The New York Times ran what appeared to be a blockbuster story today about the 9/11 terrorists and intelligence about an al Queda cell in the U.S. as far back as 2000. There are, however, a few reasons for skepticism.
More than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, a small, highly classified military intelligence unit identified Mohammed Atta and three other future hijackers as likely members of a cell of Al Qaeda operating in the United States, according to a former defense intelligence official and a Republican member of Congress.
In the summer of 2000, the military team, known as Able Danger, prepared a chart that included visa photographs of the four men and recommended to the military’s Special Operations Command that the information be shared with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the congressman, Representative Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania, and the former intelligence official said Monday.
The recommendation was rejected and the information was not shared, they said, apparently at least in part because Mr. Atta, and the others were in the United States on valid entry visas.
According to Weldon’s account, this is a disconcerting story about government bureaucracy and the failure to catch dangerous terrorists. The Pentagon had the goods on Atta a year before 9/11, but didn’t pass it on to the FBI for fear of running afoul of restrictions about domestic military spying. The same account says the 9/11 Commission was informed of this, but the commissioners didn’t follow up, and the intelligence does not appear in the final report.
It all sounds pretty startling, so long as you look past Curt Weldon’s credibility problems.
Consider, for example, Laura Rozen’s and Jeet Heer’s report in The American Prospect a couple of months ago.
For well over two decades now, dreamers and schemers who hope to overthrow the mullahs have been lurking along the banks of the Seine, passing secrets and lies through proxies, back channels, and middlemen. Among the Persian plotters marooned in the French capital is a former minister of commerce in the shah’s government, who has recently acquired the code name of “Ali.”
“Ali’s” fervent advocate on Capitol Hill is Representative Curt Weldon, the conservative Pennsylvania Republican who serves as vice chair of the House Armed Services Committee. The nine-term congressman has long nurtured a penchant for the dramatic. […]
As chairman of the House Subcommittee on Military Research and Development, Weldon has held numerous hearings on the threat of Russian suitcase bombs being inï¬?ltrated into American cities and similar cataclysmic scenarios. He often shows up in the press as a Cassandra warning against elaborate foreign plots, from terrorist hackers destroying the Pentagon’s Internet capacity to North Korean nuclear weapons exploding in the atmosphere of the United States, creating an electromagnetic pulse that would cripple the nation’s electrical utilities and electronic systems. He possesses a genuine gift for elaborating these nightmare visions, which he may have sharpened while reading the works of Tom Clancy. Indeed, he sometimes cites catastrophic attack scenarios devised by the suspense novelist, an acquaintance of his who has occasionally helped to raise money for Pennsylvania Republicans.
Weldon said his secret source was a former minister of commerce in the shah’s government. The source turned out to be a lackey for a notorious Iranian intelligence fabricator. After Weldon claimed to have reliable intelligence, the CIA found the whole thing unreliable and the agency dismissed Weldon’s work.
In fact, as Slate’s Eric Umansky noted today, Weldon has a “reputation for relying on iffy sources.”
He recently wrote a much-panned book alleging all sorts of Iranian plots, including that Teheran is hosting Bin Laden. The book relied on one source — a source one CIA official told the Times “was a waste of my time and resources.” A “fabricator” recalled another former spook.
Moreover, Weldon’s charges not withstanding, the 9/11 Commission did follow up on this, but didn’t find anything.
In this context, the New York Times’ front-page, above-the-fold scoop is a whole lot less fascinating. The entire article is based on the word of Weldon and another one of his secret sources, which should hardly be enough to convince anyone.