Eric Umansky

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.

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.

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.

Flashback: Another Weldon 'Scoop'

Take it away Steve Aftergood (Secrecy News):

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) caused a stir lately by alleging that a classified military intelligence data mining program codenamed ABLE DANGER had identified September 11 hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat as early as summer of 2000 and that the 9/11 Commission had been so informed but had chosen to suppress the information.

In an official statement on the matter, former Commission Chair and Vice Chair Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton disputed Weldon's account, and Weldon himself has begun to backtrack, stating that he is no longer certain that a chart he obtained from the military in 2001 actually named Atta.  [...]

Rep. Weldon has a history of making inflammatory allegations that later proved to be unfounded.

On June 7, 1999 he stood on the House floor and accused the Clinton Administration of leaking the design of the W87 nuclear warhead to U.S. News and World Report.  It was a charge he repeated several times, referring to an artist's rendering of the W87 warhead which appeared in the magazine's July 31, 1995 edition.

"This administration leaked this document to U.S. News & World Report, giving the entire populace of the world... access to the design of the W87 nuclear warhead," he alleged. "I have been told... that it was [Secretary of Energy] Hazel O'Leary herself who gave U.S. News & World Report the actual diagram of the W87 nuclear warhead in 1995," he said. On June 8, 1999 he stated flatly: "Hazel O'Leary leaked the plans, which are in this magazine, for the W87 nuclear warhead."

None of this was true. No government diagram of the W87 warhead was given to U.S. News. The artist's rendering of the weapon was a conceptual drawing, not a design.  It was explicitly credited by the magazine to the Natural Resources Defense Council.  An NRDC analyst confirmed that he had supplied the information to the graphic artist, and that it was based on informed speculation, not classified information. In accordance with the political tactics used to attack the Clinton-Gore Administration throughout much of the 1990s, Rep. Weldon never retracted or apologized for his unfounded accusations. See:

http://www.fas.org/sgp/bulletin/sec80.html#weldon

According to an August 10 story in The Hill, Rep. Weldon said House Speaker Dennis Hastert will support his potential bid to become the next chairman of the House Armed Services Committee in 2008.

Able Danger Source Outs Himself

He is Ltn. Col. Tony Shaffer. Laura Rozen has the skinny. Apparently, he's going to formally unveil himself on Fox News tonight. The choice of venues, of course, fills me with confidence. Apparently Shaffer acknowledges having written this post on Intel-Dump.

WH's Response to Weldon's Story

Rep. Weldon has repeatedly claimed that just two weeks after 9/11 he handed then deputy national security advisor Stephen Hadley a chart  showing that Able Danger had fingered Atta and others prior to 9/11. (Weldon explicitly says in his book--which, yes, I bought--that Atta was on the chart. I later told me and  Time  that he 's not so sure.) But he is sure he handed the chart to Hadley.

Is even that true? The White House isn't interested in helping anybody find out.  Here's what an  "administration official" told me: "The 9/11 commission has already responded to Congressman Weldon. On your particular question, 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?

Thousands of False Positives?

The NYT's Philip Shenon, who has done some of the Able Danger reporting, was interviewed Friday on WNYC. There host Mike Pesca raised the false positives question. Here's what Shenon said [listen at 18:40 mark]:

“I understand from others at the Pentagon  that one of the problems here is that  Able Danger came up with names not just of Atta and three others,  it came up with a tremendous number of  names of very decent American citizens.”

That sounds like a whole lot more than the "60"  the Times suggested...Friday (i.e. same day as the radio interview).  Are  Shenon and Jehl on the same page?

Interview with Weldon

Along with some others, I’ve been confused about when exactly Weldon began to believe (or realized) Atta had been fingered by Able Danger and why he hadn’t said anything earlier. So I called Weldon. Here’s what he said:

What I said consistently, my focus wasn’t on Atta specifically. I knew that [the military’s data-mining programs]  had been doing a lot of great work, IDing drug cartels, IDing global terror networks. Two weeks after 9/11 they brought me a chart of AQ cells. It was just a comprehensive list al-Qaida suspects. Do I remember everything that was on that chart? Absolutely not. I wasn’t focused on the specific findings. I was focused on the process. But the chart was so shocking, in general, that I immediately brought it to [then deputy national security advisor] Stephen Hadley. Hadley was so amazed with this, he said ‘I’ve got to show it to the man.”

Weldon repeated that the chart he gave Hadley was the only copy he had. I then asked him if he didn’t remember what was on that chart, how he came to believe Atta was on it:

Three months ago I was doing my book and went back to [former the Able Danger officers].  I wanted a copy of the chart, because much of my book was dealing with the importance of finding patterns in intelligence. So I asked them if they had another copy of the chart. They said no. So I asked them to recreate one—it was only then that they told me they had actually ID’d Atta and had recommended sharing it. What they told me and what I believe is the case that [the original chart] had a photo and name of Atta.

So Weldon's story seems to have been consistent:  He believes Atta was named but didn't notice it three years ago when he first had the chart.  As to whether to join Weldon in his belief, well...

I'm calling Hadley's office. Presumably (hopefully?) they didn't just throw the chart in the trash.

Able Danger, Atta, and the now MIA Proof

It looks like Rep. Curt Weldon has now adopted the increasingly popular "the dog-ate-my-proof" position. From Time:

In a particularly dramatic scene in Weldon’s book, Countdown to Terror, the Pennsylvania Republican described personally handing to then-Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley, just after Sept. 11, an Able Danger chart produced in 1999 identifying Atta. But Weldon told Time he’s no longer certain Atta’s name was on that original document. The congressman says he handed Hadley his only copy.

Still, last week he referred reporters to a recently reconstructed version of the chart in his office where, among dozens of names and photos of terrorists from around the world, there was a color mug shot of Mohammad Atta, circled in black marker.

Let's also remember that the original Times story said Weldon  recognized the significance of Able Danger "only recently."  So he says in his book, apparently, that he gave proof (the imfamous chart) to Hadley, then er, didn't have a back-up copy, but didn't recognize that it was all important anyway. So he just fired up PowerPoint,  and made a new one--without  mentioning to reporters that it was a reproduction. Hey, isn't there a word for that?

Yesterday, Weldon told the Post, "I will continue to push for a full accounting of the historical record so that we may preclude these types of failures from happening again." Well said congressman. No doubt, your  push for an accounting will include finding that original chart.

Media Angle: The Times has to be thrilled with the increasing  credibility of its source. The story feels like it's at the point now where it's turning on the Times, where the latest revelations undercut the Times' original reporting. My guess for their response to that: Nothing. That is, if SOP is followed, Able Danger--so far as the Times is concerned--is a done story. I hope I'm wrong. But this kind of stuff makes me feel like I won't be.

[Time story via Kevin.]

The NYT, Intent to Deceive

I wish that weren't the case, honestly.  But how else to explain this, buried inside today's paper: "9/11 PANEL EXPLAINS MOVE ON INTELLIGENCE UNIT."

That headline tells you nothing--and purposely so. Or, geez, maybe it's just an honest oversight. After all, it's not like the 9/11 panel's "explanation" deeply undercuts the Times' previous reporting.

Here's the Post's, slightly more substantive, take: "NO EVIDENCE PANEL KNEW OF ATTA, PANEL SAYS."

More later. In the meantime, thanks to Laura Rozen, here's the 9/11 panel's full statement. Among other things, it says the Grade A source the NYT has hung its story on, apparently insisted that the only documentary proof that Able Danger pegged Atta was, er, um, deleted. As Maguire notes, it's the dog-ate-my-proof defense.

I'm tempted to kvetch to Mr. Calame--though I get the sense he's keeping August shrink hours this month.