Atta Boy, Mark Steyn: Columnist on 9/11 commision Atta denials

Mark Steyn's column in today's Chicago Sun-Times, is as usual, brilliant.

If you want to know everything wrong with the 9/11 Commission in a single sound bite, consider this from Al Felzenberg, its official spokesman, speaking Wednesday:

''There was no way that Atta could have been in the United States at that time, which is why the staff didn't give this tremendous weight when they were writing the report. This information was not meshing with the other information that we had.''

In fairness to Felzenberg, he was having a bad week, and a hard time staying on top of the commission's ever-shifting version of events. It emerged that the U.S. military had fingered Mohammed Atta -- the guy who plowed Flight 11 into the first World Trade Center tower -- well over a year before before 9/11. Or as the Associated Press puts it:

"A classified military intelligence unit called 'Able Danger' identified Atta and three other hijackers in 1999 as potential members of a terrorist cell in New York City

Felzenberg is right on one point, there is no official record of Atta being in the US in 1999. Burearcrats always look for the paper trail and rules of course are that you have to follow the paper trail to get to "the truth."

Did it occur to Felzenberg may have sneaked into the country from jidadist hotspots such in Canada?

Steyn writes:

Here's one way just for a start. Forget the southern border, insofar as there is such a thing. Fact: On America's northern border, no record is kept of individual visitors to the United States. All that happens is that a photo scanner snaps your rear license plate. The scanner is said to be state-of-the-art, which is to say, as one Customs & Border official told me, it's "officially" 75 percent accurate. On the one occasion my own license plate was queried, it turned out the scanner had misread it. So, just for a start, without any particular difficulty, a friend of Mohammed Atta could have rented a car for him in Montreal and driven him down to New York -- and there would be never be any record to connect him to the vehicle anywhere in the United States or Canada.

Or Atta could just have walked across the border. The picture above is of the Vermont-Quebec border. All Mohammad would need is to possess a moderate level of hiking skills.