Atta boy

New information has emerged about both Mohammed Atta and the Able Danger scenario. Let's deal first with the latter...

I'm not sure if my readers are as fascinated by the Able Danger story as I am. Much of my fascination stems from the right's adept transformation of a story which actually gives the Bush administration an egg facial.

If DIA higher-ups nixed sharing the identification of Atta, why did Bush diminish CIA's authority in favor of military intelligence? Why didn't the Bushmen do anything with the Atta info between January and September of 2001? Why did Bush's investigators get Atta's chronology completely wrong?

(Incidentally, yesterday I was a skeptic on the Able Danger story. Today I'm not. Tomorrow, the wind will probably shift directions once more.)

Right now, the best piece on Able Danger is this Kos thread by "Sherlock Google." Sherlock, in turn, directs us to Justice Watch, which nails the right-wing for its deliberate misinterpretation of Jamie Gorelick's alleged "wall":

The "wall" metaphor is shorthand for the recognition that separate authorities govern law enforcement and foreign intelligence investigations targeted against Americans. These authorities, designed to prevent a recurrence of domestic spying by the FBI and CIA, always recognized that international terrorism was both a law enforcement and intelligence matter. Contrary to the repeated mischaracterization by the Attorney General and others, the law never prohibited sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence communities; to the contrary, it expressly provided for such sharing. While the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was interpreted to mean that prosecutors could not direct foreign intelligence wiretaps, as opposed to criminal wiretaps, the 9/11 failures had nothing whatsoever to do with the inability of prosecutors to direct such surveillance.

(Emphasis added.) One may also mention the inconvenient fact that Gorelick left the Clinton administration in 1997.

Here's a bit more, from Sherlock himself:

So the responsibility for stopping DIA program Able Danger, which had Identified Atta and 3 other hijackers and linked them to 56 other al-Queda terrorists overseas, has been laid at the feet of Bill Clinton--except he and Richard Clarke were never told about it at all.

That's right. Bill Clinton was never told about Able Danger and the ID of Atta because Richard Clarke was never told about AD. How do I know? He never wrote about it in his book, nor did he testify about it's existence before the 9-11 Commission!

You see Richard Clarke was known for being obsessed with Osama Bin Laden and HE was the guy the neo-con moles did not want to know about Atta and the gang.

Some readers may consider this passage a bit too paranoid, and I'm half-inclined to agree. One commentator has said that the problem with Able Danger's "data mining" technology has always been the high level of false positives; finding Atta was like finding a needle in a stack of needles.

Yeah, but.

Remember: The Able Danger team was specifically directed to place tape over Atta's face, and this literal cover-up argues against the "needle in a stack of needles" image. Something about that specific guy set off alarm bells.

So far, the only name mentioned in connection with this cover-up is that of General Pete Schoomaker, currently facing the task of trying to find enough recruits to fulfill the army's growing needs.

Eric Umansky made another interesting point recently. When Able Danger placed Atta's name on their flow charts, did they refer to him as "Mohammed Atta"? The man's full name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, and until late 2000, he usually went by the name Mohamed el-Amir.

However, he did call himself "Mohammed Atta" in 1999, when he visited Johnelle Bryant and filled out a loan application to buy a crop duster. The Bryant story was officially discounted until recently.

Now I'm beginning to wonder if more than one person used the name "Atta."

Actually, we know that of one other person who definitely did use that name: Mohammed Atta's father, who -- just to make matters supremely confusing -- also is known as Mohammed El-Amir. In interviews after the attack, this Cairo lawyer came across as something of a kook. News accounts quote him as saying that he spoke to his son after 9/11. When another reporter asked him where the younger Atta might now be, the elder Atta replied: "Ask Mossad." Although he blamed the Israelis for 9/11, El-Amir has more recenlty made explicit public statements in favor of Islamic terrorism.

Now Daniel Hopsicker claims to have found evidence that the senior Atta visited his son less than a fortnight before the catastrophe.

Hopsicker learned of this strange visit from an interview with a pharmacist who has long been a friend of his (Hopsicker's) family:

Accompanied by Mohamed Atta and his bodyguard Marwan Al-Shehhi, the pharmacist stated that Mohamed Atta Senior had been in his pharmacy several weeks before the attack, to send a fax.

"We have just about the only public fax in town," the pharmacist stated. "The fax went to a number in New Jersey."

I'd be very curious to know this number. Most people who follow these events know of the Israeli "moving company" called Urban Moving Systems in New Jersey. This firm functioned as both a Mossad front and a notorious scam operation. (After quoting a low-ball estimate to get the gig, they would would load up the furniture and refuse to unload it if the customer did not pay a wildly inflated price.) The Israeli "students" who worked for this dubious firm were seen cheering as the twin towers crumbled.

Incidentally, the head of that humble moving company -- Dominick Suter -- somehow managed to pay for three residences, including an apartment on the other side of the country -- in Los Angeles, not far from where I live. I've driven past the place. Pretty ritzy digs -- "south of the Boulevard," as they say in the San Fernando Valley.

After being outed as a Mossad "helper," Suter high-tailed it back to Israel.