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Terry McDermott, author of Perfect Soldiers and a genuine authority on 9/11 lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, weighs in on Able Danger and what was knowable about Atta back in early 2000:
Having interviewed lead Able Danger official LTC Anthony Shaffer a few times now, I think there may be something to this theory. Shaffer just strikes me as telling it how he understands it. But it's hard to figure out why no documentary evidence on Able Danger's findings has been forthcoming over the past half month of the highly publicized controversy over it, if there was anything decisive to put forward. Update: Reacting to earlier reports, Taciturn, who knows Shaffer from intelligence work, is skeptical of the Able Danger skeptics. His post includes this not-throw-away graph:Atta's academic, immigration, credit, transit and telephone records provide a fairly complete account from the time he left his native Egypt in autumn 1992 to his death. This includes the period during which Able Danger is said to have identified him as a terrorist in the United States. The story those records, and corroborating interviews, tell is that Atta was not in the United States and made almost no contact with the U.S. until June 2000.
In November 1999, Atta and three friends traveled from Germany via Istanbul and Karachi to Afghanistan, where they intended to receive military training before going to fight the infidels in Chechnya. They were, instead, recruited into Al Qaeda and assigned the Sept. 11 mission. Atta returned to Hamburg in late February, and the next month he made what is thought to be his first contact with someone in the United States. He e-mailed dozens of flight schools inquiring about commercial pilot training for "a small group of Arab men." He also e-mailed a friend from Egypt who was studying at a Florida university and asked about visa requirements. In May, he applied for a visa from the U.S. Embassy in Berlin. Six weeks later he landed in Newark, N.J...
Even if Able Danger somehow produced a name, "Mohamed Atta," that might not mean much. Variations of "Mohamed" are overwhelmingly the most common name in the Muslim world. It is James, John and Robert combined. Atta isn't Smith or Jones, but it isn't Einstein either. There are plenty of Mohamed Attas and plenty of Mohamed el-Amirs too. The likelihood of mistaken identity is enormous.
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...
After it was killed as a program in March 2001, is it conceivable that Able Danger -- hardware, slides, etc. -- was recycled as parts and bytes in other Army Information Dominance Center programs? Could that be an explanation for the lack of documentary evidence on its findings? One reason I have been pondering this is the chart Weldon has been showing since 2002 and which he writes about in his book as having given to Stephen Hadley in 2001, he has only since June credited as coming from "Able Danger" rather than Army INSCOM/LIWA at Ft. Belvoir. For instance, no where in his book is Able Danger mentioned, and Shaffer told me he only briefed Weldon on Able Danger when he and Phillpott approached Weldon in May of this year to try to secure funding for a new Navy-headed data mining program, Project Able Providence. So...where is the 2002 chart from? Is it the Able Danger chart? Or did Weldon get ahold of the Able Danger chart in 2001 thinking it was somebody else's chart (Army INSCOM?) Has Able Danger been laundered? Or its real findings reimagined or reinvented after the fact?...The hardware used in AD might very well have been decommissioned and passed on for others to use. Depending on how this was done it could make recovery of the actual source data used difficult if not impossible. However, working papers and finished products dont just up and walk away. They get passed around in email; they get pasted into PowerPoint slides; they get turned into Analyst Notebook charts; and they linger on computer workstations.
