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The Tale of Two Attas in New York
From Slate, a Kausfiles blog entry by Mickey Kaus... If you send NEXIS the following request mohammed atta and date bef 09/11/01 it will turn up a 1/28/91 Atlanta Constitution story with the following initiallly astonishing paragraph: There was a report on 60 Minutes in which an expert said that Abu Nidal cells were in the United States. Is that true? Yes, In New York, Dearborn a Michigan city with a large Arab population and Los Angeles. But that doesn't mean they're terrorists. They're support groups, and for the FBI to uncover enough about them and to go through the business of trying to deport them is a long and difficult matter that is not at all easy to accomplish. In 1987, the FBI arrested an Abu Nidal organization member Mohammed Atta in New York on an Israeli warrant charging him with participating in an attack on a bus carrying civilians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in 1986. They're around. It turns out that this is not the same Mohammed Atta who flew a plane into the World Trade Center on 9/11. It's a Mohammed Atta who was (as the story says) an Abu Nidal terrorist extradited to Israel to face charges of fire bombing and machine-gunning a bus. .... the "Atta" fingered by Able Danger was really the first, "Abu Nidal" Atta, and not the second, 9/11 "Al Qaeda" Atta. It was the first Atta's name that was on the list that Lt. Col. Shaffer remembers being shown. ... ... [the] "Two Atta" scenario explains at least three otherwise puzzling aspects of the Able Danger Story: 1) Q. How did the data mining program name an obscure Hamburg grad student so efficiently? A: It didn't. It named a known terrorist--it might even have started with his name. .... If you were data mining for new terrorists, mightn't you start with him and see who his friends and connections were? .... 2) Q. What database could possibly have turned up the 9/11 Atta, whose only apparent contact witht he U.S. was applying for a visa? A: It didn't turn up that Atta. It turned up another Atta who had a longer paper trail and was actually arrested. 3) Q: Why was the Defense department so skittish about passing on Atta's name. A. That's understandable if ... the first, "Abu Nidal" Atta was a naturalized U.S. citizen. Pentagon spying on U.S. citizens was of questionable legality. .... Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2005-08-23 |
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