Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
All Rights Reserved
Los Angeles Times
August 26, 2005 Friday
Home Edition
SECTION: CALIFORNIA; Metro; Editorial Pages Desk; Part B; Pg. 13
LENGTH: 1022 words
HEADLINE: Seeing what we want to see;
How could it be that, despite the facts, people -- and computers -- place one of
the Sept. 11 hijackers in places he probably wasn't?
BYLINE: Terry McDermott, TERRY MCDERMOTT is a Los Angeles Times staff
writer and the author of "Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers -- Who They Were and
Why They Did It" (HarperCollins, 2005).
BODY:
IN THE NEVER-ENDING effort to find someone -- anyone -- to blame for Sept. 11,
the latest scrum involves claims by an ambitious congressman about a secret
Defense Department unit pursuing a pilot program in data mining.
Data mining is a technique in which huge databases are fed into powerful
computers that sift them looking for links. It's a technology that holds vast
promise, but its main usefulness to date seems to be giving mortgage lenders the
ability to find out how much you still owe on your house.
The Defense data-mining program, established in 1998, was called Able Danger. It
focused on identifying potential Al Qaeda terrorists. Two weeks ago, Curt
Weldon, a melodramatic Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, introduced it
to the world via Fox News and the New York Times. The story has changed in its
details almost daily since, as asserted high-flying facts have fallen to ground,
but the gist has remained the same:
Sometime before Sept. 11, 2001 -- the dates vary but lately have settled around
the first few months of 2000 -- the Able Danger computers came up with the name
Mohamed Atta as a potential terrorist associated with an Al Qaeda cell in
Brooklyn, N.Y. Atta, remembers Weldon and a pair of military men he has dragged
before the cameras and notebooks, was one of four 9/11 hijackers identified by
the computers more than a year before the attacks. They can't produce records,
and the Pentagon denies it, but it's what they remember seeing, hearing and
being told.
I know nothing about Able Danger other than what I've read, so I can't speak
with authority on what the program uncovered about Atta, or when. But, having
spent the better part of the last four years investigating Atta's life, I can
speak to what is otherwise known about him and his whereabouts.
Atta's academic, immigration, credit, transit and telephone records provide a
fairly complete account from the time he left his native Egypt in autumn 1992 to
his death. This includes the period during which Able Danger is said to have
identified him as a terrorist in the United States. The story those records, and
corroborating interviews, tell is that Atta was not in the United States and
made almost no contact with the U.S. until June 2000.
In November 1999, Atta and three friends traveled from Germany -- via Istanbul
and Karachi -- to Afghanistan, where they intended to receive military training
before going to fight the infidels in Chechnya. They were, instead, recruited
into Al Qaeda and assigned the Sept. 11 mission. Atta returned to Hamburg in
late February, and the next month he made what is thought to be his first
contact with someone in the United States. He e-mailed dozens of flight schools
inquiring about commercial pilot training for "a small group of Arab men." He
also e-mailed a friend from Egypt who was studying at a Florida university and
asked about visa requirements. In May, he applied for a visa from the U.S.
Embassy in Berlin. Six weeks later he landed in Newark, N.J.
It is hard to see how computers could have named Atta as a member of an American
cell before he got here. Some have argued that perhaps Able Danger mined data
that included flight records of young Arab men traveling to Pakistan. Even if it
did, it probably would not have found Atta. He was listed on airline flight
manifests as Mohamed el-Amir, not Atta. His full name was Mohamed Mohamed
el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta. El-Amir is how Atta was known to friends at school,
to the banks that issued his credit cards and to the immigration service in
Germany. It's the name on his high school and college diplomas.
Even if Able Danger somehow produced a name, "Mohamed Atta," that might not mean
much. Variations of "Mohamed" are overwhelmingly the most common name in the
Muslim world. It is James, John and Robert combined. Atta isn't Smith or Jones,
but it isn't Einstein either. There are plenty of Mohamed Attas -- and plenty of
Mohamed el-Amirs too. The likelihood of mistaken identity is enormous.
But there is another possibility. Over the last four years I have interviewed
dozens of people who swore they saw Atta somewhere he wasn't. This includes an
assortment of waiters, students, flight instructors, taxi drivers and, more
dramatically, two women who each claim to have been married to Atta, this
despite the fact that they were never in the same city at the same time he was.
How could it be that so many people remember that they knew Atta, that they saw
him or his name, when all the facts argue otherwise? I don't think they are all
lying. Maybe none of them are. I think Atta entered an American psyche desperate
for a name and face and an explanation. He came complete with what has become
one of the iconic images of 9/11 -- his Florida DMV mug shot, an image so
memorable, so powerful and perfect for the moment that it allowed people to see
in it whatever they needed to see. I think people subsequently, subconsciously
placed that face where it made sense to them. There is no reason that a
congressman or even two career military men searching for solutions are any less
susceptible to seeing what they need to see, where they want to see it.
Whatever the resolution of the Able Danger imbroglio, there were plenty of
missed opportunities on the road to 9/11. German law enforcement knew in
mid-1999 that Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, another Sept. 11 hijacker, were
acquaintances of an Al Qaeda recruiter. This information was passed on to the
CIA. The name of a third hijacker, Ziad Jarrah, was given to U.S. intelligence
agencies in early 2000 when he was interrogated at length as he passed through
customs in the United Arab Emirates en route from Afghanistan to Germany. He
told Emiratis he was going to the United States to become a pilot. The Emiratis
say they passed this information to the Americans.
More famously, the CIA tracked two known Al Qaeda operatives through eight CIA
stations from the Middle East to Malaysia, then somehow didn't notice as they
walked onto a jetway and a plane bound for Los Angeles. We don't need to invent
intelligence failures; we need to grapple with those that we already have.