My new column at the Daily Standard, "Rethinking Prague", explores the issue of the timeline assigned to Mohammed Atta by the 9/11 Commission, especially in light of the multiple-sourced Able Danger revelations over the past two weeks. Now that three members of the secret data-mining operation have publicly verified that the intelligence pointed out Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as potential al-Qaeda terrorists, it calls into question how the Commission established any of Atta's movements. Much of it comes from unchallenged assertions by two of the 9/11 plotters themselves, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh:

IF ATTA HAD ALREADY MADE IT to the United States, how did the Commission establish this timeline? They deduced it from FBI interrogations of three sources: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, two of the plotters who helped create the 9/11 attacks, and Mohammed's nephew Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. The footnotes in the Report to the Atta timeline paragraphs give almost no corroborative evidence besides that of the testimony of these men--who have little motivation to cooperate honestly with American investigators.

Could the "intelligence" gleaned from the interrogations of these al Qaeda plotters and high-level terrorists have been an attempt at disinformation?

If KSM and Binalshibh wanted to set up a disinformation campaign after their capture, it had to specifically benefit someone. One indication of a beneficiary comes from last week's revelation (bearing in mind that Pink Flamingos had this three years ago while receiving no notice) of the arrests of two Iraqi spies in Germany at the end of February 2001, while Atta and two other 9/11 leaders traveled to and through Germany. The Germans announced at the time that they had disrupted Iraqi intelligence operations in several cities just as Atta had met with Binalshibh to finalize some of the preparations for the attacks.

Even if the Iraqi operations in the same area as the AQ effort were nothing more than coincidence, the German counterintelligence efforts should have set off warning bells for Atta and Binalshibh, especially with the bulk of the hijackers set to travel to the US, the most critical and risky part of the pre-attack plan. A careful planner like Atta would have needed to recheck his network before proceeding with a plan that, if already exposed, would have sent all twenty men into a German-American intelligence trap.

How would Atta have done that? He would have to travel somewhere near Germany to meet with his contacts, but not in Germany itself. The Commission report insists that Atta never left the US between his return from Germany until after the muscle hijackers arrived in the US. Czech intelligence, however, has always insisted that Atta traveled to Prague on April 9, 2001 to meet with an Iraqi diplomat they already had under surveillance for his role in an attempt to attack Radio Free Europe in 1998. The Commission discounts (but does not categorically reject) this intelligence for the following reasons:

* Atta's cell phone was used in the U.S. on April 6, 9, 10, and 11

* No U.S. records of Atta traveling under his own name

* No pictures of anyone who looked like Atta in the Czech Republic on those dates

* Testimony from two al Qaeda sources ... Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh

The Commission notes that Atta never used an alias while traveling before April 9. In checking the footnotes, it turns out that this comes from a denial given by a traveling companion of Atta's to Madrid that claims that neither of them sought out forged travel documents as alleged by Edward Jay Epstein and others. The traveling companion? Ramzi Binalshibh.

It could be that the FBI got the truth from KSM and Binalshibh, but then the identification of Atta by Able Danger could not have happened in the time frame that three AD team members have publicly insisted it did. It seems more likely that the two terrorists have spun a plausible tale designed to convince Americans that al-Qaeda acted alone in the 9/11 plot, a disinformation campaign that didn't account for an early identification by American intelligence that resulted in no action against the terrorists before the attack. If Able Danger proves accurate and the KSM/RB timeline collapses, that disinformation hides another state sponsor besides the Taliban for AQ.

In the meantime, with that speculation aside, the Commission needs to answer the question at the end of my column: why did they take the word of two terrorists over that of two high-ranking American intelligence officers when constructing this timeline?

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