The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update XII

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Captain Ed writes an excellent article about the Atta timeline in today’s edition of The Daily Standard:

THE ONGOING CONTROVERSY over the Able Danger project deepened this week when two more sources from the U.S. Army data-mining project came forward. Navy Captain Scott Phillpott and civilian contractor James Smith joined Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer in claiming that Able Danger identified Mohammed Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as potential al Qaeda operatives well before the attacks. Phillpott specifically told the New York Times when he went public that Able Danger made that connection between January and February of 2000, 19 months before the attack.

However, that puts the Able Danger scenario in conflict, again, with the 9/11 Commission’s final report–this time on the Atta travel timeline.

…IF ATTA HAD ALREADY MADE IT to the United States, how did the Commission establish this timeline? They deduced it from FBI interrogations of three sources: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, two of the plotters who helped create the 9/11 attacks, and Mohammed’s nephew Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. The footnotes in the Report to the Atta timeline paragraphs give almost no corroborative evidence besides that of the testimony of these men who have little motivation to cooperate honestly with American investigators.

Could the “intelligence” gleaned from the interrogations of these al Qaeda plotters and high-level terrorists have been an attempt at misinformation?

He then writes in his blog:

If KSM and Binalshibh wanted to set up a disinformation campaign after their capture, it had to specifically benefit someone. One indication of a beneficiary comes from last week’s revelation (bearing in mind that Pink Flamingos had this three years ago while receiving no notice) of the arrests of two Iraqi spies in Germany at the end of February 2001, while Atta and two other 9/11 leaders traveled to and through Germany. The Germans announced at the time that they had disrupted Iraqi intelligence operations in several cities just as Atta had met with Binalshibh to finalize some of the preparations for the attacks.

Even if the Iraqi operations in the same area as the AQ effort were nothing more than coincidence, the German counterintelligence efforts should have set off warning bells for Atta and Binalshibh, especially with the bulk of the hijackers set to travel to the US, the most critical and risky part of the pre-attack plan. A careful planner like Atta would have needed to recheck his network before proceeding with a plan that, if already exposed, would have sent all twenty men into a German-American intelligence trap.

How would Atta have done that? He would have to travel somewhere near Germany to meet with his contacts, but not in Germany itself. The Commission report insists that Atta never left the US between his return from Germany until after the muscle hijackers arrived in the US. Czech intelligence, however, has always insisted that Atta traveled to Prague on April 9, 2001 to meet with an Iraqi diplomat they already had under surveillance for his role in an attempt to attack Radio Free Europe in 1998. The Commission discounts (but does not categorically reject) this intelligence for the following reasons:

* Atta’s cell phone was used in the U.S. on April 6, 9, 10, and 11

* No U.S. records of Atta traveling under his own name

* No pictures of anyone who looked like Atta in the Czech Republic on those dates

* Testimony from two al Qaeda sources … Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh


So in the end, this may very come out as the Commission choosing to believe two terrorists under interrogation and cell phone records rather then a whole team of intelligence agents. Sounds unbelievable right? Sure does to me but as more information comes out daily on this Able Danger angle It is starting to look like we are in for more then a few big shocks.

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The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update XI
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update X
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update IX
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update VIII
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update VII
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update VI
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update V
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, update IV
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update III
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update II
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger, Update
The Gorelick Wall & Sandy Berger