July 4, 2011

The Untrustworthiness of the 9/11 Commission

What the Khaled A. Shoukry memorandum also said.

In its inquiry into the background of alleged 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] interviewed and polygraphed a man who had been identified as an associate of Mohamed al-Amir in Cairo, Egypt during the 1990s. The FBI recorded the details of the interview in a memorandum entitled, Khaled A. Shoukry.

The official story of the September 11, 2001 attacks maintains that Mohamed al-Amir, using the name Mohamed Atta, became the “ringleader” of the operation and piloted Flight AA11 as it crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center. Although The 9/11 Commis sion Report uses al-Amir’s biographical data for Atta’s, it does not expressly claim that al-Amir was Atta. Curiously, the report uses the name Atta throughout its text and only in endnote 81 on page 495 does the name, Mohamed Amir, appear:

81. [. . .] On one occasion, German authorities intercepted a call in which such a gathering was mentioned. An individual phoning Zammar's house on February 17, 1999, was told that he was away on a trip to a distant, "bad" region, but that "people" at 54 Marienstrasse knew where he was. The same conversation revealed that these "people" included "Said, Mohamed Amir, [and] Omar," likely a reference to the apartment's original occupants, Said Bahaji, Atta, and Binalshibh. Federal Prosecutor General (Germany), response to Commission letter, June 25, 2004, p. 9. [. . .]

The phrase, "likely a reference to," hardy establishes the identity of al-Amir as Atta to be a fact. Nor is the reader informed of the evidentiary basis for that conclusion.

The sole, brief reference to information from the Khaled A. Shoukry memorandum in The 9/11 Commission Report appears on page 161 and reads:

On a visit home to Egypt in 1998, Atta met one of his college friends. According to this friend, Atta had changed a great deal, had grown a beard, and had “obviously adopted fundamentalism” by that time.

The source for this passage is given in endnote 66, on page 494:

66. [. . .] On Atta's fundamentalism, see FBI electronic communication, "Khaled A. Shoukry," June 17, 2002.

But that 12-page FBI memorandum would not be declassified, nor placed into the public domain until years after the publication of The 9/11 Commission Report in 2004. The image below is from the memorandum’s first page, showing some of the document’s over 200 redactions:

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