Given the rightful focus on the devastation being wrought by Katrina I was hesitant to put out a round up today, but when I see the Norristown Times Herald with a story I cannot resist. Today the Times Herald discusses things the commission missed or did not report – a theme we will be returning to as you will see.

A memorandum sent to the 9/11 Commission, and Senate and House intelligence committees in September 2004, suggests that young Israelis who canvassed dozens of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) offices in 2000 and 2001 trying to sell paintings to federal workers, may have been spying not only on the DEA, but also on Arab extremists in the United States – including the Sept. 11 hijackers who were living in Florida and New Jersey.

The Israeli “art student” story, which first surfaced in 2001 in news reports, has yet to be explained by U.S. authorities. Curiously, the 9/11 Commission did not venture to connect the myriad of dots to solve the mystery.
Did you get the memo?
…
According to the June 2001 DEA report headed “Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities” the art-selling activities occurred in many U.S. cities, with “most activity reported in the state of Florida.”

This is around the time Atta was in Florida. If Israel knew about something going on I am sure we knew. It is interesting, but could be drifting into the tin hat zone.

Our local WTOP news has some more details on the interview with James Smith from last Friday:

“I was on the front end of specific tasks to feed something the Army was doing,” says Pentagon contractor J.D. Smith, who discovered Atta’s link to al Qaida.

He says he had no idea of the gravity of the project he was working on.

This implies Smith was one of the folks out gathering the information to feed the data mining SW. That makes sense. You would probably need a company to go out and purchase the data sets so as to not set off alarm bells.

Finally we have what I think is the most interesting item today from Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard. I have a complete post on it here which I generated before deciding to do a round up. Here is a bit of a tease:

They are all Iraqis. And two of them–Abdul Rahman Yasin and Shakir–went free, despite their participation in attacks on the World Trade Center

You guessed right if you realized this was not in the 9-11 commission report.

While blogging this, I remembered something that was a huge shock to me at the time and is pertinent again now. If you recall, Putin warned us that Saddam wanted to attack the US. Here is the CNN story from 2004.

Russian intelligence services warned Washington several times that Saddam Hussein’s regime planned terrorist attacks against the United States, President Vladimir Putin has said.

The warnings were provided after September 11, 2001 and before the start of the Iraqi war, Putin said Friday.

The warnings came after 9-11, but I bet the information was gathered well before. In fact it may have been in tandem with the German arrests of Iraqi agents trying to recruit fanatical muslims for attacks on the US, the story Ed Morrissey discovered recently. Here’s a bit more from the CNN piece:

“I can confirm that after the events of September 11, 2001, and up to the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services and Russian intelligence several times received … information that official organs of Saddam’s regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the United States and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian locations,” Putin said.

Well, he did not confirm or deny anything prior to 9-11. And why would Saddam want to hit us after 9-11? Saddam knew an attack on us, with ties to him, would make Bush’s job of garnering international support to invade Iraq a breeze. So does it make sense Saddam started thinking about attacking us after 9-11, or did he simply continued to contemplate hitting us after 9-11?

No matter, we have too much information being uncovered which was not addressed by the 9-11 commission. Way too much.

From the bloggers we have Ed Morrissey chasing what I am afraid is a wild goose chase regarding some news out of NewsMax and the Able Danger Chart (I am awating his post on the Hayes article).

Mac at Macsmind shares with us his impressions of Rep Weldon here, and his continued doubts about Able Danger here (though he too sees the big picture is the Iraq-AQ connection – we just get to the same place by different routes).

Interestingly, Laura Rozen gets confirmation of one of my other theories, that Atta was identified while outside the US (which is why his name was probably linked as Mohemad el-Amir).

Mark Zaid, the attorney for former Able Danger official LTC Anthony Shaffer, clarifies a couple points. He is now representing several former Able Danger officials and contractors. According to Zaid, none of these former Able Danger officials ever asserted that Able Danger had identified Mohamed Atta as physically being in the US; rather the project had allegedly identified Atta as being linked in some fashion (not necessarily a direct one) with the Brooklyn-based Blind Sheik. Hence the ‘Brooklyn cell’ as a term of art.

Once you find Atta you find Al-Shehhi because they were together in the Hamburg cell. I still want to see all the information Able Danger collected – not literal responses to specific questions.

UPDATE:

For laughs you can see what a professional paranoid fantascist can imagine! The left wants to win the White House, but this person I wouldn’t trust with a sharp object.

Did Bush’s people allow Atta to go about his business before 9-11 even though they knew he was Al Queda because, as Daniel Hopsicker has reported, Atta was doing big heroin work with those worst of US black budget elements? Sybil Edmonds, the Turkish FBI translator, says that just before 9-11 the FBI had documents showing a plot to fly planes into the World Trade Center. She says she saw documents about big US narcotics money that involved the Al Queda suspects, and has further suggested that the US government hushed her up because BECAUSE SOME OF THE NARCO MONEY GOES TO CERTAIN US LEGISLATORS’ CAMPAIGNS. (Guess who?)

I guess someone needs to make the MSM look sane.