Eric Umansky

Iraq Constitution Re-Do II

If it's really true that a good portion of  Sunni leaders are now pushing for Sunnis take part in the next vote--and in the process potentially making political partication the wedge issue among insurgents that every has been hoping for.... And if it's really true that the U.S. , desperate to get any constitutional deal, has aceded to  and is indeed pushing for Shiite demands  for the constittuion,  then, again, I'm left wondering:  Would dumping this consitutional assembly and holding elections again would be a bad thing?

I understand there would be drawbacks. Loss of (the perception of) momentum and loss of face, among others. But holding another  election for  a transitional government and constitutional assembly strikes me as the least bad option. 

That's just my impression, based on way  limited knowledge. And I'm happy to be convinced that my tentative position is wrong--just post below.

Jesus

The NYT:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 19 - Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee, the Republican leader, aligned himself with President Bush on Friday when he said that the theory of intelligent design as well as evolution should be taught in public schools.

Such an approach "doesn't force any particular theory on anyone," Mr. Frist said in Nashville, according to The Associated Press. "I think in a pluralistic society that is the fairest way to go about education and training people for the future." A Washington spokesman for the senator, Nick Smith, said later that the report was accurate.

Shifting Shaffer

Looks like Able Danger source #1, Anthony Shaffer, has been shifting his story a bit.  Laura Rozen, flagging a Fox News story, points out that Shaffer recently said he didn't remember Atta's name but now is claiming he raised a stink specifically about Atta. Neat trick. Here's   another comes from Shaffer's  apparently fragile memory  of his ecounter with the 9/11 commission:

From the original NYT story:

The former intelligence official said he was among a group that briefed Mr. Zelikow and at least three other members of the Sept. 11 commission staff about Able Danger when they visited the Afghanistan-Pakistan region in October 2003.

The official said he had explicitly mentioned Mr. Atta as a member of a Qaeda cell in the United States. He said the staff encouraged him to call the commission when he returned to Washington at the end of the year. When he did so, the ex-official said, the calls were not returned.

From Fox News today (thanks to Laura):

Although Shaffer conceded that during his own personal briefing of Sept. 11 commission staffers in Afghanistan in Oct. 2003, he didn't specifically name the terrorists. Instead, he detailed how Able Danger had uncovered information about three terror cells with the use of then-advanced data-mining techniques.

That would help explain why none of the four staffers present at the interview remember any Atta mention.

Able Danger Allegations: A Big Game of Telephone?

We're getting a better sense of just how little Super Source Anthony Shaffer actually knows. From the WP:

"I did see the charts and I did handle the charts, but my understanding of them was like a layman," Shaffer said. "We had identified them as terrorists. . . . But even now I do not remember all the names." ...

Shaffer said yesterday that his overall allegations were based on his recollections and those of two others -- Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott and a civilian employee of the former Land Information Warfare Activity at Fort Belvoir, whom he declined to identify. Phillpott did not respond to telephone messages left yesterday with the Navy and at his home.

So Shaffer relied to some large but not exactly known  degree on one Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott and an unnamed civilian worker.  I don't know anything  about the anonymous civilian worker. But let's look at the naval officer, Phillpott. Does he have more than a "layman's" understand of Able Danger? Here's what the 9/11 panel said last week about the then-unnamed Navy man:

The officer being interviewed said he saw this material only briefly, that the relevant material dated from February through April 2000, and that it showed Mohamed Atta to be a member of an al Qaeda cell located in Brooklyn. The officer complained that this information and information about other alleged members of a Brooklyn cell had been soon afterward deleted from the document (“redacted”) because DOD lawyers were concerned about the propriety of DOD intelligence efforts that might be focused inside the United States.  ...

The interviewee had no documentary evidence and said he had only seen the document briefly some years earlier. He could not describe what information had led to this supposed Atta identification. Nor could the interviewee recall, when questioned, any details about how he thought a link to Atta could have been made by this DOD program in 2000 or any time before 9/11.

Apart from the recent Able Danger news, I can only find a handful of references on the Web to Scott Phillpot. One  from 1995 describes him as commanding a ship, the USS Typhoon.  The next reference I see is from 2002, and it still describes Phillpot as a ship commander.  Why am I not shocked that a guy with, er,  that apparent level of expertise with data-mining, would be hesistant to attach his name to the Atta allegations. (Remember what the Post said, "Phillpott did not respond to telephone messages left yesterday with the Navy and at his home.")

Of course, none of this mean Phillpot was wrong.  But it certainly suggests he'd have no fucking idea if the wrong Atta was pegged. 

The Multiple Atta Scenario

One of the (many) reasons I've been skeptical of of the charges that  Able Danger ID'd Atta in '99 is that--according to LAT reporter Terry McDermott, who wrote the definitive take on the 9/11 hijackers--Atta wasn't even recruited by AQ until 2000. And he didn't enter the U.S. until then either. Nor did he seem to have a presence on the public databases, such as Nexis, that Big Source Shaffer says Able Danger relied on.

Could it have been a case of mistaken identity? That is, Atta wasn't flagged pre-9/11 but it just so happens that guys with similar names were.  Tom at JustOneMinute raises that posssibility, naming a former Palestinian terrorist named Mahmoud Atta. 

And here's another one: Back in the late 1990s there was a Egpytian-born  man who was linked  in sting-operation trying to ships arms to militants to Egypt. That man's name is Mohamed el Amir. Mohamed Atta's full name is  Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta. Or as he was commonly known: Mohamed el Amir.

(Thanks to Terry and another big paper reporter for the Atta doppleganger theory.)

UPDATE:
I thought I had posted this yesterday--turns out, I forgot the whole "publish" button concept.  In any case, Mickey has since  gone into detail explaining why the two Atta theory makes so much sense.

I concur. In fact,  the two-Atta theory only leaves one major issue unexplained:   What about  the three other 9/11 hijackers that Able Danger purportedly fingered? Possible answers:  1) Mr. Shaffer was embellishing. (Has he named the specific hijackers who were purportedly  ID'd?)  2) They indeed were named and--just like Atta may be--are also cases of mistaken identity.  That would be understandable. It's easy for Arabic speakers to  mix up Arabic names.  Indeed, the FBI itself originally pegged four or five wrong people as the 9/11 hijackers.

Post-War Plan TK

My buddy John Cook finds the most substantive pages in the State Department's recently released memos about post-war plannning for Iraq:

The  pages were redacted after the fact, of course.  And the explanation for doing so is obvious: The plans must have been so advanced, so detailed, so nuanced, that releasing them  would  pose a threat to national security.

An Iraqi Constitutional Deadlock, Such a Bad Scenario?

I just want to say, I'm with Mickey on this:

[W]ould it really be so terrible if the Iraqis failed to come up with a new constitution and the National Assembly were dissolved and new elections held? Just asking! Presumably more Sunnis would participate in elections the next time around, resulting in a more representative constitution-drafting group--and a constitution more likely to placate Sunni dissidents (and embolden Sunnis who may be willing to risk supporting the new state). [ Bolding Mickey's]

A deadlock and subsequent disolving the National Assembly would obviously be bad in the short-term, especially in P.R. terms. But as Mickey says, on substantive grounds doesn't it hold the possibility of a much better outcome?  I suppose the danger is that  the next National Assembly could deadlock again. So that's a risk. But getting Sunni participation seems like an enormous potential plus--and a far more lasting one.

Comments/thoughts/criticisms welcome.

No Comment

From the NYT's correction box:

An article on Saturday about a conclusion by the Sept. 11 commission that an intelligence program known as Able Danger was not historically significant, despite a claim that it had identified the leader of the attacks, misspelled his given name. (The error was repeated in articles last Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.) He is Mohamed Atta, not Mohammed.

Hey, Everyone Has Their Own Perspective

From Agence-France Presse:

A group of Iraqi workers in Baghdad came under fire from US troops who mistook them for insurgents.

An interior ministry source said US troops fired on a crowd of workers in the central Baghdad neighbourhood of Alawi, while a defence ministry source reported an exchange of fire between suspected rebels and US forces in the area.

But a number of casualties lying in Al-Yarmouk hospital told AFP that a US helicopter fired at them as they were gathered outside a hotel.

"The electricity went out at around 0500 (0100 GMT), so we exited the hotel to the street to have breakfast in the fresh air. A helicopter then opened fire into the street," said Ali Mohammad, who sustained neck and leg injuries.

From the NYT:

The American military also said today that some Iraqi civilians were killed or wounded when American forces attacked suspected insurgents from the air in Baghdad early Tuesday. In the battle, American helicopters "tracked and engaged the terrorists," the military said in a statement. There was an unknown number of civilian casualties, and an investigation has begun into the incident, the military said.

The Most Detailed Interview with the Able Danger Guy

It was done by famous investigative reporter, Soladad O'Brien.  Unfortunately, CNN hasn't posted the chat, so I'm cribbing from Nexis.  The two things that stuck out to me:

1) Shaffer names names. He says he told, among others, former 9/11 executive director Phil Zelikow Able Danger (and Atta?) back in 2003 and was blown off. The 9/11 panel has previously said Zelikow was in on the 2003 interview, but Shaffer really homes in on him:

S. O'BRIEN: I mean, why isn't this six months ago, even earlier than that? Why now?

SHAFFER: Well, I understand. I can't address the report, other than I know I provided information to Mr. Zelicow (ph) in Bagram of October of '03. That information was significant in the fact that in their 12 August statement, they talk about that he called back immediately, requesting more information. I was asked to talk to him in January of '03, where I called his office -- I mean January '04, where I called his office, and they changed their mind about talking to me.

[Later in the interview:]

The other thing is Mr. Zelicow (ph) himself gave me his card and asked me to contact him upon my return from the deployment. And I did contact him in January of '04. That's where I was essentially blown off.

I called him. They said they wanted to talk to me. I waited a week, called him back. And they said, "No, we don't need to talk to you now."

2) As Laura Rozen has noted, in the  interviews Shaffer has had so far, there is "a kind of vagueness about what exactly [Able Danger] found."  Now, that could be because of classification issues. It could be because of...who knows what. But one  possibility is that Shaffer actually has limited knowledge about the program.  Over to no-B.S. O'Brien:

 

S. O'BRIEN: Mohamed Atta, who was obviously part of this team of hijackers. Where did this information that he was a terrorist linked to al Qaeda, where did this come from that you had that nobody else in the security branch, as far as we can tell, had that information?

SHAFFER: I didn't have the information. I was part of the task force which supported Able Danger.

I know: None of this means Shaffer was wrong. But I still leaves me with the  feeling that the story is, at the least, murkier than Shaffer's take. Let's see what the Pentagon has to say... 

P.S. Full interview below the fold. (Sshhhh... don't tell CNN.) It includes more detail about exactly what his role was. At one point Shafffer calls himself a "manager." As Laura says it's all very vague.