goes, oh, I'm sorry. I'm Kirk Lippold. I'm the commander of the USS Cole. And, I mean, Kirk and I are friends now, but that's the moment that, again, it hits you that, again, I feel responsible for the loss of your sailors.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
I have the response. I get to carry the responsibilities for the loss of 3,000 people on 9-11. The 20th, I really wish you hadn't played that video just a few minutes ago because— On the 20th anniversary, my wife found me totally broken down in our kitchen. And I get to carry that PTSD the rest of my life.
PBD Podcast
"The 9/11 Commission Was A FRAUD" – Curt Weldon EXPOSES CIA Cover-Up, Able Danger & Deleted Evidence | PBD Podcast | Ep. 586
And I didn't think I had it, and it got worse and worse, and it gets worse and worse every year.