Captain Ed on Able Danger and another angle the 9/11 Commission may have missed.

CPL: Captain Ed, we just started talking in the last segment about this whole idea of Mohammed Atta, and the ties...between Iraq and Al Qaeda that have perhaps been downplayed or ignored, and we were hoping...we know you have a very substantial posting, you could kind of walk us through this in a way that all of us, even a Dartmouth grad like Peter can understand.

PR: So the commission got this information from the Able Danger intelligence unit, looked at it, and said that doesn't fit with what we've already decided, so we'll leave it out. Is that roughly what they're saying?

EM:The only part of the Atta timeline that I know is in dispute is the April 9th visit to Prague...with a known Iraqi agent.

Baghdad...had drawn up a plan to strike at U.S. interests around the world, through a network of alliances with extremist, fundamentalist parties.

If the commission did have that information, why isn't it in the 9/11 report? Because it would tend to underscore a connection between Saddam Hussein and ...the Al Qaeda cells that were operating in Germany at the time, which were focused on the 9/11 attacks that were coming up.

So that's the one thing. But here's another interesting part of this, and this is how it related to Prague, and I haven't posted about this. I'm in the middle of writing this post.

But assuming this is true, one of the reasons why the 9/11 Commission rejected the idea that Atta went to Prague was because, first, they had the cell phone records, and second, that he traveled under his own name when he traveled.

In Washington, the FBI moved to quiet the Prague connection by telling journalists that it had car rentals and records that put Atta in Virginia Beach, Va., and Florida close to, if not during, the period when he was supposed to be in Prague. The New York Times , citing information provided by "federal law enforcement officials," reported that Atta was in Virginia Beach on April 2, 2001, and by April 11, "Atta was back in Florida, renting a car." Newsweek reported that, "the FBI pointed out Atta was traveling at the time [in early April 2001] between Florida and Virginia Beach, Va.," adding, "The bureau had his rental car and hotel receipts." And intelligence expert James Bamford, after quoting FBI Director Robert Mueller as saying that the FBI "ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads and checked every record we could get our hands on," reported in USA Today , "The records revealed that Atta was in Virginia Beach during the time he supposedly met the Iraqi in Prague."
All these reports attributed to the FBI were, as it turns out, erroneous. There were no car rental records in Virginia, Florida, or anywhere else in April 2001 for Mohamed Atta, since he had not yet obtained his Florida license. His international license was at his father's home in Cairo, Egypt (where his roommate Marwan al-Shehhi picked it up in late April). Nor were there other records in the hands of the FBI that put Atta in the United States at the time. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet testified to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in June 2002, "It is possible that Atta traveled under an unknown alias" to "meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague." Clearly, it was not beyond the capabilities of the 9/11 hijackers to use aliases.

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/PragueConnection.htm

Do I have this right?

1. All of the information gathered about Atta is after-the-fact and he was never under active surveillance.

2.There is little firm data concerning his whereabouts from about April 6 to April 11, 2001, but the 9/11 Commission KNOWS he wasn't in Prague on April 9, 2001.

unknown unknowns or known unknowns or known knowns

"Reports that say something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know,"

"We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know.

But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

--Don Rumsfeld--

Well. It seems a bit odd to say that Able Danger was "left out" because his whereabouts didn't fit in with what was known when, according to what I read today, the guys in Able Danger were following him *three days* before 9/11.

What? Do the commissioners insist that everyone in Able Danger was hallucinating? Or is there something else going on here, eh?

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