The Washington Post's Bill Arkin seems to be on his way to unraveling it. He also has a good explanation for why the Pentagon has been so tightlipped: It's not that they ID'd Atta, it's that that they start snooping around on American citizens, which, whoops, is illegal.
The theory, which I meekly offered last week, that Able Danger may have mixed up Atta (aka Mohamed el-Amir) with another Mohamed al-Amir, is gaining credence. As blogger Strata-Sphere pointed out, there's a link between the other al-Amir and Sheik Rahman, best known as the blind cleric connected to WTC I bombing. Could Able Danger have mixed up the two al-Amirs? Well, again as Strata-Sphere notes, it's sure telling that an Able Danger guys says "Atta" was spotted by A.D. thanks to... his connections Sheik Rahman. (Bonus explication for the slow: Atta wasn't connected to Rahman, but according to long-ago press reports, other al-Amir was.)
From the LAT's Terry McDermott, who doesn't know anything special Able Danger but does about Atta. McDermott literally wrote the book about Atta and the other hijackers. I've chatted with McDermott before and posted some of his musings. Now he's penned an op-ed explaining why Weldon, Shaffer and Co. probably think Atta and why they're probably wrong:
It is hard to see how computers could have named Atta as a member of an American cell before he got here. Some have argued that perhaps Able Danger mined data that included flight records of young Arab men traveling to Pakistan. Even if it did, it probably would not have found Atta. He was listed on airline flight manifests as Mohamed el-Amir, not Atta. His full name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta. El-Amir is how Atta was known to friends at school, to the banks that issued his credit cards and to the immigration service in Germany. It's the name on his high school and college diplomas.
But there is another possibility. Over the last four years I have interviewed dozens of people who swore they saw Atta somewhere he wasn't. This includes an assortment of waiters, students, flight instructors, taxi drivers and, more dramatically, two women who each claim to have been married to Atta, this despite the fact that they were never in the same city at the same time he was.
How could it be that so many people remember that they knew Atta, that they saw him or his name, when all the facts argue otherwise? I don't think they are all lying. Maybe none of them are. I think Atta entered an American psyche desperate for a name and face and an explanation. He came complete with what has become one of the iconic images of 9/11 — his Florida DMV mug shot, an image so memorable, so powerful and perfect for the moment that it allowed people to see in it whatever they needed to see. I think people subsequently, subconsciously placed that face where it made sense to them. There is no reason that a congressman or even two career military men searching for solutions are any less susceptible to seeing what they need to see, where they want to see it.
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.
A television review in Weekend on Friday about "Inside 9/11," on the National Geographic Channel, misspelled the given name of the hijackers' leader in some copies. He was Mohamed Atta, not Mohammad.
Laura Rozen has already flagged it. But I just wouldn't feel right in skipping it. From the NYT:
Representative Weldon also arranged an interview on Monday with a former employee of a defense contractor who said he had helped create a chart in 2000 for the intelligence program that included Mr. Atta's photograph and name.
The former contractor, James D. Smith, said that Mr. Atta's name and photograph were obtained through a private researcher in California who was paid to gather the information from contacts in the Middle East. Mr. Smith said that he had retained a copy of the chart until last year and that it had been posted on his office wall at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. He said it had become stuck to the wall and was impossible to remove when he switched jobs.
Sounds
like a credible story to TP! I have no doubt the NYT has a reporter on the scene cofirming the existence of the wall chart.
Atta's full name is Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta. That's what was on his passport and if you look carefully on his U.S. visa issued in May of 2000. The name he went by before that--the name he used for example on email--is Mohamed el-Amir. Atta didn't go by "Mohamed Atta" until the late spring of 2000, after Able Danger supposedly ID'd him.
UPDATE: Here's the flight manifest from the trip Atta took to Pakitan in November 1999 and his return to Hamburg in February of 2000. On both legs of the flight, the records identify him simply as Mohamed al-Amir.
The documents come courtesy of Terry McDermott, the LAT reporter who wrote the 9/11 hijackers history Perfect Soldiers. McDermott wrote me earlier tonight that "Atta used Mohamed el-Amir in Germany and Egypt almost exclusively. Even his residence papers and school enrollment forms in Germany used ‘Amir.’ If someone id'd him as Atta in the US before march [2000] it seems to contradict all the documentation. Even his father didn't go by the name 'Atta.' In fact, the first month I was in Cairo, I couldn't find anything about Atta because I was looking for 'Atta.' ”
P.S. Maybe the Able Danger crew was savvy to all this. Somehow, given the Pentagon's inability to find confirming documents, I doubt it.
By the way, forgetting about names for a moment, the email in particular is just fascinating.
Note: I've edited this post, adding Atta's full name and his passport.
You would think this Able Danger stuff would be pretty easy to establish as fact. All Shaffer, Weldon, and the naval officer would have to do is produce the chart they've talked so much about.
So where is it? According to the 9/11 commission, the naval officer charges that evil lawyers scrubbed the chart clean, and he only saw it in pasing anyway. Meanwhile, Weldon has said he took his only copy and gave it to the White House, which hasn't said anything about a chart. (Weldon also has offered conflicting statements about whether the chart even has Atta's name on it. But whatever.) And now, Shaffer joins the dog-ate-my-proof crew:
From Newsmax:
Documents detailing the work of a top secret military intelligence unit that identified lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta before the 9/11 attacks have disappeared, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency's liaison for the group, code named Able Danger.
"There's some troubling things that have happened both to me and the way the [Able Danger] information [was handled]," Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer told C-Span's "Sunday Morning Journal." "Shortly after I talked to the 9/11 Commission, there was some issues going on about the documentation. Right now as it stands this minute, to my knowledge, the documentation I had . . . we don't know where it is."
"It's not where I left it back in March of 2003," Shaffer said, which was "in a Department intelligence facility in the Northern Virginia area."
(HT: Laura Rozen)
Looks like Republican 9/11 panel chief Tom Kean is getting ticked about the WH's silence too. From Time:
[T]he chairman of the defunct 9/11 commission has lashed out at the Bush Administration for failing to address publicly claims that the panel ignored a tip that Atta had been flagged in the U.S. as a terrorist well before he led the 2001 attacks.
Former chairman Tom Kean told TIME that the White House should confirm whether, right after 9/11, Congressman Curt Weldon handed then Deputy National Security Adviser Steven Hadley a 1999 Pentagon chart pegging Atta as a member of al-Qaeda. Weldon makes the allegation in a book he published this summer and claims the commission failed to scrutinize a Pentagon data-mining program called "Able Danger." "I'm offended, because people say, 'Well, why didn't you do anything?'" says Kean.
As I've already mentioned, I spoke to an "administration official" who spoke on behalf on the White House and strongly suggested that the White House is simply not interested in ferreting out the facts. From my previous post:
Here's what an "administration official" told me: "The 9/11 commission has already responded to Congressman Weldon. On your particular question [about Weldon's puportedly handing the 'Atta Chart' to Hadley], I've got nothing for you on that."
I wish the "administration official" hadn't been so insistent on the vague I.D. ("an administration official"). Given the banal statement what would be the harm in not even a name but a more specific I.D.?
More importantly, I wish the administration hadn't decided to punt. Afterall, say the adminsitration had no info about Weldon's purported chart hand-off, why not simply say that? Could it be--and I'm just guessing here--that not pissing off a sympatico congressman was deemed to be more important than giving citizens a glimpse of the truth?
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.
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.
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