The Context Missing From the Times' Atta 'Scoop'

As is his way, Tom Maguire has become the go-to man for OCD-level parsing,  this time of Rep. Curt Weldon's allegations that the military knew about Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers back in 2000.

Among the other things,  Tom notes that, according  to the NY Times, Weldon  said he has "been aware of the episode since shortly after the Sept. 11 attack" but  "recognized the significance of the episode only recently." To which Tom asks, rightly, WTF: "So, Weldon learned of this Pentagon success shortly after 9/11, discussed it with Stephen Hadley, but only recently realized its significance.  Really?"

In another post, Tom points out that, as Laura Rozen has also noticed, Weldon has, since least 2002, been talking up the secret program's purported pegging of al-Qaida suspects. Weldon never mentioned Atta.  Tom wonders whether that's because of some classification issues. I have no idea. But I do have another guess:

I was talking about this story with LAT reporter Terry McDermott, who recently published  a history of the 9/11 hijackers,  Perfect Soldiers.  He pointed out a key bit of context missing from the Times' story:   If the Pentagon's secret data-mining program really did finger some of the future hijackers, how many other names were on the  list? Tens, hundreds, thousands?

If  it was closer to thousands, maybe officials presumably (rightly? wrongly?) that they were dealing with too many false positives and the info was, essentially, not of high enough quality to be actionable. And, just guessing here, maybe there were  so many names on the list that nobody noticed Atta's et. al until recently. That would explain some of the mystery, and offer a much murkier picture than the NYT painted.

Comments

[scott]

If the "100s or 1,000s of names" was the case, wouldn't the 9/11 Commission just say so? Why say, "It didn't mesh with our conclusions about Atta"?

[house]

It is likely the results did draw many false positives, but these were probably ranked.Atta and 3 others ended up on the chart.
Consider the claim of the use of open source info only.If that is true, profiling variables would have been used that may have been questioned as violations of privacy, and perhaps unscientific.
If classified info was also used,
(i.e., CIA cables on Al Midhar and Alhazmi's travel to Malaysia/Bangkok/LA, )then we have another agency that didn't share with the FBI.

[michael reinhard]

Even if it is true that there were too many false positives on the Able Danger list it seems like this story is not getting the attention it deserves. We have reorganized our intelligence services to reduce the autonomy of the one agency in the government that appears to have had a clue, outlawed the technology that produced the clue and gave a pass to the people that decided the clue should be ignored. And yet the story seems to be going away already. After the breathless reception given to the CIA's quoting a 2 year old TV interview as an answer to HIS request for more information the speed with which this story is going away is truly perplexing.