UPDATE:

Instead of burying this at the end of a terminally long post, let me thank Captain Ed Morrissey up front for the kind words and link to this post. I agree with his sentiment on Reason Magazine

Reason usually does better than this.

That was the short version of my reaction. Now for the long version!

END UPDATE

The Able Danger news is basically shut down these days with Katrina and Roberts headlining everywhere. So it has not even been worth posting an update in recent days. But ‘Reason Online‘ was kind enough to publish an article by a Mr. Paul Sperry which perfectly illustrates how not to approach this story: without research.

The good Mr. Sperry has offered himself up for a good fisking on the subject. And since I have an itch to post on Able Danger and there is no groundbreaking information coming out – normally I would have ignored this piece – I will oblige. Here we go!

Fabled Danger?
Atta bombshell looks more like case of mistaken ID

…Washington may witness one of the most intriguing hearings in history. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter is expected to call a career military official to testify about his shocking allegation that the Pentagon flagged 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta as a potential al-Qaeda terrorist more than a year before the attacks…

A proper fisking uses the fiskees own words against them over and over. So please note the emphasis I added and keep it in mind as we continue on. Here is a prime example of jumping to conclusions so far distant from fact you wonder what holds these people to the ground.

The revelation, if true, would rewrite the 9/11 Commission Report, which concluded the government could not have prevented the attacks and was not responsible for the loss of thousands of lives.

One, I doubt the fact that Atta was identified necessarily follows there would never have been an attack on the US. 9-11 may have been avoided, delayed or reduced – but our national complacency about Islamic Fanatascism was going to get us sooner or later. And the people responsible for the deaths of 3,000 people were the terrorists. The government is responsible for our general protection – but short of confining us to our homes and dictating our activities it cannot be completely responsible for what befalls us.

This binary thinking is how we became complacent. Either Muslims are all good or all bad, and we cannot rightfully determine they are all bad. So we cannot take actions against them since they must be all bad to be watched and monitored. Binary thinkers get stuck so quickly on these matters.

Navy Capt. Scott J. Phillpott, who headed a Pentagon counterterrorism project codenamed Able Danger, has claimed that as early as January 2000, his team identified lead hijacker Atta as part of an al-Qaeda terror cell operating out of Brooklyn.

No, the reference to ‘Brooklyn’ is a reference to the nexus of where Able Danger was getting leads. It is already been mentioned Able Danger was led to Mohamed Atta via linkages, rightly or wrongly, with the Blind Sheik of WTC I fame. So the brooklyn connection does not imply Atta was in Brooklyn at the time. In fact there are suggestions Able Danger members will testify to the opposite.

Sperry extends his confusion through ignorance to claim Atta could not be in Brooklyn at that time – which of course nobody claimed:

That’s all very curious, however, because according to German police records, Atta was nowhere near the U.S. then. He was in Hamburg. And it wasn’t until March 22, 2000, that Atta, an Egyptian national, began contacting flight schools here to see about taking lessons. He emailed 31 different schools.

I hate to point out the obvious – well, OK I don’t ‘hate’ to – but email from an email address doesn’t ascertain where a person is. I can email from my address from anywhere in the world – and do so often. Even a good tracking effort would have to deal with the fact email from private residences comes over modems to an ISP. You have to track all the way back to the phone connection to tie the email back to Hamburg. And even if you did, Atta was living with 2-3 other 9-11 highjackers in the same apartment. They could have used his email account as cover for his actions. So Mr. Sperry is jumping to conclusions all over the place.

Mr. Sperry uses another ’email’ from Egypt as evidence of Atta’s where abouts, while not even considering the fact Atta was travelling all over the place at the time. But let’s be clear about some events. Able Danger claimed they identified Atta as possibly tied to Al Qaeda. Their attempt to contact the FBI was due to Al Qaeda operatives being in the US. their attempts to contact the FBI started around the time Sperry has Atta coming to the US in May.

What Sperry seems to initially neglect is the scenario where Atta and others are identified by Able Danger while overseas, and then Able Danger gets really worried when they begin showing up in the US in the summer of 2000. Able Danger trhen tries to contact the proper US authorities. So did it ever occur to the good Mr. Sperry that the reason Able Danger contacted domestic law enforcement was because their targets had suddenly entered the US? Why yes he does!

But isn’t it still possible the Able Danger team could have identified Atta as a member of an American cell before he got here, perhaps from records of his foreign travels?

There are a couple of problems with that notion, too. For one, the team developed its al-Qaeda links by mining data from open sources, which involved searching the Internet. Passenger lists and visa data are confidential and not available through open sources.

Ahhh. Mr. Sperry is blissfully ignorant! Interviews with Able Danger members state the data was public information – not ‘open source’. Mr. Sperry uses words loosely and then jumps to conclusions based on his erroneous selection of words. Able Danger purchased data from sources that easily could cover the records of travel and purchases. And they analyzed that in conjunction with classified intelligence. This is well known to the casual investigator. Well, I guess you could be like Mr. Perry and be a tad too casual.

Mr. Sperry finally get’s to Mr. Atta’s name variations, but again jumps to the conclusion Able Danger only looked at ‘Atta’ and no other forms.

And even if Pentagon analysts had mined those closed records, they more than likely would not have found Atta in them for the simple reason that he didn’t use that last name (nor did anyone in his family). He went by Mohamed el-Amir, not Atta. That’s the way he was listed on flight manifests and travel documents—until, that is, he got his U.S. visa in May 2000. It was issued using his first and last names (his full name was Mohamed Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta).

Look at this post which clearly shows ‘Atta’ was not the only name they were tracking. So Sperry’s circular reasoning that they couldn’t track Atta in the US because he was in Germany now comes full circle to claim Able Danger could not have known Atta before when he was el-Amir. It is this kind of twisted ‘logic’ that gives one a headache.

So when Atta arrived in America in June 2000, he in effect had a brand new identity as Mohamed Atta, making it highly unlikely Able Danger would be able to identify him by that name six months earlier as claimed.

Problem is Mr. Sperry, no one claimed they tracked Atta as ‘Atta’ prior to his arrival in the US. That is something you simply made up out of thin air in one of your many jumps to conclusions. More conclusion jumping from the spry Mr. Sperry.

Some analysts maintain that Atta was also IDed by photo, however. They recall seeing his mug on a chart of suspected al-Qaeda operatives that was produced back then.

This is even more curious. Where did they get it? There were no publicly available photos of Atta in early 2000. And that was long before there was one of him in the files of the Florida DMV, which would have been in the summer of 2000.

Is the mind numbingly quick Mr. Sperry going to now wildly claim there were no picture IDs of Mohamed el-Amir, a college student in Hamburg? I had a student ID in the 1980’s when I went to college. I am sure Germany has caught onto the idea by now! Especially if el-Amir had a driver’s license. Maybe it was his passport picture from Egypt??? Nah, impossible.

Phillpott and others on his team who share his recollection can’t explain it.

A more accurate statement is they have not yet explained it. In fact they have not yet explained a lot of things – but that doesn’t mean they do not have explanations. In fact, Phillpott has not provided any details since he is still a flag officer in the Navy. He has simply stated Shaffer’s comments are accurate.

But one of them, a former contractor, says he recognized Atta after 9/11 from his distinctive “cheekbones.” James D. Smith is sure there was an Arab terrorist on the chart, which he helped develop some 20 months earlier, with the same features.

Accuracy is not one of Mr. Sperry’s strong suits. There were something like 60 possible terrorists in the final version of the chart, with about one third having photographs. And there were at least two versions of the chart: the one supporting the study publish around April 2000 and the one published at the end of the program around February 2001.

As we said, a good fisking uses the author’s own words to rebutt his own words:

Are there other copies of the chart floating around? Unfortunately not. The Pentagon has found no evidence that such a chart ever existed.
…
the Pentagon did turn up a “similar” chart showing links to a “Brooklyn cell.” But it did not contain a photo or a reference to Atta (or any of the other 18 hijackers), just two individuals with similar names—Mohammed Ajaz and Mohammed Arateff—who could easily have been confused for Mohamed Atta.

Similar chart? You mean a version without Atta on it? That is evidence a chart could have existed with Atta’s name on it! But Mr. Sperry is very, very gifted in the art of twisted logic. You see, a similar chart of that type made by Able Danger is evidence that no chart of that type ever existed! The mind staggers at the intellect that came up with that rationalization.

But wait – there’s more!

Given confusing Arab naming conventions, mistaking the identities of terrorist suspects is commonplace. And variations on the transliteration of Mohammed, the most common name in the Muslim world, are legion. What’s more, there are scores of men named Mohamed Atta.

And all of them were connected to the blind sheik of WTC I fame, and had an accomplice named al-Shehhi, who lived in Hamburg with him and traveled to Afghanistan to be trained by Al Qaeda!! There must be millions of these Mohameds with these strange coincidences out there!

Mr. Perry is forgetting one important factor to the Able Danger story: 20/20 hindsight. No one claimed a priori knowledge they had a 9-11 terrorist. What they claim, as the good Mr. Perry leads in with, is having identified individuals “as a potential al-Qaeda terrorist[s]”. In hindsight you can connect a Mohamed el-Amir who roomed with a al-Shehhi to a Mohamed Atta who left Hamburg the same time as al-Shehhi to come to America. At the time they had numerous candidate Al Qaeda members. Hindsight allows a lot of connecting dots to become visible. This never occurs to Mr. Sperry in his leaps of illogic.

According to the Pentagon, only five out of the 80 people associated with Able Danger recall seeing Atta the hijacker on a chart or any document prior to 9/11.

Ever see someone so distracted on minutiae the big event simply passes right by them without them even seeing it? Able Danger is claiming they had four of the highjackers identified. Al-Shehhi is probably just as important as Atta. And the other two are probably leaders as well, since they do not appear to be muscle but pilots. So how many recall the other three? Are there records with the other three mentioned? I could care less if they are on a chart with pictures. Where they on their list of candidate terrorists? If they were everything Mr. Sperry is focused on is irrelevant.

I have no doubt these career military analysts mean well, and would have no motive to lie (although at least one, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, is upset the data-mining project was axed and is lobbying Congress—with the help of Weldon—for $50 million to refund it). More than likely, they’re remembering someone else. It looks simply like a case of mistaken identity.

Interesting dichotomy here. Mr. Sperry, on inaccurate and incomplete information, is passing judgement on people who worked the Able Danger program, and who have had their claims substantiated with numerous contemporaneous bits of evidence. But he is sure they are pure of heart. Yet Mr. Perry is ready to claim they are mistaken without any proof and a pile of faulty, circular logic! What is his motive?

But that would be too easy. Washington loves a good conspiracy theory, so this one will likely drag out beyond the absurd, sapping precious time and money from the investigation of real scandals.

Ahhh, it becomes clear. If it is not a Bush bashing it is not a real scandal!!!

There you have it friends. When the news died out, the fools rushed in.