Two witnesses who actually worked on Able Danger (navy Capt. Scott Phillpott and James D. Smith, a civilian employee of a defense contractor) have now come forward and asserted that the intelligence program identified 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta as a likely al Qaeda terrorist as early as January or February 2000. And recall that Lt. Col. Larry Shaffer has pointed to another team member (a female) who has not come forward at this time but who, Shaffer asserts, would provide consistent information.

Let’s leave aside for now that the Pentagon says it has not, to date, been able to find documentary corroboration (at least that mentions the names of specific terrorists). What I want to focus on at the moment in the 9/11 commission’s methodology.

The commission staff interviewed Phillpott right before its report was issued in July 2004. His version of events was rejected and deemed unworthy of mention even in a footnote. This seems to have been done in the absence of much follow-up investigation – such as speaking to other Able Danger members who could have corroborated Phillpott (at least one of whom now has). The rationale for the peremptory dismissal of Phillpott was that his version did not jive with the Atta timeline the commission had already settled on. That is, because the commission was certain Atta did not enter the U.S. until June 2000, it rejected a version that would have put him here five or six months earlier.

This calls to mind the commission’s rejection of the possibility that Atta left the U.S. to meet with an Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmed al-Ani, in Prague on or about April 8, 2001. I’ve previously addressed this, here. The commission confidently concluded that Atta could not have been in Prague at the time because the FBI had placed him in Virginia as of April 4 when he was captured by a surveillance camera as he withdrew $8,000 from his bank account. The FBI has no eyewitness account for Atta’s whereabouts in the U.S. for a week – i.e., until April 11 when he was seen in Florida.

But a Czech witness claims to have seen Atta meeting with al-Ani in Prague on or about April 8. The commission, which never interviewed the witness, rejected this possibility, largely based on cell phone records showing that Atta’s phone was used in Florida on April 6, 9, 10, and 11. Those records, though, only establish that someone, not necessarily Atta, used the phone (like, say, his roommate and fellow hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi). Meanwhile, though al-Ani, the Iraqi, evidently denies meeting Atta, it has been reported that the Czechs have al-Ani’s appointment calendar and it says al-Ani was scheduled to meet on the critical day with a “Hamburg student” – which is exactly how Atta identified himself when he applied for a visa.

And we also know that Atta had traveled to Prague before – choosing on June 2, 2000 to stop there on the way to the U.S. rather than flying directly here from Hamburg. (It must be noted that reports of an earlier trip by Atta to Prague on May 31, 2000, which I relied on as more corroboration for the alleged April 2001 trip, were later discounted by the commission, convincingly, as based on mistaken identity. See Final Report, pp. 228 & 522 n.69.)

Significantly for present purposes, the commission also contended that Atta’s practice was to travel under his own name (Final Report at 229), and there is no indication of that in April 2001. But, of course, that Atta traveled under his own name at times (which he may have had good operational reasons for doing – such as being able to back up his cover story of who he was), does not prove that he did not travel under aliases at times when he wanted his movements to be secret (which might well have been the case in April 2001 given the big cash withdrawal, which suggests a reluctance to pay expenses in a traceable way). You can only prove travel by an alias if you know what the alias is. And there is evidence that Atta used aliases – both he and fellow plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh, for example, acquired false passports from a pair of Algerians, Khaled Madani and Moussa Laour.

The commission could, of course, be right. It’s quite possible Atta never went to Prague in April 2001. But the commission could also be dead wrong. And for present purposes, the point is: how sure can we be of its Atta timeline? The timeline based on which the commission insists Atta was not in the U.S. before June 2000, and based on which it rejected Phillpott, whose account has now been seconded.