Atta known to Pentagon before 9/11

This story changes from day to day. One day Able Danger exists and ID’d Atta before 9/11, the next Able Danger never existed. The usual. But the story keeps coming back, in this the latest chapter of the Able Danger saga. There are hearings going on now getting very little coverage. The next few weeks may shed some more light into what the FBI knew about Atta.

WASHINGTON — Four years after the nation’s deadliest terror attack, evidence is accumulating that a super-secret Pentagon intelligence unit identified the organizer of the Sept. 11 hijackings, Mohamed Atta, as an Al Qaeda operative months before he entered the U.S.

The many investigations of Sept. 11, 2001, have turned up a half-dozen instances in which government agencies possessed information that might have led investigators to some part of the terrorist plot, although in most cases not in time to stop it.

But none of those leads likely would have taken them directly to Atta, the Egyptian architecture student who moved to the U.S. from Germany to take flying lessons and later served as Al Qaeda’s U.S. field commander for the attacks.

Had the FBI been alerted to what the Pentagon purportedly knew in early 2000, Atta’s name could have been put on a list that would have tagged him as someone to be watched the moment he stepped off a plane in Newark, N.J., in June of that year.

Physical and electronic surveillance of Atta, who lived openly in Florida for more than a year, and who acquired a driver’s license and even an FAA pilot’s license in his true name, might well have…

Posted by Briefcaseman
Suitcaseman's "Left Hand Man." Prodigy and managing editor. Briefcaseman also plays electric guitar.